A blog to my future self – looking back on 25 years at SAP (and counting...)

Hey, Markus!

It’s November 1, 1998 – your first day at SAP in Walldorf, Germany.

You’re here for a year or two (you think). Pssst: You’ll still – unexpectedly – be here 25 years from now. ??)

You’re on day 1 on what’ll turn into an incredible journey of learning and development. You will experience (many) ups and (a few) downs and discover much about yourself, your environment, other people, teams and organizations, how you want to work and live, and how not.

Here are a few key things you’ll find out about:

Having worked as a free-lancer and in a small company before, adjusting to life in a large corporation will be difficult a lot of the time. You will struggle with mindless bureaucracy, hard-to-work-with formal hierarchies, incomprehensibly conflicting goals within teams, and ridiculously complex processes. At the same time, you will always enjoy wonderful job choices and continuous personal development, incredibly smart, competent, and supportive colleagues everywhere, and camaraderie, drive, and positive energy every day in numerous passionate communities.

You will – and will have to – take your time over and over again to figure out what you really, really want.

You’ll realize that you tend to get complacent when life chugs along nicely (Your comfort zone is a nice place to be, isn’t it?), and then things will happen that you didn’t (get to) decide on. You’ll see that it would be easily possible to just sit back and do very little. And you’ll recognize that that’s not you. You’ll figure out what to do to be the one to decide what’s important to you – within certain confines and with all consequences.

You’ll experience more than once that “People join companies but leave managers.” isn’t far from your personal truth. Every month, every year you’ll reflect and need to decide whether disagreements with your manager are worth moving on – instead of appreciating all the good things happening in your teams, networks, and communities, which are so much more important. You’ll understand that to a certain degree you’re probably un-manageable.

You’ll learn quickly that everyone should have that person in their lives who asks the difficult questions that you won’t even come up with and that can be scary. It doesn’t matter whether that kind of coach is at home, at work, or somewhere totally different. You’re lucky: You have that person around every day.

You’ll acknowledge that – beyond the sociological perspective – organizations are made up of people. And where there are people, you will have conflicts of all sizes all the time. It’ll be up to you to decide in each case how you approach them and whether you take them on as an indicator for the need to change – something or yourself.

You will learn how to support others in how to deal with conflicts better – through appropriate structures, questions, and dialogues. And you will – unfortunately – recognize that applying those clever principles and methods to yourself is often more difficult than supporting others.

You'll experience that good concepts, especially around people stuff, get a bad name easily through overuse and corporate branding. You’ll learn how to navigate that difficulty to be able to uphold those good concepts.?

Being a manager in a big company means being part of a sandwich – it may be the meaty part, but it’s still in a sandwich. You’ll be able to move some things within your team, you’ll have to manage upwards (or better: lead from below), and you’ll have to decide often whether to take a stand. You’ll have to communicate things you don’t like. Transparency is key to staying credible and authentic.

You’ll discover the meaning of the sentence “Es gibt nichts Gutes. Au?er man tut es.” (Literally: “There’s nothing good. Unless you do it.”). Theory alone is not enough. It’s more important to show the value of values by making them tangible.

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And if you’re interested, here are a couple of helpful hints for the next 25:

• Be mindful of your circle of control.
• Your mindset is the foundation for everything you do. How you approach stuff will co-determine what results you’ll get.
• Be the leader you wish you had. Don’t try to convince others.
• Your colleagues, your networks, and your communities will carry you through the bad times. When things look bleak, you have support.
• Decide consciously what career means for you. Climbing the ranks in the hierarchy is not the only thing. It’s important to enjoy what you’re doing and find motivation.
• Share your leadership role with someone else, a sparring partner of sorts. It’s a wonderful open learning environment.
• Self-reflection isn’t easy to do when you tend to just ‘do the grind’. You’ll need to very consciously let go of what you would normally do. It’s worth it.

?All this is stuff you’ll discover over time anyways.

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You will have many incredible companions on your SAP trip – too many to list here, and it wouldn’t be fair to miss some of them.

You will be grateful to all of them, and they’ll know it.