A Team Anthem? Yeah, We’ve Got That!

Read a few posts on this blog and you’ll see that there are a lot of #LoveWhereYouWork examples. From sharing stories of giving back with friends after work to shouting it from the mountaintops because you can’t contain yourself.

My Cisco Advanced Services team is no different.

I’m a Project Specialist at our Bangalore, India campus for our Advanced Services team which is a dynamic organization that catalyzes Cisco’s success by bringing products together into solutions. Our team is full of experienced, motivated and fun-loving individuals with a great team leader who makes it her responsibility to build a strong team spirit.

Based on what I said, you may think our team is all “sunshine and rainbows.” We all have our days, we all work hard, and sometimes you just need a boost of “fun” to fuel you up.

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Recently, our organization was undergoing a transformation, and we were all pitching in (because we have each other’s backs.) Our team lead, Lavanya Gopalakrishnan, was worried that we would burn out, and started to think of ideas to infuse a bit of fun into the long days.

At Cisco, we don’t do anything “ordinary.” To brighten our days, we did something EPIC. We decided to create our own team anthem.

We set up an arid tree that we dubbed our “musical tree” at our office bay where the team answered the question, “We are better together, tell us why?”

We were busy, and now we needed notes on a tree? With only one lonely “leaf” on our tree after the first day, and three the next day.

Slowly, however, everyone began to contribute with colorful, funny, inspiring, and even tongue-in-cheek messages – and our tree looked magnificent!

It was now finally time to record our anthem.

Our conference rooms were decorated with red and blue balloons, musical instruments were fine-tuned and the recording equipment was all set. We had some “stage fright” but soon we were all gleefully singing at the top of their voices!

Suddenly, our stage wasn’t big to accommodate all of these energetic performers.

Here is the final version of our anthem, which we called “Together We Win.”

Do we sound like pop artists on the radio? No. Our notes were off by a mile! But that was never the point, and we were still in harmony – with each other.

Lavanya said it best after she saw our video, “We may not win at the Grammys but we made something memorable together, and that is what people will remember years from now!”

Making the anthem made me feel cool, and I sometimes start singing it in front of my colleagues and we all burst out into laughter now as we remember our musical adventure.

Our ‘Musical Tree’ still stands tall on our floor, and every now and then, when the blues creep in, we look at it and are reminded of all the awesomeness we are capable of creating together!

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