At the AHRI National Convention this year I had a pretty awesome time because I got to hear Dave and Wendy Ulrich speak. I also got them to sign my book and have a photo with me! Yep, I am a nerd.

Anyways, people have been asking me about what I’ve learned and what I thought was good so I got my butt into gear and started writing up some of my notes to share with you all. First cab off the rank is of course, Dave and Wendy Ulrich.

I’m sure you’ve heard of him before but Dave has been named the number one management educator and guru by Business Week, selected by Fast Company as one of the 10 most innovative and creative leaders and he is consistently named as the most influential person in HR in publications across the globe. Wendy Ulrich has been a practicing psychologist for 20 years exploring the personal dynamics of corporate complexities. Wendy helps organizations build people’s skills and personal strengths to succeed. Some of the areas she focuses on include communication, relationships, trained creativity resilience and happiness.

The first thing I’ll share is that they make a great team who are actually pretty warm, genuine and funny to listen to. It’s easy to be engaged by them and not notice how much time is passing. Very important to be engaged on day two of an AHRI Conference after the Gala Dinner!

Dave started out by saying that they wanted to talk to us about something a little more personal than how to structure a HR department; they wanted to talk to us about how to create meaning and purpose, not only in our lives but in the lives of the employees where we work. He said “If you create more meaning in a company- good things will happen. It’s simple”.

*MAKE MEANING in the workplace—to bring out the best in everyone.
*CREATE VALUE for your employees, your customers, your company, and yourself.
*BUILD HOPE for the future by building “the abundant organization.”

The Abundant Organization Flower

When we think about what gives us a sense of meaning, we often think about things like having children, travel, our faith or relationships. What do these things have in common? They have nothing to do with work. We don’t necessary find meaning in work. This is a problem because we spend most of our time at work but we aren’t finding same sense of purpose and meaning at work. We are finding it outside of work. It’s a tragedy.

The ultimate source of happiness is not pleasure or engagement; it’s meaning. Are you connected to your deepest values?

In HR we want to shift away from measuring from job satisfaction, away from engagement (i.e. does your job give you discretionary energy?) to does my job give me meaning. We want to ask, does my job allow me to find purpose?

Before talking about their new book “The Why of Work” and introducing the 7 things that Leaders can do to become meaning makers, they revealed that the title of the their book actually came from this quote from Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s search for Meaning”.

“He who has a WHY to live can bear with almost any HOW” – Nietzsche

Some further resources to check out when you have the time or the inclination!

So what are the 7 things that Leaders can do to become meaning makers (Key Questions for abundant thinking)?

1) Identity- What am I known for? Think Gallop Strength finding attributes. It’s about help people match their personal strengths with the organisation identity (brand/culture).
2) Purpose and Motivation- Where am I going? What are your passions and the passions of your employees? In your development discussions with your employees, do you ask about their passions? Are you able to not impose your passions on them?
3) Relationships and Teamwork- Whom do I travel with? Gallop 12 questions- having a best friend at work produces those kind of outcomes. How do you control/facilitate this?
4) Positive work environment- How do I build a positive work environment?
5) Engagement/Challenge- What challenges interest me? Is there a line of sight between what I love and what I do?
6) Resilience and Learning- How do I learn from setbacks? If it’s worth doing- it’s worth doing badly i.e. failure is important.
7) Civility and Delight-What delights me? Even though they seem small, they can make a difference in how someone feels about their work.

Well these are just my back of the napkin notes but for all the details on this, please visit their website where all seven steps are discussed and explained in detail.

I’m pretty excited about this as it builds upon a lot of stuff I’ve been working on already. Does anyone else think they could incorporate this into their work?

Goffee and Jones say that the main body of literature on Leadership talks about the characteristics of leaders and that is gives it a strong psychological bias. I’m sure we can all think of a few, and we may have also been witness to discussions on whether a person can learn to be a leader or whether they are simply born a leader.

However, have you ever considered Leadership to be a relationship?

