empowHER

IWLC - How I love the inspiration you provide in just a few short hours,  I always leave the event fired up and ready to be an agent of change!!!  In ruminating over the Women's Leadership conference today, I was pleasantly surprised to find how many of the tips/tricks these leaders shared I was already doing!  YAY me!  Even though not all of the information today was new, its so essential it bears repeating.

Janice Kaplan's Gratitude journal tip?  Done that.  And IT WORKS.  Keep it simple so its not a chore (a scrap of paper by the bed with just a sentence for each of the 3 - 4 grateful things from your day is enough!)  Use the car trip home from work to focus on the good specifics of your day.  Forcing this perspective change creates happiness and ensures you bring the right attitude into your home life.  And when you have a down cycle?  Remember to give yourself grace ~ nothing in nature blooms all year, be patient with yourself!  Another tip in the down moments? Read through that gratitude journal.  It helps to remind yourself that you've gotten through shit before and you've always made it through to the other side.  :o)

Hannah Ubl's Generational differences session was very informative.  In a high tech industry with a very quickly changing generational population, I found the "how to relate to each generation" education directly relevant to my everyday workplace.  Its nice to know that as a Gen X/Millenial cusper, I actually speak 2 generational languages!  :o)  She noted US Bank has a yearly CEO led open dialogue with 12 high potential millennials from across the company to encourage a forum for allowing their voices to be heard.  I think this is a BRILLIANT idea and would love to see RC enact something like this but take it a step further.  We do skip-levels all the time, but to really hear a population's voice, you cannot dilute it among other populations (so many of these meetings are mixed generation/gender/job type).  If attrition is the problem you are trying to solve in this war-for-talent pandemic, then isolate the voices you need to hear from.  I think it would be incredibly insightful for some high potential polling in breakout sessions by gender/generation.

Another tip from Hannah was soliciting a 5 word performance review from a colleague (2-3 positive words/2-3 negative words).  Set up an informal meeting for an hour (starbucks run anyone??) to discuss the meaning behind the selected words, then crumple up the paper and trash it - not everything needs to be HR documented!  The real benefit to this review is then setting up an improvement roadmap, with very specific items you want to address and a timeline.

Natalia Noguera was kind enough to bring Venn diagrams into the picture, which I found so nerdy awesome I had to give a shout out here.  It looks something like this:

I'm still trying to determine if I'm in the #WIN zone?  Waffling on the "love" part... :o)

And the last little bit I got out of the Conference?  Some staggering statistics that show we are STILL NOT THERE yet....   It is 2016 people, WTF?

THIS is what keeps me pushing on in my profession, even though there have been times I've wanted to quit so badly I called HR to see if I could cash out my 401k.

But you want to know some positive statistics?   Women influence 80% of the spending in our economy.  And they make up over 50% of the voting population.  So if we aren't being heard, its as much onus on us women as it is the culture we need to shift.  There aren't many leaders above me that look like me.  If women keep stepping back, there never will be.  So I guess I'll just keep marching forward and I'll bring my own chair to the table.  And if that doesn't align with my life?  Then I'll be creating my own table.  :o)