Creating connection and belonging for others is critically important for event professionals. What does your research say about the human values that might drive people toward this kind of work?
I’ll have a real answer to this on stage in Vancouver at theEVENT (Sept. 14-16). Right now, we’re surveying the meeting and event profession across Canada, and the results will be shown for the first time at theEVENT. As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone has measured the values of this profession in Canada, and I’m as keen to see what we find as anyone else.
What I can tell you is the difference between the values of event professionals in the U.S. and the attendees that they are planning events for. This was from my keynote at the World Education Congress years ago, and the data still holds true.
Event professionals in the U.S. over index on the value of experiences. No wonder they’ve ended up doing the work they do! But if you look at how important that value is to event attendees, it’s significantly lower on the list. Experiences for the sake of experiences are just not as important to the people coming to events as they are to the people planning the events. My advice to planners in the U.S. is to be aware of this and make sure that any experiential elements that you’re building into your event strategy have a logic and purpose behind them that will make sense to the attendees.
There’s a very well-known, very large, very splashy event that happens every year in Canada. I won’t name names. At this event, you can sign up to be part of a “suspended conversation” where you and five or six other people sit around a table with benches attached, then you’re hoisted into the air, where you have your chat dangling above the crowd below. I think this is a classic case of an experience for its own sake. I’m not a meeting professional, but I can’t see how a meeting suspended from the ceiling improves meeting outcomes.
Many professionals are facing burnout, uncertainty and rapid change. How can understanding our personal values help us build resilience during difficult moments?
Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, spent more than a decade showing that perseverance predicts success better than talent does. She tracked cadets through summer training at West Point, contestants at the National Spelling Bee and new teachers in some of the hardest classrooms in the country. The people who succeeded were the ones who kept going. She called it grit.
What her research leaves open is why some people keep going and others take one swing and stop. What are they being gritty for? I think what she was measuring is what happens when the work lines up with what matters most to you—in other words, what you value. We’ve all seen this at work, where two people do the same work and one comes out energized while the other comes out a wreck. If the work is aligned with your values, the work itself feeds you. If it isn’t, you’re running down the clock.
Aligned and difficult are frequently roommates. The feeling to look for is “this is worth it,” which is a different feeling from “this is easy.” That’s the practical use of knowing your values in a hard year. What changes is that you know which parts of the job are worth being gritty about, so you can steer toward those and spend less of your energy on the parts that drain you.
When attendees leave your theEVENT keynote, what is the one insight or realization you hope stays with them long after the event is over?
That they made the right choice. People in this profession spend their careers creating the conditions for other people to feel like they belong, and they’re usually the last ones to hear that the work matters. I want to show them, with data, what this community has in common and why it’s extraordinary.
Everyone who completes the values assessment I send them before the keynote arrives with a 30-page report on their own values, and I’ll show them what to do with it. So the bigger thing I hope stays with them is that their values, or What Matters Most, drive everything they do, whether they can name it or not. Some of the research out there says as much as 90% of what you do in a day runs on autopilot, and your values are what’s steering. Once you can see them, decisions get easier to make, people get easier to read and you spend less time being the person you think you’re supposed to be.