The underlying assumption is that leadership is something we do to other people. But in our view, leadership should be seen as something we do with other people. Leadership must always be viewed as a relationship between the leader and the led.

The point? There is no magic recipe or list of characteristic that can make someone an effective leader. It’s not one way. It’s about the relationship between the leader and their followers. After all, a leader is nothing without followers.

A few months ago now, I was asked to come up and speak at the launch of HR Club Newcastle. As a thank you for doing that I was given a copy of “Your Brain at Work” (thanks Jenny & Olivia!) and on holidays recently I was able to get some quiet time to read it.

The introduction starts like this:

• An avalanche of emails.
• An overload of information.
• A meeting that leaves you exhausted.
• Ever more change and uncertainty.
• The occasional win just to keep you going.

At this point I was like, “Yes- that’s me. I need help!”

While I found this book to be like some of the other psychology books I’ve read (i.e. it’s not an easy read that you can get through in a few days), its jam packed with interesting info and research that can be applied to anyone in the workplace. The way in which the brain is explained is so simple; it makes me think even I could be a neurologist!

Basically the book teaches you about how the brain works so that you can work smarter, be more focused and productive, stay cool under pressure and even influence others. It also focuses on problems and decisions, collaborating with others and facilitating change. I won’t be able to go through it all but I will present a few key takeouts that you might find useful.

Recently I attended a Working Smart with Outlook Program which was fantastic and is already keeping me a lot better organised, saving me time and relieving the pressure I put on myself by allowing me to leave work with an empty inbox everyday. However I have found that recently I do feel like a bit of a slave to my inbox, and that this is something I also need to change.

For example, how many times do you check your inbox a day?
From what hours do you check your email?
Do you feel bad/depressed/overwhelmed when your inbox is out of control?

Before I did that course I was a bit out of control. I was responding to emails as fast as I could- which meant more emails in my inbox because people saw I responded quickly so they started to send me more issues to respond to. I checked my email on my iphone when I opened my eyes in the morning, I answered emails on the train, I answered them all day at work and then I checked them when I got home. What an ineffective way of working while trying to do other tasks at work and find time for a personal life in there somewhere too.

For instance ‘Your Brain at Work’ talks about ‘dual-task interference’. The scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at one, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight year old. If accuracy is important, then you shouldn’t be dividing your attention. Linda Stone, a former VP at Microsoft, coined the term ‘continuous partial attention’ in 1998. It is what happens when people’s focus is split, continuously. The effect is constant and intense mental exhaustion.

Further to this, a study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capacity by an average of five points for women and fifteen points for men on an IQ test. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep! For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. Hence always ‘being on’ is not an effective way to work and you can focus on only one conscious task at a time. This means that the only way to do two mental tasks quickly if accuracy is important is to do them one at a time.

‘But I can multitask’ I hear you say (particularly if you are a woman- this is something we pride ourselves on), and so there is a possible solution to this- practising the activities over and over until they are embedded. With regards to how the brain works, by embedding the action it means that these actions are not being managed by your prefrontal cortex, but rather the basal ganglia. An example of this is learning the keystrokes to cut and paste data rather than going to manually cut and paste using the mouse each time.

This book is full of helpful and thought provoking ideas that are relevant to the way in which we work as individuals, leadership development, influencing others- all that meaty and interesting HR stuff. There isn’t time to go through it all but I will leave you with a few more chestnuts you might find interesting.

1) Studies show that the strongest emotion in a team can ripple out and drive everyone to resonate with the same emotion, without anyone consciously knowing this is happening. The strong emotion gets attention, and what people pay attention to will activate their mirror neurons.

In a similar way, the boss’s emotions can have a flow-on effect to others, since people pay so much attention to the boss. You see the boss smile, and your brain starts to mimic the smile; then you smile; then the boss smiles back. It’s a virtuous and upward cycle, with each person raising the depth of the other’s smile through a mirroring function. Mirror neurons explain why leaders need to be extra conscious of managing their stress levels, as their emotions really do impact others.

