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

Getting Ready for Our State Leadership Conference

Members of the Board of the Illinois State Council of SHRM are getting together soon, very soon. We will be attending our State SHRM Leadership Conference.  This is a big deal because the board in its entirety only gets together face to face twice a year.  The other time is for the State Conference (Aug 6/7 see the sidebar). So this is a BIG deal.

There are no secret handshakes or ceremonial hats worn at the event. It is simply HR pros from throughout the state, getting together and discussing our organizations plans and goals for the year.

We should come out on the other side with some great ideas and plans to move the organization forward,

And on a totally unrelated note, the Illinois State Council of SHRM would like to congratulate the Heart of Illinois (Peoria) chapter of SHRM on being named a Pinnacle Award Winner at this year's SHRM Leadership Conference.  We have a piece of video (which is raw - I never got it edited) a little shaky and late but nonetheless here it is and congratulations to all of our Peoria area members who helped the chapter attain this award.




- Dave Ryan Director of Social Media ISC SHRM

A New Look - More White Space

This blog has been in place since July 14, 2010 with our first post.  The concept was to get "some" social media in place before the 2010 Illinois State Conference.  This came right on the heels of the 2010 SHRM National Conference and was really the collective thought of John Jorgensen and Curtis Mikdiff.

Well now that the blog is 10 years old (in dog years) we thought it was time for a little bit of a face-lift, a makeover, a redesign; call it what you will.  We have made some fairly subtle changes, to the layout and design.  While we are using Google Blogger as the platform, there still are a lot of options.  We have tried to keep it simple and go with a lot of so called White Space. I hope this hasn't rocked anyone's world.

Actually, I wonder if anyone would have even noticed.  If you have any comments please feel free to share them of email me Dave Ryan.