A Room Full Of Powerful Leaders

Leadership intrigues me. I am always looking for thoughts, ideas and insights to challenge my thinking and help me grow. 

I work in an organization that, at the local level, is predominately female. Like so many others, we are facing an eventual exodus of many retirement eligible staff and our continued growth and success requires us to be able to develop and retain quality, effective leaders.

Our turnover is low and we have some pretty solid leadership development program in place. So by these two measures, and some others, we are doing well. I am interested to see just how well we really are doing and what can we do to do it better.

I will be attending the Women's Leadership Conference, April 27 -April 28 as a guest of The Conference Board. The  presenters include senior executives from Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Sara Lee, State Farm, AstraZeneca, QUALCOMM, Pitney Bowes, GlaxoSmithKline, UPS and Deloitte as well as Gail Evans, former Executive Vice President of CNN. Talk about an all-star cast!

The sessions of particular interest to me are Returnships (think internships): Programs for Workforce Re–entry; Social Communities: How to Best Use Them; Scalable, Sustainable, & Cost–Effective Mentoring; and Being Resilient: Leading with Energy.

What ideas can I bring forward for discussion and what types programs could our Workforce Development Committee consider and in what other ways can we contribute? At the conference I will not only enjoy meeting some of the finest, I will be conducting informal data gathering on how to be a human resource executive and gathering  ideas that I can bring back to my organization, share with my colleagues, and use to enhance my career. 

I am also out to help you. Do you have any questions you want answered from the Women's Leadership Conference?

My 9 Year Old is Digitally Distinct. Are You?

My daughter is nine years old. She owns her own domain, rocks her Google Rank and we track her online identity with Google Alerts.

She has a blog called Raising Tarah that she lets me share with her. Her page is the front page because she writes much more than I do. One of her posts inspired a highly respected leadership blogger Mary Jo Asmus to write Leadership Lessons From Children. 

She is working on her writing, "if you want your posts to be linked to, you have to write more details," sharing her space with guest authors, and is not afraid to share her feeling about others. She experiments with video, T-Rex Tango, and she shares her creative side via The Artist Within.

She knows that if one source says something she doesn't think is right she looks further. Just because something is in writing doesn't make it true and if you write something bad about someone you can hurt their feelings.

She is not online without our permission, she does not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account and is just beginning to e-mail. Her texting is limited to family members.

My daughter is interested and she is engaged.  Are you?

Cross posted on Raising Tarah