2) Having many social connections doesn’t just increase your happiness, it can also help you perform on the job, and even live longer (another reason to get involved with HR peeps in the community). Being connected to others in a positive way, feeling a sense of relatedness, is a basic need for human beings, similar to eating and drinking.

3) A study by Gallup Organization showed that companies that encourage water cooler conversations exhibit greater productivity. Increasing the quality and quantity of social connections (up to a point, of course is likely to improve productivity, as more people find themselves surrounded by fewer foes first and foremost, and then more friends as well.

4) David Rock says that there are five domains of social experience that your brain treats the same as survival issues (such as food and water- yes Maslow’s hierarchy is challenged). These domains are status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness- the SCARF model.

This model describes the interpersonal primary rewards or threats that are important to the brain, and strengthening your ability to increase several of these elements toward a reward or away in order to reduce the threat will help you to operate much more effectively.

For more info on how your brain works, there is a very cool website you may like to check out.

I’ve finally gotten around to reading “What got you here won’t get you there” by Marshall Goldsmith that I picked up at the AHRI Convention. Can I say that I loved every moment of it and after seeing him speak, I was reading it and in my head I could totally hear him saying every word.

The best thing about this book is that it can apply to everyone, and that you can take things out of it for your work life and your personal life. The book talks about challenges in interpersonal behaviour and focuses on twenty bad habits that we need to stop doing rather than typical leadership traits that we need to start doing.

The twenty bad habits are:

1. Winning too much
2. Adding too much value
3. Passing judgement
4. Making destructive comments
5. Starting with “no”, “but” or “however”
6. Telling the world how smart we are
7. Speaking when angry
8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”
9. Withholding information
10. Failing to give proper recognition
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve
12. Making excuses
13. Clinging to the past
14. Playing favourites
15. Refusing to express regret
16. Not listening
17. Failing to express gratitude
18. Punishing the messenger
19. Passing the buck
20. An excessive need to be “me”

Now when I first heard Marshall speak at the convention I saw a lot of these bad habits in myself, particularly in my personal life. After doing the LSI a couple of years ago in my second job out of uni I think I have really valued feedback and knowing how I come across to other people in the workplace. However, not so much in my personal life. When I heard Marshall speak a few months back, I vowed to make some changes and I have made some ground. Reading the book again was a refresher that there’s still a way to go.

In any case, in reading this book I was reminded of a person that I used to work for and report into. Let’s call him Jake. Now Jake was a bit of a jerk, and I’d like to talk about some of the things that he used to do and hear about times when you’ve had to work with Jake the jerk yourself.

Here are a few examples from Marshall’s list.

No. 8- Negativity or “Let me explain why that won’t work”

Marshall defines these people as those that are “constitutionally incapable of saying positive or complimentary to any of your suggestions. Negativity is their default response. You could walk into their office with a cure for cancer and the first words out of their mouth would be ‘Let me explain why that won’t work’”. People in senior positions often do this to insert themselves as the senior critic.

Well this guy was a Negative Nancy, Debbie Downer, a perfectionistic and a control freak all wrapped into one. I tried to remain positive and respectfully challenge his way of thinking on a number of occasions. Crunch time came when he wanted me to implement a plan that he had written and distributed without me even seeing. I’d done my homework and had my plan written for the year ahead and put it to him for his input (being the bigger person I thought). He essentially dismissed it, saying that it wouldn’t work and it couldn’t be put to the senior staff. He then said to me “now here is a perfect example of what I was talking about the other day. You just don’t listen. You need to do what you’re told and implement this plan”. It was an a-ha moment for me.

I had thought ‘this guy probably hasn’t managed people before’, I’ll be patient with him and he’ll warm to my positive responses and he’ll at least meet me halfway soon. After that comment to me all I could think of was that he was a massive egotistical jerk that was not going to listen to anything I had to say.

