Tag: SHRM

Sometimes I Just Forget To Look

You don’t get to choose much of what happens to you, but you do get to choose your own attitude, and how you respond.

Burnt Crumpets

Tuesday morning started in a less than ideal fashion. I got up early to attend a breakfast meeting in London and thought I’d make some fruit smoothie to share at the meeting. I was in a rush, long story short, I completely ruined our smoothie maker (more haste less speed). Next I burned the breakfast crumpets (pay attention 007) before checking online to find out that trains into London were delayed and cancelled because of local electrical supply problems. I was frustrated (putting it politely).

Once I knew the London thing wasn’t going to happen I offered to take Keira to the train station for her journey to school (heading away from London). The delays there were just as bad, so I gave Keira a lift to school.

On the way to school we talked, sang and laughed, and agreed that the silver lining of these minor morning misfortunes, was some excellent time together. The smile Keira gave me as we parted stayed with me all day, a day which turned out to be great fun and very productive.

You choose your own attitude, and I often forget to look in the right place before choosing.

Thanks Keira.

Wednesday evening after dinner we each opened a fortune cookie – they were leftover from a recent trip to the Chinatown district in Manchester.

Carole’s read: Each failure takes you closer to success
Keira’s read: You have an important new business development shaping up
Mine read: Bless others with kindness and you shall be blessed.

Later that night, just before I went to bed I received an email from The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) rejecting my proposal to speak at their 2015 conference in Las Vegas:

Dear Doug:

Thank you for submitting a presentation proposal for the SHRM® Annual Conference & Exposition being held June 28 – July 1, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Each proposal was given careful and deliberate consideration. We strive to offer a balanced program of educational sessions at the conference and select the proposals that best fit the overall programming framework of the conference. Please understand that we receive many proposals with several on the same topic. Exceptional proposals are turned away each year for the simple reason that we have limited speaking slots. Your proposal for The Art of Collaboration was not selected this year. However, your interest in offering your skills, background and knowledge is greatly appreciated.

Once again, thank you for your submission.
Sincerely,

Letty Kluttz, SPHR, MBA
Director, Conference Programming and Development

Truthfully – although I was a little disappointed to get the Dear John – on reflection I was more frustrated about the crumpets than I was about getting this note. Maybe Tuesday morning’s breakfast hunger was stronger than the hunger to speak at SHRM National? I don’t know – but I do know that this Thursday morning brings another day full of failure and success, business development and blessing. Today I’m looking in the right place – I hope you are too. Have a great day.

London to Louisiana – Beyond HR

In a few short weeks, Neil Morrison and I are heading off to the 2014 Louisiana SHRM Conference. I’m excited to be the conference mc this year, and Neil and I are giving a talk on the morning of day two. What will we be talking about? Here’s an excerpt from our pitch.

Beyond HR

We believe that in addition to the functional expertise HR already does so well, there is something more we can do to create greater value for our organisations, colleagues and customers. This is more than just being a strategic partner, or being commercially focused, this is a role that only HR can play.

HR is uniquely positioned and connected with all other parts of the organisation and it is through a systemic approach that these connections can be tuned in such a way as to help the organisation create additional strategic value.

Adding value comes in many shapes and sizes, and whilst it’s tempting (and sometimes necessary) to focus on the ‘next big thing’, we also believe that small is the new significant. Our approach focuses on participation and experimentation, on developing unique internal and external relationships, it focuses on both macro and micro environments and delivery through people, not around them.

I’m excited about this gig. Neil and I share some thoughts and views, and of course we have differing opinions too. We’ve never been afraid to disagree in public, we come from very different walks of working life, and I hope we can create some useful tension and pose some interesting questions for our conference guests.

And seeing as how some of our conference guests may not have visited London, or experienced us previously, we’ve also put together a short, ultra serious video which we hope will help position our talk. Enjoy.

Developing Art For Work’s Sake

The Past

I facilitated another Art for Work’s Sake session in Milton Keynes a few days ago, and it went down a storm. Something that really interested me about the session was how we enabled a mixture of conversation and emergent thinking and action to develop around a framework, albeit a loosely structured one. We also cocreated a safe space in which to talk, work and experiment which certainly helped.

The Present

Here is some of the learning from recent Art for Work’s Sake sessions, pulled together for you in a SlideShare. I hope this stuff is helpful to you, feel free to download and play if you would like.

The Future

I can also confirm that I am off to Chicago again in the Autumn. I will be delivering an Art for Work’s Sake session for the people at the Illinois 2014 Society for Human Resource Management conference, with my co facilitator, Joe Gerstandt. I’m hugely excited about the work itself and about collaborating with Joe. Joe and I have been in touch for a good while now – patiently impatient – looking and waiting for a chance to do something epic. We haven’t rushed it – we’ve kept in touch – we’ve shared the good and bad in the process. And we are now ready to serve. More details on this soon.

And if that wasn’t enough, I received confirmation from Ohio over the weekend that I will be heading their way in September to do likewise. I love the way that the HR community is responding so positively to this creative and artistic way to improve the way we work.

I’ve received a lot of requests to run further sessions. Even though I am London based I’m very happy to travel to help spread the word, I think this work, this use of artistic practice to make work better, is important. So if you’d like me to come to your town or workplace – drop me a line and let’s talk.

And finally, to celebrate the great start to 2014, we are giving away our 2014 tour t shirt, a copy of the very excellent book, 101 Things To Learn In Art School, by Kit White, and a set of Stop Doing Dumb Things cards. We have three sets to give away. To win, all you have to do is leave a comment on the blog and say you’d like to go into the draw. We’ll draw the winners at random in a few weeks and then get in touch to ship your goodies to you.

Prize Draw