Inspiration Hub

There are so many theories in leadership ranging from vision to self-awareness to service. The simplest way to develop your leadership skills is to have a work ethic mixed with a solid foundation of core values. Inspirational leaders have commandments they work and live by. Commandments, or guidelines, lay the critical foundation for the development of leadership and business solutions.

Mistakes happen — even to the most organized event planners. It’s hard to be perfect when you’re juggling endless details and deadlines, corresponding with dozens of caterers, and trying to woo sponsors.

Every organization has to figure out how to make meetings more effective. It’s a complex challenge. To be productive, each meeting needs to engage the individual talents of the people involved, work to achieve the organization’s specific goals for the moment, and do so in a way that’s both culturally relevant and contextually sensitive to the world around it—not an easy feat.

I LOVE a good brainstorming session. There’s nothing like great minds coming together to form a new idea or solve a specific problem. But in order to actually do that, the brainstorming has to be, well...good. It needs to be a productive meeting of the minds.

To ensure that happens, be mindful of these five tips.

When I was the newly hired president of Burger King USA, I worked for the late and legendary restaurateur, Norman Brinker. I was in Norman’s office one afternoon after he had seen a memo that I had written to one of our senior leaders. I was noticeably thorough and prescriptive in terms of laying out the course of action, to which Norman offered an alternate approach.

“I saw your memo to so-and-so and have a thought for you,” he said. “Next time, why don’t you just focus on the objective and leave how he gets there up to him?”

He continued, “Two things will happen: one, you’ll find out how smart he is or ain’t, and two, he might just come up with some new ideas you hadn’t thought of.”

That moment 36 years ago has shaped the way I’ve operated ever since, particularly when it comes to mentoring. While many mislabel mentorship as giving advice, there’s much more to it.

When obtaining a conference budget, there are many facets that can determine your success. The same goes for any operation, possibilities increase with financing. If you represent an association that has just acquired event sponsorship and are looking for ways to maximise on the allocated budget, then carefully considering the following aspects is imperative. Never underestimate your value as an association, along with the value that an organisation will gain by attaching their brand to your conference.

It’s easy to be in awe of the attendees at Elevate!, the inaugural Association for Women in Events conference. Many at Mandarin Oriental, Washington, D.C., are among the industry’s brightest and most-driven stars. AWE’s hope is to inspire and promote its members to leadership positions. The fact remains that while women comprise the bulk of the events industry’s planners, a glass ceiling—however cracked—remains atop the ladder. “Make yourself indispensable,” advised Sarah Hurwitz, a former White House speechwriter who was the opening keynote on March 7. Her tip to up-and-comers is sound, but it raises the question whether men have as much work to do to prove their worth.

Event planning is a mix of fast-paced excitement and mind-boggling stress. You know it’s worth it when you see the smiles on your attendees’ faces — but sometimes it’s hard to remember that feeling during a last-minute crisis. Whether you need to get pumped up to power through an event-day marathon or a tricky sponsorship negotiation, mantras can help you feel centered so you can take action.

Writing contracts and negotiating terms with suppliers can be tricky. How do planners protect themselves and their attendees from cancellations? Are attorney fees included? In a recent Smart Meetings webinar, veteran hospitality contracts attorney Lisa Sommer Devlin shared some tips for creating win-win contracts. Here are the contract clauses you shouldn’t do without.

A post-event recap provides useful information to your stakeholders and community on key takeaways from the event. But sometimes this important step is forgotten or postponed in the flurry of activity. However, this essential tool is most useful in the days after the event. In fact, the best time to publish this report is within 48 hours of the event ending. After two weeks, the information gets a stale. Following are some tips from a veteran planner on writing the perfect event recap.

The motto “there are no bad questions” does not apply to surveys. There is definitely a right and wrong way to ask attendees for feedback. The wrong way can confuse and annoy attendees — and ultimately lead to them giving up on your survey. It can also affect the accuracy of the answers you get. If you’re getting biased answers — and making critical changes to your events as a result — it could seriously undermine the success of your future events.

