What Happened in Vegas . . .

. . . shouldn’t stay in Vegas !!

I just returned from the SHRM Annual Conference (SHRM15) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was a great even from start to finish. I enjoyed the Bloggers Lounge, the Smart Stage, the SHRM Store, the vendor hall, the keynote speakers, Jennifer Hudson, the concurrent sessions, being on TChat with Kevin Grossman, Callie Zipple and Chanel Jackson, the No Kid Hungry Poetry Slam and especially meeting the great attendees throughout the week !!

Tomorrow, I return to work and the great folks I get to be with most of the time !! Please note that I don’t HAVE to go back to work, I GET to go back to work. I have great new information on how to work with my Team Leaders from Marcus Buckingham, how to build my team from Coach Mike Krzyzewski, how to develop leaders that leave a legacy from Mary Faulkner, how to drive strategy through HR from Jennifer McClure and much more.

Las Vegas SignI have information that I can use immediately to make my role better and more effective. I’m sure that everyone who came also gathered information that they could use in their HR roles. The question is – will that information stay in Vegas or make it back to your workplace?

People tend to get all geeked up at HR Conferences which is fantastic and needed !! It is a great release from the day-to-day functions we perform. We don’t get that release often enough and it’s fun to decompress with your peers. In sessions, we find tons and tons of takeaways that we promise ourselves that we will use the moment we step back into the office.

Then . . . Monday hits and the pattern that we have been following every day takes over. The first “fire” of the day bursts into flame and it builds from there. The excitement we felt at the Conference rapidly fades and all of our good intentions never come to life. Aren’t you tired of that? I know I am !!

Break the past and hit Monday running and take it head on. Be intentional about changing how you’ve been practicing HR, and implement the takeaways that mattered to you into your day right of the bat. Also, reach out to the people you connected with during the Conference and build your network. Refuse to go back to the days of practicing HR on your own. The people you met will be the best HR resources you will ever have. Keeping in touch with each other will make you an even better HR professional !!

Trust me when I say that these hints are things I practice myself. I met hundreds of new HR folks and have already reached out to them to make sure we’re connected. I’m going to introduce the takeaways I had in my department and with our Team Members. I used to go to HR conferences and left everything behind me. They were great fun, but they weren’t very sustainable.

That never seemed to work, and I changed my approach several years ago. Once I brought things back on purpose, my love for HR grew and grew even more.

8 thoughts on “What Happened in Vegas . . .”

  1. Drop the millennials mantra, the generational gaps, the metrics just for metrics and instead add in a few that are ‘geeked’ to be where they are doing what they are doing and watch your culture cultivate excited and innovative employees. Steve teaches me that.

  2. Awesome presentation! Now to make sure we are building a better culture- not tearing it down! Oh, and quit being the fun police!

  3. Thanks for sharing Steve! Sad I missed the conference but I agree with the lesson. I’ll make sure to keep this in mind for any conference I attend and especially as I prepare for Washington D.C. in 2016!

  4. Thanks for sharing, Steve! Just like any learning event, application back on the job is key. I sometimes find these very large conferences to be overwhelming from a learning application perspective and find it helpful to focus in on just 2 or 3 key take-aways and what I can do to bring those into my work. Glad it was such a successful conference!

  5. I agree with you. It’s so easy to fall back into the same old, same old. I am more accepting of change lately. One of my favorite quotes from Jim Rohn applies to your thinking: “You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.”

  6. Steve, you’re so right. It’s hard to avoid going from fired up to putting out fires after a conference. Getting steps for implementing new ideas onto the calendar right away is the only way to avoid losing the inspiration. Finding a conference packet at the bottom of a dusty old to-do pile is a true bummer.

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