No. 15 Refusing to express regret

Marshall says that people often think apologising means we’ve lost, its a humiliating process and means we are giving up power or control, however that refusing to apologise causes about as much ill-will in the workplace as any other interpersonal flaw. He says that “People who can’t apologise at work may as well be wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I don’t care about you’”.

After this conversation with Jake, it made me think about all our interactions together. I knew that apologising was important and I thought back to times when I’d forgotten to tell him about something that was happening that he probably should have been across. It was unintentional, but nevertheless it was something that I apologised for. He had never apologised for anything he had ever done, even when he’d majorly stuffed things up.

Once he came in and barked at me that I needed to organise an interview with person X immediately. I did as he asked. Later right before the interview, we received some feedback on this person and the senior staff did not want to proceed with the interview on that basis. He then sent me an email CC’ing in senior staff saying that this is something that I really should have looked into before I organised the interview. There were major things like that, and minor things like constantly booking me into meetings without my knowledge (or even checking my calendar) and leaving me double booked. I was surprised when I reflected that he had never apologised for anything. This led me to my next point.

No. 17 Failing to express gratitude.

He had never said anything positive or even encouraging to me.

Marshall says that “Gratitude is a skill that we can never display too often. And yet for some reason, we are cheap and chary with gratitude- as if it were rare Bordeaux wine that we can only serve on special occasions. Gratitude is not a limited resource, nor is it costly. It is abundant as air. We breathe it in, but forget to exhale”.

I’m really big on this, particularly for staff in typical support or administrative roles in a business. They are often seen as dispensable resources , when in reality they are the engine room that keeps things going. They are often the staff that are not engaged, yet other parts of the business demand discretionary effort from.

It’s not hard to say thank you when someone has done a good job and should be a skill that every leader posses. At this point in time I was thinking ‘why am I putting in so many hours and so much effort when this guy just acts like a jerk and doesn’t appreciate anything I do?’

Which brings me to the question- what would you do in the same position and how have you conquered working with your very own ‘Jake the jerk?”

Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to briefly drop into the Women, Management and Work Conference which was held at the Sofitel (you may have seen some of my tweets throughout the day).

The quality and balance of the discussions taking place was fantastic. As you might have noticed from my Crustgate article, I’m not an extreme feminist however I would like to think I am certainly about equality. I’ll admit I was a little bit cautious about attending the conference thinking that it might be a little bit like being in the audience of an Oprah Winfrey taping. To be honest, I didn’t want to play the victim and stamp my feet that men won’t let me play. It’s just not my style. Luckily, it wasn’t and like I said above, the balance of discussions was fantastic.

The first session I sat in on was a round table discussion on Leadership for Women. It was an opportunity to swap new ideas and practical tips on the most effective ways to develop women for leadership roles. In true musical chairs style, the scribe was to stay at the table while the other team members moved every 10-15 minutes. The two questions the table had to answer were “what works” and “what doesn’t work?” with regards to leadership development for women.

Some key take outs that I found interesting:

What doesn’t work?

• Being placed in acting roles but not really being seen to be truly in the role- one lady said that their CEO calls them the “B Team”
• Similarly some believed that they didn’t think that mandatory appointments or quotas worked- do you want to be awarded a promotion because you earned it or because you are a woman?
• Being forced to progress when that’s not necessarily what you want- now this was an interesting one. There is so much focus on women not getting the leadership roles- it never occurred to me that there were women who felt rushed or pressured to take on roles that they did not want. It was then a concern for these women that if they did not take the opportunity when offered it, that it may not exist in the future.
• Courses without follow up support or opportunity – Employers are often happy to send women on training courses but then they often find they can’t use what they’ve learned because they aren’t given the right opportunities
• Social systems which don’t support the needs of women- i.e. those which are non flexible, exclusive or may create negative perceptions if you participate in them
• Boys clubs and “blokeism”- may include after hours functions and the type of activities that are presented to the leadership team for participation by default may exclude women
• Lack of female role model/mentors available within the business
• No policy or inconsistent policies around how we can best include women in leadership positions
• Being our own worst enemy sometimes doesn’t work- Is it gender inequity or is it just my perception?
• Lack of recognition
• Being forced to take on the style of male leaders (i.e. emotions aren’t appropriate at work etc) rather than being accepted for your own style of management

