Focus Area: Managing Yourself

Overworked, overextended and overstressed. Does this sound like you? Many businesses today expect individuals to produce more in less time with fewer resources leading to high stress, high turnover and low morale. Women think they must do more and be more, but the truth is that mantra only leads to a vicious cycle of mayhem and stress. In this funny yet practical keynote, Colette Carlson will reveal how setting clear boundaries and making thoughtful choices will yield greater satisfaction… and stronger results. This session will help you manage today’s business environment by learning how to create healthy boundaries, shift perspective, and negotiate unrealistic expectations. Learn how to balance the things that matter most, how to take back your life and love it, how to lower your stress by becoming an “ASK Master,” and how to move up on your own “To Do” list. And you will no doubt walk away inspired to make positive, long-lasting changes after witnessing Colette’s signature, visual close that brings it all together

Focus Area: Managing Yourself

Women need networks, from personal advisory boards to small strategic networking groups to networks of people who can help them make things happen in their organizations. This session will show you why strategic networks are so beneficial and how to build them. Here you will gain a framework to manage strategic networks and relationships both inside and outside of your organization. Through an exercise designed to use network “mapping,” you will focus on a specific leadership goal and then develop an action plan for how to analyze your strategic network to fill any gaps and achieve your goal in a structured, systematic way.

Focus Area: Managing Yourself and Strategic Thinking

Many women now entering leadership positions owe their success to a strong technical command of their jobs and for a “nose-to-the-grindstone” dedication. But as you step into bigger leadership roles—or are assessed on your potential to do so—a different set of skills are required. One of the biggest developmental hurdles that aspiring leaders –male or female – must overcome, is learning to sell ideas—their vision of the future—to numerous stakeholders. But for women in particular, being a leader “with vision” often presents an additional set of challenges. Presenting an inspiring story about the future is very different from generating a strategic analysis or a logical implementation plan. You will explore ways to articulate a positive vision of the future for your team, unit or organization, and learn how being regarded as a “Visionary” can impact your career success.

Focus Area: Manging Yourself and Managing People, Projects and Teams

Whether you are aware of it or not, you bring unique value to your company or organization, including an impact on its financial performance. By looking at the many factors that contribute to a personal brand, you will discover how to shape a brand that fully reflects your unique strengths and the contributions you make to your organization.

Focus Area: Managing Yourself and Managing People, Projects and Teams

Research shows that women often face backlash when they negotiate for themselves or when they use agentic traits in their negotiations. As a consequence, we know that women have a narrower bandwidth for choosing their negotiation tactics and must be more strategic in their approach. Concerns that negotiations can harm relationships are legitimate when looking at the research, however, smart negotiations, mindful of how to deal with stereotypes and norms, can actually enhance relationships through improved negotiation skills. The good news is that women are already great negotiators for others and by understanding and overcoming some internal and external barriers they can become great negotiators for themselves and their organizations.

By building off of research findings on women and negotiation, this session will introduce you to the fundamentals of successful workplace negotiation and the basic elements of how to approach negotiation differently. Through group discussion and practical application, you will gain negotiation strategies to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

Focus Area: Managing Yourself and Managing People, Projects and Teams

In the book, The Leader of the Future, author Charles Handy notes, “A career is now not so much a ladder of roles, but a growing reputation for making things happen.” It is this reputation (aka “personal brand”) of providing value that enables you to establish credibility and authority, and influence organizational outcomes. But it is one thing to have an aspirational brand (what I hope people will think of when they think of me) and another to achieve it. It is through the intentional management of your executive presence (your core values and ethics; your acumen; and your “externals”) that you can develop, maintain (or hurt) your aspirational brand.

“Externals” are what others see and hear that ideally reinforce and actually “markets” your brand. For example, does your behavior in meetings reinforce your brand of being open to dissenting ideas? What do your emails tell others about who you are? Clearly “presence is in the eye of the beholder,” so what happens when you add gender into the mix? Do people interpret your externals, and therefore your brand, according to gendered expectations regarding what men and women are supposed to act and be like?

In this session we will explore your own aspirational presence, and how gendered dynamics may be impacting your reputation/brand inside your organization. We’ll discuss strategies for managing your externals in a way of managing your brand and building your perceived value inside your organization.

Focus Area: Business Acumen

Business Acumen encompasses a complex set of leadership competencies that rise beyond the ability to read and decipher financial reports. In this breakout session, Theo Gilbert-Jamison will demystify the three key components of business acumen (Intelligence, Strategy, and Innovation and Resourcefulness) and share strategies for increasing ones self-accountability for building this vital skill to become more promotable, and a valued contributor within the organization and community.

Participants attending this session will:

• • Define Business Acumen beyond financial expertise
• • Identify key components of Business Acumen, and how each element contributes to accelerated career advancement and opportunities
• • Participate in a “Food for Thought” exercise that helps participants identify personal individual strengths and weaknesses in growing your Business Acumen
• • Develop an action plan with specific focus on Intelligence, Strategy, Innovation/Resourcefulness
• • Walk away with tips, and best practices that they can immediately begin to implement

Focus Area: Managing People, Projects and Teams

When given a team assignment most people want to jump right into the task: what do we have to produce? Who will do what? What’s the timeline? But hold on! The success of a team is significantly determined in its very early stages, specifically what you do before the team is even set up, and then what you do in the earliest meetings. The more work you do upfront in setting up your team (selecting the right number and mix of members) and establishing an infrastructure (its goals, operating procedures, and roles), the smoother your task production will be. Unfortunately, with all the time pressures and work we face, it’s no surprise that our impulse is to “get down to work.” But by rushing into the task, we are actually dooming the task to take longer, as we run into unforeseen problems and deal with conflicts between members.

This session will share strategies for building the infrastructure upon which to do great work, build solid relationships, and avoid task problems and team conflict down the road since everyone is on the “same page.” We will also how to hold individuals accountable, another critical component of team leadership
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Focus Area: Managing Yourself

So much to do, so little time. How do you take all the strategies, best practices, and connections that you have gathered during the conference and translate them into results that really count? Business coach, brand strategist and bestselling author Libby Gill believes that it’s a matter of changing beliefs that change behavior. And to make sure those behaviors last, you have to master the foolproof factors for accountability.

The author of the award-winning book, You Unstuck: Mastering the New Rules of Risk-taking in Work and Life, Libby will guide you to life-changing results that last. Her high-energy and interactive presentation will help you discover the benefits of her “Clarify, Simplify & Execute” process where you learn to clarify the vision, simplify the path and execute the plan – a system with aggressive strategy and flawless follow-through. This system will show you how to challenge the “INR” – Immediate Negative Response – the knee-jerk reaction that causes you to make excuses, doubt yourself, procrastinate, or lose motivation; understand the right (and wrong) way to set personal and professional goals; and build “Foolproof Factors for Accountability” into our personal and professional lives. A rousing call-to-action finale will leave you with a non-negotiable commitment that will position you for success.