When you are trying to push for real change and progress in an organization, you need to get beyond your comfort zone. We marketers tend to enjoy staying in a warm, cappuccino-like risk-free zone. In a recent offsite meeting, the company I work for did exactly this activity. We went to a Syrian refugee camp in Germany.
Seriously, we went to donate our time and labor to help immigrants from Syria who arrived in the last few weeks in Germany.
Our management team had a leadership conference in Deidesheim, Germany involving strategic planning meetings and breakout sessions. It was a week of hard intellectual work where we challenged ourselves to build a roadmap for the future.
But the real event happened when we went into the unknown with our hearts and hands, ready to help.
Out of My Comfort Zone
Most of us were very uncomfortable with the idea. It sounded scary, hard and emotionally challenging. It made us wonder, what possible difference we could make in an afternoon. I felt way outside of my comfort zone with so many unknowns and apprehensions.
We organized into five teams. We built tables and chairs. We sorted clothes for appropriate gender, sizes and types. We constructed a makeshift basketball court, and some created a small tea room. Drinking tea is an important part of Arabic culture, so it was like setting up a mini Starbucks. Another team created a little kiosk to get snacks for the children.
What we gained far exceeded the physical help we provided. The volunteer afternoon helped us put real human faces on something that is like background noise on the news. You hear so much about Syrian refugees, but when you shake the hand of a person who has made the journey, it puts a human connection to the issue.
We were instructed to refer to their living quarters as a hotel and the refugees as guests. Of course, no one was to touch or reach out to any of the women since their culture is very protected of women in a different way the west.
Many of the men we engaged with spoke English, were very well educated and wanted to work alongside us to help their fellow immigrants. Some were civil engineers, and others were teachers. I had to smile when they were all searching for places to charge their smartphones and kept asking about WIFI.
All of them were inspiring as we recognized in their faces that they were fleeing the unspeakable, unimaginable and unreal world that Syrian has become today. They introduced themselves with a warm handshake and looked in our eyes when they quietly
All of them were inspiring as we recognized in their faces that they were fleeing the unspeakable, unimaginable and unreal world that Syrian has become today. They introduced themselves with a warm handshake and looked in our eyes when they quietly said: “thank you”.
I helped in a few areas, but my favorite activity was to help use chalk to draw the outline of the basketball court. With dozens of beautiful little children playing with a soccer ball, they quickly wanted to help me and und
erstand why I was writing on the driveway. They couldn’t understand my English nor could I read their Arabic.
Chalk became the common language we spoke together.
I showed them where the lines were, and they helped me make them thicker. Most of the lines they drew weren’t straight, and they quickly started decorating the space with their names and drawings of cats, butterflies and houses with people in them. The two little boxes of chalk quickly became a place for an expression of hope and an obvious plea for normalcy.
It wasn’t a basketball court we created; it was a little playground of hope.
I have attended many team building events for plenty of companies during my career. But this was the first time, there was a real connection between strategy and soul. If you want to move your marketing beyond your comfort zone, you need to experience some discomfort to remind you of what happens in a real journey.
Time to take my marketing efforts outside of my comfort zone.
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Photo credit: We were not allowed to take photographs at the refugee camp. These are stock photograph
Children: Credit to Russell Watkins/Department for International Development. Available free for editorial use under the terms of the Open Government Licence and the Creative Commons -Attribution ShareAlike Licence.
Chalk Cat: https://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/