What works

• Increased levels of responsibility and breadth in roles as well as opportunities to do things outside of the ‘business as usual’ tasks
• Making contacts with mentor and networks outside your industry
• Access to leadership role models
• Coaching on Interview techniques- we don’t sell ourselves as well as the guys do
• Increasing social support systems for child care
• Early identification of goals and needs and then support to help achieve objectives
• Learning from countries that are doing it well
• Including men in discussions about how we can help women achieve
• Acknowledging that clear boundaries exist for part time employees
• Positive reinforcement- hearing that it is possible
• Sharing inspirational stories and also warnings
• Getting support from the top

Finally, some of the key themes that a few attendees wanted to share with the audience:

• As an individual, it’s important to know our boundaries
• Work/life balance doesn’t exist or work. We need to be focussed on imbalance and recognise the different segments that make up our lives. If we have balance all the time we are actually stagnant. Focus on the imbalance and your personal strengths.
• Your own attitude towards development. If we believe it’s not possible then it won’t be possible. We’ve actually got to go in believing it- if we believe there is a glass ceiling it will exist. It’s up to us to make that opportunity happen.
• One of the ways to make this opportunity occur is to potentially use technology to breakdown international boundaries to find a mentor or a coach. Look outside of our own experiences.
• Importance of roles models. It’s up to us to help others up the ladder, rather than being the queen bee. It’s not about me, it’s about them approach.
• A lot of discussion around work environment and culture- what can we do to make it more female friendly and more likely to support women and help them achieve their potential. For example, diversity policies need to be visible and measurable.
• The extent to which women really support each other (or not). Women can be quite catty and can be difficult to work for when in groups. That isn’t helpful to anyone. One lady said ‘Once that glass ceiling has been cracked, man you paper it over” and don’t let anyone else come up behind you.
• We need to move away from training for leadership development for women. It needs to be more focussed on mentoring and coaching.
• In considering issues for women in the workplace, we also need to move past only looking after women with children. Not that it isn’t important, but we can’t ignore women who do not or choose not to have children.
• Celebrate the wins. Embrace difference. Stop trying to be perfect. Find your voice. Take risks in your career.

Some very interesting and provocative thoughts in there from a diverse group of people. What struck you as an unsual comment or something that you hadn’t heard before?

In creating HR Club Sydney, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to meet a number of very amazing and passionate individuals. I also regularly get invited to events that are happening in Sydney, and am free to write my thoughts on these topics. After all, I don’t make any money from HR Club Sydney, I’m not reliant on boosting traffic to my site and I don’t get paid to say certain things. It’s great because I feel that gives me the ok to say when I think something or someone has done or is doing something cool.

With that said, the week before last I was invited to the Proteus Leadership Networking Breakfast where HR Club Sydney was fortunate enough to be given a table.

I got the opportunity to sit with some of my favourite HR Club Sydney people and it was fantastic to see so many cards being swapped and potential career opportunities being discussed.

I also wanted to write about the presentation because well I thought it was fantastic, and apologies it’s a wee bit later than I would have liked but I wanted to do it justice.

I attended this seminar at a time where I was thinking very much about leadership and what it means to be one. Within HR we know the difference between leadership and management, but it’s important to remember our friends in the business don’t always see it our way. This presentation hit the nail right on the head and I’m hoping many of us can use some of these ideas to create change in our organisations.

These are some of my key take outs (and you’ll probably be nodding your head or shouting hallelujah with me lol!).

Richard started off by talking about how people normally fall into management roles, rather than being selected for their people management skills. Familiar story particularly in areas of technical skills or ability. What happens then is that people with bad managers either leave or try to wait for them to leave. We all know about how employee engagement impacts upon people and the business- so why is it still happening?

