Thoughts on the Illinois SHRM Leadership Meeting

The Illinois SHRM Leadership Conference at Grizzly Jack's

in Utica, IL January 9, 2012.

Upon the closing of the Illinois State Council Leadership Conference,  I got in my truck and headed home with my Springfield SHRM chapter buddy Pattie Currie.  We talked about the confernce  for about the first 30 miles.  One of the things we discussed was the merging of old SHRMies and the New SHRMies. The state leadership conference like the National Leadership Conference (which takes place in Nov. at SHRM Headquarters) brings together folks at all levels.  This is a challenge,  because there are some old dogs, and some folks completely new to the SHRM organization.

Then I got home from our the meeting and my wife says, "Well what did you do?" This really gave me pause to reflect, again, on what had just happened, as I spent the last day and a half with a group of my HR/SHRM friends. What makes us old hands keep coming back?  While there is always the new stuff that gets discussed, there is always a bunch of basic stuff that gets re-hashed.  After some deep, albeit breif introspection, I have decided it is a deep and unabiding respect and committment to SHRM and the HR Profession. Even though the new people continue to come in and the old hands keep hanging on it is difficult to balance the needs and interest of both groups.

With my involvement in ice hockey, I have seen how USA Hockey addresses this with thier annual officials clinics. After struggling with this for years, they have finally taken thier annual seminars and broken them into two groups.  The groups are Levels 1 & 2 (new/begining)  and then the Level 3 which are the more Senior officials.  In most instance you must have three years of experience to be a level 3 official.  I think USA Hockey has decided they will teach the more advance official more advance concepts, and hope that the older officials mentor the younger officials.  After years of dropping the puck,  USA Hockey has decided that the old dogs either know how to do it, or are never going to learn.

While the SHRM message is always somewhat of a combined message; it is one that everyone needs to hear and then there are the orientation parts.  Let's take the SHAPE plan for instance.  It is important that we all know the changes to the plan, and I suppose it is equally important for the newbies to know that there is a SHAPE plan and what it is.

So maybe we need to challenge the SHRM format and have at least some  break outs for the old dog and some sessions for the newbies.  It doesn't seem like it should be that hard to make that happen.

In the meantime, us old dogs will just keep on coming back.

-Dave Ryan Director of Social Media ISC SHRM