“Our departments are too siloed.”

“I don’t understand how my role makes an impact.”

“There isn’t enough transparency!”

Sound familiar? It can get easy to become so focused on our initiatives that we put our head down and barrel through - especially when times are busy and resources are limited. That said, this approach often leads to an unnecessary disconnect among staff.

Let's be honest, event planning is a stressful job. At any given time there are a number of jobs that need to get done and it can seem like every deadline comes right down to the wire. The 18 tips in this blog post will help you save time during the event planning process and ensure your next event is wildly successful. Let's dive right in.

It’s easy to get into an afternoon/end-of-day slump. But how you end your day can have a great impact on how you begin your tomorrow. Obviously, you want your work days to be as productive as possible, so to make that more of a daily reality, try ending each day by completing the following six tasks:

Organizational complexity is strangling innovation, productivity and engagement. It is fogging people’s ability to proactively focus our time and energy on the top strategic priorities. We get sucked into low value, reactive busy work, which contributes to ordinary performance. But we, individually, are also responsible for allowing complexity to drive constant distraction, low focus and low energy. We live highly cluttered lives, have become addicted to checking our phones, are too responsive to interruptions and do not nurture, protect and direct our most productive energy.

Benchmarking with similar companies is a valuable way to gather data on strategic meetings management best practices. I know many meeting managers who have developed strong relationships with their peers over the years. Their candid sharing provides them with new ideas and quick wins for program improvements. Additionally, benchmarking will help you understand how your program compares to that of your competition, which provides is powerful information for C-level executives. Below are six tips for your benchmarking journey.

Remember that glorious 2017 music festival in the Bahamas that garnered headlines for its excellent planning, exceptional execution and gorgeous attendees? Fyre Festival was all the rage, until it was supposed to happen and attendees found themselves stranded on an island with no infrastructure, F&B easily surpassed by your average soup kitchen, leftover FEMA tents for housing and, well, no festival.

As professional event planners, we understand the value of time; but what happens when your work requires you to collaborate with someone on the other side of the country, or even the globe? A few simple best practices can help make this an easy transition for many event professionals.

Organizations are in the midst of a massive shift toward more teamwork. In the average company, up to 80 percent of employees’ days are spent working collaboratively. However, only 14 percent of executives are satisfied with their employees' ability to collaborate and make decisions as teams. This represents an opportunity for meeting planners to help, by putting on educational sessions that make people better at working in a team.

There is a lot of talk about brands taking stands in today’s marketing world where doing the right thing has become vital to an organization’s reputation and customer base. In the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study, statistics show that 65% of consumers now buy on belief or buy from brands having similar morals, values, and beliefs on social issues and politics. This is up 13% from 2017.

Last week I wrote a proposal for a great client and sent her all the information I knew she would need to make a decision. But unlike some clients who just don’t get back to you or follow up weeks later to tell you that they’ve gone with someone else, this client responded with a list of questions that she had been using to evaluate all the different proposals she got to compare apples to apples. Some of what she asked had already been covered, but some of it had not been addressed in my proposal.

Planning and managing multiple events is a constant juggling act. You’re not just managing your venue, vendor, caterer, staff, and sponsors for one event — you’re managing multiple sets of them for each event! And while the highs can be exhilarating, the lows can make you seriously question why you’ve picked a career that leaves you so little time for friends and family.

So I’ve been on a kick talking about thought leadership lately, as you’ve probably noticed, but I truly believe this is a difference-maker in so many businesses. And yet – not many businesses even know what thought leadership is, let alone are focused on building it. I talked a few weeks ago in my blog about how you can be a thought leader, even when you don’t feel like an “expert“, but I think it’s also important to talk about why thought leadership and influence is really important.

63% of event creators today base their decision to participate in future events on past performance. But if you’re only measuring total revenue or ticket sales, you don’t have clear visibility into your marketing and event performance. If your analysis stops there, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your audience and boost your event’s return on investment (ROI).