I love the Peter Drucker quote that was used, “The only definition of a leader, is someone who has followers”.

It’s so true. Being Gen Y, I have often got the attitude from Managers that I should do exactly what they say because they are the Manager/Senior Executive/Partner/Director/Been here a really long time etc. And that’s not to say that being young means you can walk around doing what you like or thinking you know everything- but it begs the question: without people actually wholeheartedly following what you are doing, how effective are you as a leader anyway?

Richard also mentioned the work of Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones who are Europe’s leading experts on organisational culture, leadership and change.

They are past winners of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review, entitled, “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” The huge interest the article generated led to a five-year journey exploring authentic leadership and their book is the culmination of that research.

Just because you have the title or “authority” it doesn’t mean you will have people onboard. It’s not an entitlement- it’s a privilege to be a manager or a leader but some people these days just don’t get it. Some even believe that that is the way people should be treated because “they were treated that way” or “that’s how it is in X industry”.

4 words.

Doesn’t make it right.

Source

Richard talked about how autocratic leadership may have worked in the past, but that Gen Y just simply won’t put up with it. Will they complain? Probably not. They’ll just vote with their feet.

In looking at a definition of an autocratic leader, the wikipedia machine says that:

Under the autocratic leadership style, all decision-making powers are centralized in the leader, as with dictator leaders.
They do not entertain any suggestions or initiatives from subordinates. The autocratic management has been successful as it provides strong motivation to the manager. It permits quick decision-making, as only one person decides for the whole group and keeps each decision to himself until he feels it is needed to be shared with the rest of the group.

In the great words of Dr Phil “How’s that workin for ya?”

So now that we are all nodding our heads in unison, the real challenge is to get this message across to the decision makers of the business. Would love to get some discussion happening in this, and let’s keep it on topic. It’s not Gen Y versus Baby Boomers/Gen X etc.

It’s about leadership and what’s going to be effective.

Also- Richard was a fantastic speaker so check out his presentation here
Breakfast Followrship NSW

2010 Leadership Breakfast Series

Proteus is a leadership and management training organisation which holds regular networking breakfasts which also includes a seminar. A lot of their work is around creating great leaders and positive work cultures.

I’ve been given 6 free tickets (at a value of $49 per person) to share with HR Club Sydney for the next seminar on 14th July in Sydney, at the Hilton. So if you’d like to join my table on the 14th, please leave a comment via this blog and tell me in 25 words or less why you would like to come

You can find more information on the Leadership Breakfast Series here, and it operates in various states- not just Sydney.

Hope to see you there!

Yes well it feels like there is a lot of focus on women and leadership at the moment. Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister Thursday after Kevin Rudd lost favor over mining disputes and his shelving of climate change initiatives.

So for the Women of NSW we now have a female Premier, Kristina Keneally (@kkeneally), a female Governor-General her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce AC and now Julia Gillard is our first female PM.

This comes at a time when there is a lot of talk about the level of women in senior leadership roles in Australia, calls for mandatory quotas for women on boards, paid maternity leave for all and again pay equity.

Are we at the point where things are starting to truly shift? Keen to hear your thoughts. I’m not sure to be honest. Sometimes it is hard to differentiate whether people are doing things because they feel obliged or because it looks good, as opposed to believing it is actually important. I think if all these conversations continue to gain momentum, we’ll get there.

On that note, I’d like to share a few things that you might be interested in.

Women, Management and Work Conference

Macquarie University’s Women, Management and Work Conference, on 29-30 July 2010, will be a place to canvas solutions to increasing the number of women elected to parliament, appointed to boards and senior management positions and achieving salary equity.

Leading women speakers will be discussing equal opportunity in the workplace and strategies to achieve higher levels of women in leadership roles throughout Australia. It will encourage and inspire women to succeed in the workforce.

Conference co-chair Melanie O’Connor says, “The conference has been running for 22 years, yet 22 years later we are still looking for solutions to these intractable issues. Although many Australians do not want to hear it, gender continues to act as an insidious barrier.”

