The Onset of the Journey

With much anticipation and anxiousness, I welcomed an exciting project where I would help build out and scale a social media platform towards sustainable capitalism for our client. As daunting as it sounds, I anticipate that learnings, growth, and challenges will be packed for this project. With this anticipation comes an excitement of being part of a dynamic team and working towards a vision that is larger than myself. I hope that the message that our project will deliver to the world will be impactful and help bring about positivity to capitalism through the power of social media. As much as I want to create value for our client, I want to become a better version of myself by not only gaining new knowledge and skills, but also discovering my strengths and weaknesses through interactions with others as well as through the challenges and opportunities that the project presents. 

My journey started with getting to know my teammates. After sharing our backgrounds and experiences, I had the feeling that we can get along well with each other and have the capacity to  complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We all come from diverse nationalities including Mongolia, South Korea, Greece, and India, which is our team’s greatest strength because our diverse insights, thoughts and skills will be our unique proposition. Although we all shared the same excitement, our anticipations and expectations about the project were divergent, which I think will evolve and align as we start to interact with our client. With the same belief that getting to know our client was the first key action, we started researching about our client and shared our findings and feelings with each other. The thoughts and feelings that each one of us expressed while sharing information revealed our values and interests, which was our small step towards building our team’s synergy.  

As a team, we already faced our first challenge in our correspondence with the client. We successfully reached out and introduced ourselves in our first communication. However, to our tiny disappointment, our client responded through his assistant, who proposed to have an online meeting with her rather than the client. In our subsequent communication, we insisted on having the first meeting with the client himself because we had agreed on that the assistant might not be knowledgeable enough and hence would not be able to provide us with the specific project information that we seek to secure from our client. In doing so, we suggested our possible online meeting slots, which were, luckily, not hard to agree on among ourselves. However, none of us realized that we were in a cross-cultural setting, where we had to consider the time difference when pushing our meeting availabilities to the counter party who was located in the United Kingdom. Moreover, our client was unresponsive for more than a week, which created uncertainty within the team. As a former project manager, I was the one who was getting worried about project delays and insisting on follow-up communications while my other teammates remained calm. Observing how differently we react to the same uncertainty was interesting, and I believe that acting quick in this situation helped get a timely response from our client.  With much excitement, I am looking forward to our first kick-off meeting with the client next week. I cannot help but hope that our journey will be an adventurous, enriching, and enjoyable experience.