Yesterday we held the last of our leaders events for 2019 at Hotel Football, Old Trafford. With great attendance, it was definitely a day full of interaction and debate from the start.
After a quick introduction round the tables, Board Directors David Herd and Lisa Hooley, kicked off an open session, focusing on areas of change for growth development and the business challenges the group may be facing. Questions asked included: How do you set your priorities? What is your perspective/expectations? How and what are we doing to get the most out of our time? What does the future look like? What does performance management mean to you? and How does a team come together? This created an engaging, interactive session, where everyone was happy to share their own experiences and the current challenges they face within their own organisations and provided key takeaways to share with their teams.
The live Sli.do session created a buzz around the room with 81% of the group believing that personal development has a significant impact on business and team performance. When asked what was the main cause of distraction, delay or reprioritisation of personal development activities, the majority of the group felt it was due to unplanned business priorities.
After a networking lunch, we were welcomed by Award Winning Speaker Heather Wright who gave us an insightful talk on "The future of team development" and "How to put the personal back into personal development". Her first question to the group was "What do you do when you need to change a habit?" and "What drives you to change a habit?". This provided the group with tips and advice on self -awareness, rewarding yourself and your team, resilience, coaching and motivation and a great opportunity for the group to again, share their experiences.
Heather also spoke about core and strategy - the vision and the values. Asking the questions "What are your team behaviours?" and "What do you agree to do if someone in your team goes against you?". The message was clear - if you want to build resilient teams you first need to build the core.
Our second speaker of the day was wellbeing GP Helen Garr, who certainly got the group up off their feet and engaged in some physical activity. Helen gave her interactive speech "Go to Rome" and the 5 ways to wellbeing - Give, Learn, Connect, Be mindful & grateful, Be active. She provided plenty of interesting facts, tips and advice on wellbeing and physical activity, describing the benefits of having close relationships with your team, connecting with your team, finding out more about your team and how 1 minute of moving really does make a difference. All aimed at helping to improve the work/life balance.
Helen also touched on email overload, which had been a feature in the opening Sli.do session and suggested ways in which we can reduce the stress and anxiety around this. To improve our heath and wellbeing, we should pick up the phone and talk more. Communicate in person with our teams in the workplace, rather than sending an email and when we get home from work each night, spend the time engaging with our families, not our laptops and phones. Her message was simple - send less, check less- and talk more!!!!!
Lisa and David rounded up the day with a closing Sli.do session which gained feedback on the event, the guest speakers and future topics for events in 2020. We do value all your input and honest feedback from our Sli.do polls.
Feedback from the day included:
"Great day, I learnt a lot, as always" - Katie Duxbury, Head of Payroll, Bupa
"I saw Segun earlier - he was telling me how good the leaders event was yesterday which is great" - Nikki Hargreaves, Head of client services, News UK
A huge thanks to Shared Services Forum UK for hosting such a great event on Wednesday. Thankyou to Helen Garr & Heather Wright for such great talks and to Lisa Hooley and David Herd for the morning Sli.do session. Awesome venue too - Elanor Currin, Resourcing Partner, Sodexo
Thankyou to all that attended the event, the group engagement and interaction was very much appreciated. The sli.do results and speaker presentations are available to download from the resources section of the website.
We look forward to seeing you at the annual conference on the 20th & 21st of November at Aintree Racecourse. Registration will go live on the 1st of October and we are asking all leaders to register for the event, plus their chosen 4 members from their organisation. For day one please include your preferred network session, along with the other 4 attendees (please not it will be 2 members per organisation, per network session).
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