Professional development is critical to the long-term health of your career and can help you implement change in your organization in the short term. But that doesn’t mean attending things like conferences and seminars isn’t without investment — in both time and money. CCI columnist Mary Shirley and Ethicalways director Penny Milner-Smyth offer novel ways that professionals and their employers can maximize participation in “compliance camp.”
Attending a conference can be expensive. Conferences aren’t just a fiscal investment; they require considerable time out of the office to travel to and attend. While there is huge intrinsic value in attending “compliance camp,” as many have amusingly (but not inaccurately) put it, we wanted to share a few ideas to help elevate your next conference experience.
As delegates we feel confident that we have done the opportunity justice by showing up, attending topics of direct relevance to our roles and by paying good attention to the speakers rather than allowing our minds to wander.
But richer rewards can be found if we challenge ourselves to approach the experience in some less than usual ways.
Choosing between tracks and topics
Limiting your choices to topics of direct relevance to your compliance niche is a great way to benchmark your practices and deepen your knowledge. At the next conference you attend, try an approach that balances this with topics that are adjacent to your lane or topics that are many lanes apart.
Fulfilling an anti-money laundering compliance role? Select an adjacent topic like anti-corruption. Privacy compliance your day job? Take the opportunity to learn about a focus area that you know comparatively little about, say, tax compliance. Beyond the new knowledge, frameworks and solutions from one field may offer you a new way of looking at your own challenges.
Stretch out!
If two or more from your team are attending the conference, resist the comfort of navigating the program as a group. If you divide the topics among yourselves and set time for a debrief at the end of each day or after the event, you maximize your shared exposure and increase the likelihood of growing your professional network.
Similar value awaits if you are attending on your own. Simply be intentional with the conversations you strike up with other delegates. Move beyond just asking that other person helping themselves to coffee to share which topic they’ve enjoyed the most so far. Follow up with an invitation to them to have their coffee with you, and interview them. What were their key takeaways from the talk? They will appreciate your interest and you will have turned any discomfort making small talk with strangers into a purposeful engagement.
Think like a journalist
Just as you can ask questions of other delegates, consider going into each session with the mindset of a journalist who takes notes with the intention of writing an article on the topic being presented. This will make you hyper-focused on the task at hand and less tempted to get distracted checking your phone. You also have at the forefront of your mind the objective of making clever connections and application of the information that you’re processing, which guides you think more analytically in the moment.
This approach has an additional benefit of providing the opportunity to actually go forward with getting an article published after the event as a feather in your cap (Editor’s note: email us!). At the very least, decanting your bullet points and sharing them with team members unable to make the event will deliver value to your absent colleagues.
The Slippery Slope & Your Culture of Integrity
Small transgressions and unanswered questions create pathways to major misconduct — and compliance teams need strategies beyond punishment
Read moreDetailsAppraise speakers to invite into your elevator
Every conference is an opportunity for you to evaluate speakers whose messaging and impact would align with and land well at your internal compliance awareness events or executive briefings.
A helpful way to break the ice with speakers who have impressed you is to take a few photos of them during their session and share them with the speaker so that they can either use them for a social media post or share with their family at home.
Doing a LinkedIn post on your favorite session with key takeaways has the dual effect of making the speaker’s day (don’t forget to tag them!), as well as endearing you to your network, who get to learn something without being at the event. Even speakers experienced on the circuit are not always sure of which topics are most relatable or land better with the audience, so a genuine comment about what you enjoyed will also help build a new connection for your network.
Embrace the brain breather opportunity
Even the most introverted among us know that however tiring the human engagement element of a conference is, we often leave motivated and refreshed. How is it that days that are long and intense with classes, followed by evening events — all while trying to stay abreast of work during breaks — somehow leaves us feeling more energized and excited about getting back to work to put inspiration into action?
During an average work day, a great deal of our cognitive bandwidth is depleted by the need to inhibit distractions and by the process of multi-tasking. Seated in a session, we find ourselves in a state of comparative physical stillness and social safety, with reduced opportunity to move on or have unexpected demands made of us. Think of it as a rare opportunity for your brain to take a breather.
The good news is that this “brain breather” effect is one we benefit from whether we focus intently on the speaker or whether we zone out and let our minds wander. When we enter a state of engaged focus on a topic, we experience that desirable flow state and a sense of intellectual accomplishment. This is coupled with a release of mood-elevating endorphins, while the nervous system enters a state of relative calm and peace.
But what if we lose focus during a session? Don’t scold yourself for it! During mind-wandering, our brains enter a state in which a network of brain regions, the “default mode network,” is most active. The valuable activities taking place while we are in this neutral mode include integrating and re-organizing the wide-ranging information that we have been incubating. It is during this cognitive state that we are most likely to experience sudden insight flashes — the “Aha!” phenomenon.
The benefits we get from experiencing these two very different cognitive states go a long way to explaining our invigorated and innovative mindset after a socially taxing conference.
Schedule time in the future to review your notes
Epiphanies and fascinating new information you’ve learned can disappear surprisingly quickly if you don’t act on them promptly by applying them to your work as soon as you get home. Schedule time in your calendar three to six months after the conference to re-review your notes and be reminded of ideas and inspiration you can put into practice.
As we’ve touched on here, conferences can be a wonderful learning experience, foster networking opportunities and provide you with substance to add value to your colleagues and network, especially if you put some of these novel tactics into play.
Mary Shirley
Penny Milner-Smyth
