The opening Keynote of Louisiana SHRM was titled “I Come From the Water.” In his presentation Kris Dunn did an awesome job of relating many phenomenon in popular culture and society and how they apply to our world, and our business lives. Kris related different TV character to some of our problem and stand out employees. Of course, the name of the presentation implies evolution and change, as we moved from the water. This seems to be an emerging underlying theme of the event so far “Change”.
LASHRM Day One
Human Resources professionals have to become change masters and learn not to practice defensive HR. This is a necessary change for many of us. We think that is what we are supposed to do for our organization, minimize the risk by keeping employees from doing things we don’t want them to do or things we don’t think they should be doing. Jay Kuhn’s did all that he could to dispel HR from fearing risk and change. Jay, time and again, challenged the 400 HR pros to cast away the ideas of fearing change and learning to embrace process improvements, things that are going to make your organization better. Jay shared his wisdom on how he has navigated his world-class organization through this process with many engaging examples.
Jay spoke to how he had broken down the walls of his organization when it came to Social Media, while breaking a few rules. Then after tearing things apart, he began the re-building process. Jay created alliances which had never been there between different departments. He lead the way to show people how to work together and accomplish their re-defined collective goals.
Leading and changing, are the reoccurring themes here so far.
Both must be done with caution. The changes should be needed changes. We need to remove the ill-functioning parts of our organization with a scalpel not a meat cleaver. Then, we need to implement change in a thought-out well-planned method.
Tomorrow afternoon Cy Wakeman will wrap this all up and put a nice bow on it. She is an accomplished speaker and author that I have seen present a number of times. She will bring her high energy and humor to the Louisiana SHRM stage. I would bet a large sum of money there will be a lot of content on change and leadership (which in my opinion are shaping up to be the conference takeaways).
