It’s August. The summer temperatures are soaring, and families are working to squeeze in one last vacation before school starts. For us at Varsity, August marks the last leg of the summer conference season. Our team has crisscrossed the country, visiting LeadingAge and aging service conferences from coast to coast. Like you, we learn something new at every one of these events. We also get excited about what the future holds and how we can be part of it. Then, winter rolls in, our daily workload increases, and those big ideas get bogged down in a mental mire from which they rarely return.
In speaking with a colleague, I was asked, “How do you keep yourself and your team inspired and excited long after a LeadingAge conference is over?
It’s a challenge we all struggle with — and one that I’ve been thinking more about since having that question posed.
Perhaps one of the best tactics I’ve used is our series of “takeaway” articles from each event. Sure, they are informative for our clients and friends, but they also provide me with a handy reference to remember what we found most exciting at each event. Over the course of the year, our team keeps track of these takeaways and looks for larger, nationwide trends. Then, as the year closes, with conference season far behind us, we gather and discuss the global trends that we have noticed. We distill the most important points that then become part of our business mindset going forward. For us, regular check-ins like this help to keep the conference energy up and to remind us of what we are excited about.
Therein lies the best and most difficult way to reengage your team members and build their excitement. You have to give them a time and an opportunity to be excited. You need to carve out a half day or a full day of time wherein they can ignore their daily tasks and get excited about the future and share their conference experiences. Doing this three to six months after an event is perfect, as it allows your team members to reflect on what they’ve heard and also see how it relates to your business.
For instance, we recently wrote about hybrid homes here on this blog. This is a concept that first came to us more than a year ago. As we’ve heard more about it, our team has gotten more excited. This excitement has led us to connect and grow our relationship with RLPS Architects. The company’s work helps to drive excitement in our team. Likewise, our marketing abilities help its team understand how the mature market is using the spaces it creates. By coming together to talk about those we serve, we energize each other between major events.
You simply can’t do everything, though. Conferences can offer hundreds of great, innovative ideas, but the reality is that most organizations can only handle one, maybe two, of these ideas at a time. By engaging with your team members and letting them decide which idea excites them most — and figuring out how to execute that idea — you can really keep the conference energy flowing through personal buy-in.
Over the next few weeks, our team is hitting the road for Florida, Colorado and Tennessee — you can be sure that we’ll be posting takeaways from all of these events. Just like you, we are working to harness these ideas to build our team, with the plan to better serve our clients, and through them, their residents.
A conference is a once-a-year event. It’s up to you to harness that excitement and energy for the remainder of the year to inspire your team.
