Recently, a good percentage of my former team attended a local one day conference. Here’s my viewpoint on why this can be such a great thing for your team.
- Learning for individuals: I don’t care what your mastery level is, there is always something to learn.
- Learning for teams: A common approach to attending conferences is to divide and conquer sessions. I don’t always prescribe to this approach as personally some of my best learning and later applied results came when a group of us attended the same session. We shared the experience and together we share moving forward.
- Perspective: It’s not until you go outside of your company’s walls, that you learn how far you’ve really come and how much more you can do. I’m not ashamed to admit that it feels good to realize that we’ve overcome this problem that someone else is knee deep in. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I’ve realized we were not as far along as we thought.
- Inspiration: Walking away with ideas, maybe brand new concepts or maybe tweaks to existing concepts is exciting. Our world is anything but following one exact approach. The best resource is ideas and the willingness to try them.
- Connections: Some would call this networking and yes, it’s powerful to extend your network of people as this is becoming more and more important when looking for new opportunities, etc. However, I’m going a step further by highlighting connections. After attending for several years, these are not just people that are on my LinkedIn account. They are my friends. Friends that I can call and say “I’m not good with giving a billing rate for this service. Any advice on what I should charge?” Or better yet just to check in and say hi.
Why do attend conferences?
