Ask Coach: How To Get The Most From Attending A Professional Conference

By Hardin Byars, executive coach with HTG Peer Groups

Q: “How can I ensure an ROI on investments such as professional conferences?”

Coach: Follow a process like the one I outline below:

Step 1: Start with the end in mind!

Said differently, what will make you say, “Dude, I am so glad I took my team to the conference?” As simple as that sounds, many leaders don’t spend the time to think about what success looks like for an event. You are about to make a significant investment — travel plus opportunity costs — wouldn’t it make sense to know if an attractive return were in the offing? Once you have determined the objective, choose your team accordingly. Remember, team composition should produce both corporate benefit as well as individual professional development.

Step 2: Communicate

Smart leaders not only have clarity on the objective, but they effectively communicate it to the team who is attending. Team members need both to understand the objective and to be able to articulate its value to the company and themselves. Since each role is different, teammates need to know why they were chosen as well as the expectations of participation, including post-event. Don’t assume understanding!

Step 3: Plan

Once the conference agenda is available, sit down with the team to identify priorities and determine who is going to cover what sessions. Then, make a plan for how you will share the benefits of the conference with the rest of the company upon your return. It’s important to remember that conferences are fast-moving and dynamic environments in which communication may be problematic. When attendees understand the team’s objective and their role in achieving it, they can call audibles if the original plan runs into challenges (See Step 2).

Step 4: Coordinate

In the course of your planning, include a time when you will get together as a team at the conference to compare notes and make any necessary midcourse corrections. Not all sessions turn out to be what they are billed so a topic may need to be backfilled. Or, someone might learn information in one session that makes a previously unscheduled topic of new value.

Step 5: Distill & Share

When you get back to the office get the team together one last time to determine the best way to get newly gained information into the company’s working knowledge base. Please note, as logical as it might seem, this step is often skipped. Perhaps the reason is information overload that makes this too big of a hill to climb. You’ve run the race and gotten so close to the finish line, yet you won’t get the big payoff on your effort unless you finish the race. So here’s the crowning piece of advice: if everyone will undertake the discipline of recapping their information several times during the conference, you will find it much easier to push this baby across the finish line.

Good luck! “Runners take your mark…”

Hardin Byars is an executive coach with HTG Peer Groups where he is most energized by helping CEOs apply their God-given talent to achieve their potential and create business value.  He also advises senior executives on strategic planning and organizational development to drive sustainable growth. Prior to his affiliation with HTG, Hardin was CEO of Intellinet, a nationally managed Microsoft partner focused on maximizing the business value of corporate IT investments. You can reach him at hbyars@htgpeergroups.com