Hello everyone, I'm Stephen from Chongqing GSC. I joined Maersk for 2 years. In September 2022, I was lucky enough to be selected for the LEAD project. One year later, I graduated from the project. There are so many experiences that I didn't expect.

I never thought I could take so many courses like: critical thinking, problem solving, POA Innovation, Communication skills.

I never thought I would have the opportunity to join sales team and cooperate with colleagues from other frontline departments for 6 months. I also didn't expect to be able to interact with customers face to face, build trust, and try to understand their needs and expectations.

Looking back at me before I participated in the Lead project, I was a newcomer who had just entered the workplace for less than a year even I didn't know what to work for.

Now, through the exercise of this project, I find my progress is as follows:

1. My cross-departmental cooperation and

In December 2022, the training series of Chongqing was established from 0-1.

In May 2023, I cooperated with air transportation, marketing, and sales departments to complete air transportation customer activities at Hangzhou XIAO Shan Airport

2. The problem-solving ability has been improved: I can find problems, identify opportunities, and solve problems. In October 2022, I led the completion of Day 1 Automation of intra-group business.

One of the stories that struck me most during my rotation was about identifying opportunities:

In March 2023, our sales team found that the energy storage industry was booming in the market, but customers in the energy storage being served by different sales groups, which means we unable to provide the most professional and standardized services to them. Our task is to conduct market research on the entire industry and develop solutions to logistics problems.

It was also the first time I knew that sales colleagues had to do so much paperwork before they approached customers. For example, we even need to check the warehouse location of the target customer and provide a complete route from the warehouse to the barge port even they didn’t tell us where the warehouse is.

We need to quickly establish a basic understanding of the energy storage industry through massive reading, draw the draft of the industrial chain, and analyze customer needs. Finally, we set up a unique team responsible for the energy storage and continue to provide more specialized solutions for our customers and continue to expand the market.

In fact, customers in this industry have always been on our list, and we have continued to provide services to them. What sales colleagues did is they have analyzed and identified opportunities and opening a new path for providing better services to customers.

This is the most important learning content in the process of job rotation.

After the LEAD project, how to apply what I have learned, and share it with our team, is a question I have been thinking about every day, I could do these:

1. Customer-oriented:

I will actively share experiences and stories from the front line with my colleagues, creating an environment where the team is more eager to understand customers, more active in solving problems for customers, and improving customer satisfaction. For example, CCC, which we use every day, we need to consciously get closer to our customers, more in touch with their needs and expectations and put them into action.

2. Improve performance:

Through my theoretical knowledge of problem solving and innovation, I can identify potential opportunities in the existing business, optimize the process, help the team to clear the difficulties in the business, so that we can better provide services to customers, and more importantly, improve some ideas and methodologies or learning methods to my colleagues. Because maybe sometimes we are so focused on the operation that we forget to think about the problem and solve the problem in a different way.

3. Engage team members:

Uniting all our colleagues on our team is fundamental to achieving our most ambitious goals. I hope my experience will inspire more fresh thinking among my colleagues. The sales manager said that the stability and efficiency of back-end operation could be the most critical factor to win the trust of customers. We can identify the opportunities and highlights of existing business lines through the efforts of all colleagues and establish links with front-line sales and marketing colleagues to help provide customers with better service.