"Reflect on the conferences you've gone to in the last year and think about how many takeaways you've had, and if it's not more than 10 then they probably don't match up with TINYcon."
My biggest takeaway from TINYcon this year, there are so many that it's hard to pick only one, but I actually think I have two. One was yesterday morning when Howard Behar was speaking. He mentioned a question that I just really loved, which is, "What happens in your organization when someone makes a mistake?" And I work with leaders all over the country to try to build cultures of innovation and risk-taking, and I never thought to ask that question before. So, I love it both as you're interviewing for a job yourself, and when you're working with an organization to say, "What happens, what rewards, what penalties when someone makes a mistake?" And I think building off of that, Nancy Meadows shared something later in the day, which was the big eye approach and the idea of zooming up into the sky and looking at your organization objectively from 10,000 feet and I think those two sentiments go really nicely together. My favorite sessions, definitely Howard and Nancy were up there. I also really loved Nick's session yesterday. So, really talking about some of the operations and systems that they've put in place for learning. I especially love the way they think about leadership development at their organization. And then I loved the wheelhouse session this morning, and really talking about, how do you create a culture of joy in your workplace? In fact, I've already sent three ideas back to my team that they're going to try to implement next week. I agreed to speak at TINYcon for two reasons. One, I love Dave. I think he's a great guy, a great leader and I really love the way he's thinking about supporting leaders and employees.
And two, I wanted to come to a place where I knew everyone was focused on the same type of challenge. So, everyone I've met here is really thinking about, "How can we be better for our people? How can we engage our people? How can we make our people happier and more effective?" Absolutely. The dine-around dinner last night, we went to Anthony's Seafood across the street. I feel like I had just as many sparks in that conversation as I had in some of the workshops. I think I already have a few of my colleagues at Education Element signed up to come, and I definitely plan to tell all of our clients about it. I think my pitch would be, "TINYcon is very focused on the employee experience and all of the sessions are led by practitioners who are speaking from a really authentic place of having tried this themselves." For someone considering TINYcon I would say, "Reflect on the conferences you've gone to in the last year and think about how many takeaways you've had, and if it's not more than 10 then they probably don't match up with TINYcon." Yeah. I think one of the questions that we help a lot of our clients try to answer is, "How can we as leaders respond to the needs of employees?" And that's fairly easy to do in some of our smaller clients where they have less than 50 employees, but much more difficult when you have 10,000 or 100,000 folks. So, I think TINYpulse helps leaders get a sense of trends across everyone and really, kind of, eliminate that individual bias they might have for how employees are feeling.