2018 – What’s Up At TMS Americas?!?

Tom GibbonsOrganization Development, TMS News3 Comments

January 4th, 2018 and I am looking out my office window on a bright blue sky and sparkling sun. The trees are devoid of leaves and it is a bitter cold – 15 Celsius here in London, Ontario, Canada.  Good to be inside even though it is quite beautiful out there.

The above I can be certain of, the rest of 2018 not so much! I think all of us are more or less in the same space. As we enter a new year we hope for a good year and wish others the same. We make some New Year’s Resolutions, do our best to plan how to create a good new year and off we go, both personally and organizationally. Then the year actually happens! And sometimes in that ‘happening’ our ‘plans’ don’t happen…

Unfortunately, most of us have had it drilled into us that if our plans don’t happen, somehow or other we have failed, that we are incompetent or are lacking in some important aspect of who we should be.

Well one of the things that’s up in TMS Americas in 2018 is to say ‘SCREW THAT!’

On Tuesday January 2nd I took some time and considered a number of what I think are important focus areas for TMS Americas in 2018. I sent these out to our team for additions, other ideas, questions and concerns all with the intent of having some good conversation about them, narrowing them down and then putting some good focus on what we ended up with. Sounds like something a lot of us do, right?

On Wednesday January 3rd I met with a Network Member wanting to discuss a cool new opportunity she had. Well cool is an understatement! And the opportunity might replace some of those careful considerations I diligently recorded the day before.

Unfortunately, most of us have had it drilled into us that when this happens we need to be ‘flexible’ or better yet, ‘agile’ and act on this new opportunity. What that really means most of the time is just add this new thing to the list and make sure you get all of it done! After a month or two of these happenings we feel like or are being crushed by the weight of our to do list!

Well ‘SCREW THAT’ again!

Another thing that is up at TMS Americas in 2018 is to give equal consideration and importance to what we plan and what actually happens. We have more or less been doing this for years anyway but this year we will plan more to do it…. 🙂

So what have we planned for that might be of interest:

  • Continuing to promote, build and support the role of Sustainability Resource Person.  See here for a short video. Sustainability of use of our assessments is a sword we would die on; or to be more positive, a message we will shout from the mountain tops!
  • ‘Sponsored’ TMS accreditation. We are looking for Network Members who want to be involved in planning and populating TMS accreditations in their geographic area. We will be reaching out to specific people but if you are interested, please contact us. Kind of scary for us but still awesomely cool!
  • An updated webinar based accreditation process. We do this now but we are going to make it more effective and spiffy. We are calling it Synchronous Web Accreditation. How spiffy is that!?!
  • End user support. Investigating ways to help end users make the most of their profiles.
  • Social media strategy. We do stuff in social media. We are planning on making that stuff more intentional.
  • Client contact strategy. We are pretty good at this now but want to be awesomer!
  • There are some other things on the list but not too many people other than TMS people are very interested in them.

So that’s some of the plans we have; then there will be the emergent, unplanned, good, bad and ugly things which will just happen. We look forward to most of those too (well not the bad ones too much)!

We hope you can join us for part of our 2018 journey and that we can join you on yours!

Let’s stay connected….

3 Comments on “2018 – What’s Up At TMS Americas?!?”

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