Inspiration Hub

Frequently, meeting professionals have challenges linking with leadership to get their sponsorship for new programs, such as strategic meetings management. It is important to connect with them to get their buy-in for an initiative’s governance, value drivers, and outcomes.

Are you in the middle of your organization’s busy season? Conference season, perhaps? If so, you’re not alone. But even if you aren’t, chances are, that time is coming...soon!

So when that happens, how you can you stay productive and get done what you need to get done without wanting to pull your hair out? It’s all about working smarter, not harder. 

At Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Conference in June, speaker Joanne Dennison, CMP, of The Ordinary Success Project, offered an hour of advice on how to make “bad” business more valuable to host venues. The packed house of planners and suppliers heard these eight tips.

When you think of the word “team,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most of us automatically associate teams with some kind of organized play. And if you want to generate a sense of team spirit among a group of co-workers, games are one of the most effective ways to make it happen.

Phone interviews are a great way to connect with a candidate without the time and effort investment (on both sides!) that an in-person interview requires. If the position you’re hiring for includes time on the phone with those you serve - even better! You get to test drive the experience.

In the spirit of the theme of Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Conference 2019in Toronto, the Smart Meetings team gathered lessons from the main stage and The Village floor to share with event professionals who couldn’t attend.

Is your daily routine leaving you tired and burnt out? Do you find it hard to build up the energy to get even the smallest tasks done? Well, you’re not alone. The job of event professional is consistently rated one of the most stressful after emergency responder and surgeon—a condition that can lead to stagnation. But even the most junior meeting manager knows that nothing gets the blood flowing like crossing things off a checklist.

Inbox zero is something people love to talk about, but it remains elusive for many of us. That need not be the case any longer.

Audrey Thomas, founder of Organized Audrey, recently shared tips in an FICP webinar on how to achieve inbox cleanliness and how to maintain it. With proper use of the calendar, task feature and rule creation, you’ll be an expert at Outlook in no time.

At the annual Exhibition & Convention Executives Forum, Sam Lippman, president of Lippman Connects and producer of the event, has a tradition of starting off the conference with a five-minute summary of the top-level takeaways from the annual ECEF Pulse Survey. This year’s event on May 28 at the JW Marriott Washington, D.C., was no exception, and Lippman’s quick delivery of the survey results—five business trends for convention executives—was a fitting blast-off to the fast-paced educational day.

Just like people, teams have personalities. While the nature of teams has shifted since our tribal hunter-gatherer days, teams are still one of our most crucial social structures. This is true in most organizations, and particularly the case in high-stress event planning groups. How we introduce hopefulness into our teams can be the difference between joyful collaboration and frustrating second-guessing.

It’s entirely normal—and almost expected—to feel lost in the beginning stages of your job. You’re trying not to forget details, dealing with clients, all the while trying to maintain sight of the big picture. And aside from some internet articles, there isn’t a real guidebook. Enter: mentors. Mentors in your field can be underrated. But they hold information and wisdom that will help guide you through your job—and even far into your career. So, how do you find one, and how do you present yourself as the perfect mentee?

Meetings are necessary. We have to have them to move business forward, make decisions, plan projects and communicate with cross-functional teams. They are an intrinsic business component.

But what is not a given is an effective meeting. We all want them, want to be in them and want to host them. But often, we are faced with meetings that are either poorly managed, unnecessary or a huge time suck. How much time do you spend in meetings? I’ll bet it’s more than you think.

If Bill Gates dropped a dollar, would he pick it up? You may have heard some version of this question before. Following a 2011 experiment by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Internet was ablaze with the finding that Gates would have to stumble across $45,000 in order for it to be worth his time to bend down and pick it up.

What can you, as an event professional, do to help the 40.3 million people around the world who are victims in the multibillion-dollar human trafficking trade? It turns out the answer is: a lot. During a panel discussion of the many faces of trafficking, attendees at The Smart Woman Summit at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas learned that they could make a real difference by doing something as simple as taking a picture of their hotel room.

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.