Day 2 – SHRM 09 – Mutton Chops, Morford & Manners

After an authentic N’awlins dinner with Lance Haun and a little bit of shut-eye, I washed away my Day 1 doldrums and started anew.

Day 2 began for me with a coffee meeting followed by the general session. While in line at Starbucks, I overheard a group of HR professionals from Wal-Mart lamenting the ROI of having a vendor booth at the show (note that this was a very consistent theme today). They also had a good chuckle when new vendors state that they can handle Wal-Mart’s population/needs/configuration with “no problem”. Oh Wal-Mart, you coy and fickle lover.

SHRM made several announcements today, including the winners of the Best Small and Medium Companies to Work for in America. Congratulations to all the winners! In my opinion, the quote of the day was by one of the winning firms during their short acceptance speech:

“The measure of a company is how they treat their lowest paid employee.” - Scott Scherr, CEO, Ultimate Software

The keynote was by the unstoppable Earl G. Graves. Although he generally read from his prepared remarks, I really became a fan when he broke script and just spoke to the crowd. He shared his life story, joked about how his grandkids keep changing the ringer on his cell phone before presentations and made it abundantly clear that he absolutely adores his wife. He has a tremendous amount of energy, passion and influence and has lived a life to emulate. He challenged the audience to make a difference and heralded those early HR leaders who took it upon themselves to bring diversity to the workplace. He also got a laugh when describing how 85% of his employees are minorities and that “it’s not easy to find qualified white people”. And as you can see from his photo, the man sports a mean pair of mutton chops. I thought he was terrific.

I then sauntered into a session that I obviously misunderstood. The title was “Management Courage: Having the Heart of a Lion” by Margaret Morford. Don’t get me wrong – Margaret was charming, a terrific presenter and really engaged the audience. My problem (and it was my problem) is that the session really honed in on difficult conversations managers have with their employees. For example, how do you tell someone they physically stink, have a drinking problem, or like? Margaret offered great advice, but I was hoping for a bigger message on courage. And speaking of big, her PowerPoint font was huge! She was great but I was left a bit unsatisfied.

The next session was on “Etiquette in the Workplace” by Peter Post, Emily Post’s great-grandson. I’ll be writing a full post on Post soon as there is too much to cover here. One takeaway? I think I converted him to the power of Twitter when we spoke afterwards.

All things being equal it was a pretty good day. My only disappointment came when I walked the expo and saw the frantic rush for crappy giveaways. This picture of HR pros screaming for one of those ugly stuffed Monster dolls just about made me drive to the airport. Like the Wal-Mart attendees, I really had to question the value of so-called “leads” captured from this event when most attendees simply want swag.

The evening storms then blew in and I met some terrific HR bloggers for dinner and drinks. In doing so, I strolled past a Yahoo! HotJobs party on Bourbon street. Watching HR people throw beads at flashing strangers has no small amount of hilarity and irony.

Day 3 is well underway so I need to run. Please share any thoughts/comments you may have and – like always – let’s keep the conversation going.