“Research by Associate Professor McGraw published in The 2008 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency Census highlights some alarming statistics which show that women do not form the majority in any category of senior job position in any industry in Australia.”

“Not surprisingly, not a single industry in Australia pays women more than they do men and most pay them less.”

“In 2008, there were four female CEOs in the top ASX200 companies in Australia or two percent, down from three per cent in 2006. 106 companies in the top ASX200 do not have a single woman on their boards,” said Ms O’Connor.

The conference will include presentations, round table discussions and workshops encouraging audience participation run by influential Australian leaders.

Topics discussed over the two days include: how to get on a board, how to get on an executive team, coaching and mentoring, promotion and development in your job, balancing the risks and rewards as well as inspiring leadership success stories. This year also includes topics on starting your own business.

There are over 20 inspiring and leading speakers including:
· The Hon Tanya Plibersek MP, Minister for Housing; Minister for the Status of Women

· Brigadier Simone Wilkie AM, Director General Training, Headquarters Forces Command

· Heather Ridout, Chief Executive, Australian Industry Group

· Andrea Grant, Group Managing Director Human Resources, Telstra

· Mia Freedman, Journalist, columnist, author and media consultant

The Conference Directors are Associate Professor Peter McGraw, high profile management consultant Melanie O’Connor and Pam Morpeth.
Date: 29 and 30 July 2010, 9am – 5:30pm
Where: Sofitel Sydney Wentworth, 61-101 Phillip St, Sydney
For more information and program details visit: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc
To register visit: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc/register_now

You might also like to follow them online:

Web: http://www.lmsf.mq.edu.au/wmwc
Facebook: Women at Work Australia
Twitter: @womenatworkoz
Posterous: http://womenatworkoz.posterous.com/

New Blog- Coping with Jane

Jane Coupland has started her own blog which aims to share the “boom chicka wah wah of fabulous women”.

Jane says “Imagine if we all had access to what makes female innovators and the most influential women of present day, tick. Who would these individuals be, and is there something they could share with us that we could take away and use?”

She will be working towards providing lifestyle and career insights of modern day heroines from the community.

She is also interested in being a megaphone for fabulous 30+ women!

I encourage you to check it out and provide suggestions to Jane if you know any fabulous women with stories worth sharing.

Women in Business Blog

I recently came across the women in business website (I think on twitter or LinkedIn) and thought that there might be a lot of people interested in this. It’s a pretty cool little community where you can engage by signing up as a member on the blog, you can participate in the discussions on LinkedIn, start chatting with people on twitter or become a fan on facebook.

To give you a better idea of what the site is about, the manifesto below pretty much sums it up:

Embrace doing business online
Connect to a likeminded community
Promote your business by sharing value

Clare Lancaster also runs a five week online training course which teaches you the principles of online marketing strategy, SEO, social media and email marketing and how you can apply them to your business.

Finally, one of my favourite females Christina Aguilera has just launched her new album Bionic and I would like to share one of her songs. It’s just beautiful and she often sings about the strength of being a woman.

Have a fantastic week everyone!

Some quick photos from the HR Club Sydney Event the other night. Thanks to everyone who came along!

Get all the details here and then RSVP via LinkedIn (please note you must be logged into LinkedIn in order to RSVP)

Starts: Tuesday June 08, 2010, 06:00PM
Ends: Tuesday June 08, 2010, 08:00PM
Location: Aurora Place
88 Phillip St, Level 5
Sydney Nsw 2000, NSW 2000 AU
Price: Free!

In case you don’t have the budget to attend HR Summit this year, I’ve managed to secure Muffy Churches from A.S.K Learning to present a case study around developing the learning roadmap for an award winning program they developed with Siemens Ltd. The award in question is actually the highest honours in the LearnX Asia Pacific Training Awards 2010 for Best Leadership Training Program.

Read more about the event here and then RSVP on LinkedIn here.