Session Descriptions

10:15am – 11:15am  Session 1

Finding the Right Ingredients for a Great Team
Christina Moffatt
Ten years ago, Christina abandoned a thriving corporate career to dedicate herself to baking. In spite of her self-described driven and perfectionist personality, Christina focused on expanding her team and relied on their innovation to survive and thrive. With the help of her mother and several friends, Christina transitioned from an exhausted one-man show in a home operation to a commercial kitchen, her first employees to a team of twenty.

Keynote Breakout

 

Developing Your Leadership Skills
Chad Olson
What’s the difference between a leader and a manager? Which do you strive to be? In this interactive session, participants will discuss the differences between a manager and a leader. After identifying 10 skills of leaders, the participants will assess their own leadership skill set. You’ll also leave with some tips on how to improve your leadership skills.

Leadership

 

Intermediate Excel Basics
Lucas Oerter
Scrolling endlessly to find data? Want a competitive edge? Intermediate Excel knowledge is the step beyond simply inputting data into a spreadsheet. That means knowing how to format properly, use VLookup formulas, and create pivot tables. Participants will gain knowledge to produce reliable and easily accessible results from your data.

Professional Resources

 

How to Lazy Genius Your Busy Season
Autumn Cartagena
Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Like you are putting in *so much effort* but aren’t sure if it’s paying off? Ever scurried from one activity to the next and thought “how did I get here?” or “why am I doing this again?” Wish you felt more like yourself at work and in your life? What if there was a paradigm you could learn to help you answer questions about what matters most to you, where you can put your best effort (and where not to), how you could actually find rest and peace amongst the really important and really taxing aspects of life and work? Join in as we explore how to apply the Lazy Genius principles to our busy work seasons. Guided by author and podcaster Kendra Adachi’s idea that we get to be “genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t,” participants will be introduced to and apply the thirteen Lazy Genius principles to their current season of life and work.

Human Interactions

 

Making Them Sound Good: Writing Successful Letters of Recommendation, Nomination, and Reference
Tera Lawson & Jamie Sass
Join us for an interactive session to explore how to better craft successful letters of recommendation, nomination, and reference! Our discussion topics will include recommendations for highlighting and selling a nominee’s strengths, navigating unconscious bias when writing, and takeaways that you can immediately apply when writing your recommendation, nomination, and reference letters.

Professional Resources

 

Learn Innovative Tools for Regaining Lost Resilience to Impact Wellbeing
Nora Hudson
It’s no wonder that current challenges of exploding technology, social media and pandemic health issues have impacted resilience skills. Learning new innovative tools to assess and develop behaviors to regain resilience is critical for prevention of negative effects on individual’s wellbeing.

Health & Wellness

 

12:45pm – 1:45pm  Session 2

Strategies for Increasing Reach and Impact on Social Media
Patrick Wall
Learn how to beat the algorithm on Facebook, get seen by more people, attract new audiences, and make posts go viral. Use these skills to better promote educational opportunities, sell products, market your business, yourself, etc.

Professional Resources

 

5 Strategies for Transformational Facilitation
Gayle Coon & Robin Ertz
Through active engagement, this workshop highlights 5 strategies a facilitator can work toward in order to strengthen facilitation skills. These skills include preparation, creating a safe environment, being participant-centered, using active engagement strategies, and motivating for action. This presentation is for anyone who wants to lead a group in an effective manner, keep members involved, create real leadership opportunities, and build leadership skills in others. Facilitation skills are helpful in meetings, education, community committees, and presentations.

Leadership

 

Simple Tools, Big Ideas: Elevating Ideas by Using Creativity
Kira Kistner
Join us as we peer into the scientific connection between creativity and innovation. We’ll explore practical scenarios where creativity becomes a game-changer in the workplace and provide you with a toolkit of simple activities to engage your creative thinking.

Human Interactions

 

Improving Your Physical Wellbeing with Spend Smart. Eat Smart.
Jody Gatewood
Join Registered Dietitian Jody Gatewood as she shares resources and tools from Spend Smart. Eat Smart. that can help you improve your physical wellbeing through better nutrition and daily movement. Learn about simple ways to prepare recipes, physical activity videos, sample meal planning calendars, and more. Leave feeling empowered to make your physical wellbeing a priority.

Health & Wellness

 

Changing the Perceived Culture of Your Office
Kate Cossa
Are you wanting to know how to change the vibe of your office to make it more friendly to students and guests? Join Engineering Career Services staff as we share the steps taken to change the feel of our office from Doctor’s office to a campus destination.

Human Interactions

 

Engaging AI: How P.E.E.R.S. Transforms ChatGPT into Your Personal Intern
Andrew Severin
As the advent of ChatGPT reshapes the digital landscape, the academic world needs to harness the capabilities of this innovative tool and understand its limitations. Instead of scrolling through hundreds of pre-made prompts that aren’t perfect for your needs, learn to craft your own prompts by using the P.E.E.R.S approach. The P.E.E.R.S. mnemonic is both a reminder for how we should interact with chatbots like ChatGPT and is an easy to remember method for crafting a prompt: Please, Explain, Example, Requirements, and Scrutinize. This approach creates rich, engaging prompts that bring out the full potential of ChatGPT. We will explore 10 prompts with examples on how to incorporate into your daily routine. This presentation is for P&S staff members looking to save time in their teaching and research by incorporating ChatGPT into their daily routine.

Professional Resources

 

2:00pm – 3:00pm  Session 3

Exceptional Customer Service and Managing Up
Jenni Winter
Customer service is the art of providing timely, attentive, upbeat service to a customer, and making sure their needs are met in a manner that reflects positively on the company or business. Managing up is a customer service tool that involves positioning yourself, your teammates and even decisions in a positive light to decrease anxiety and increase customer confidence in the service our team provides.

Human Interactions

 

Understanding the University’s Budget Model and the Model’s Impact on Staff and Student Retention
Rachel Boenigk
Throughout higher education, we see a multitude of strategies used for resource management. One such strategy that is applied across universities is the Responsibility Centered Management model (RCM). Universities utilize the RCM to fund and allocate expenses to subdivisions based on their revenue. This presentation will provide a basic explanation of the university’s budget model, compare it to other budget models and show how the RCM model improves faculty & staff retention, thereby improving student retention.

Professional Resources

 

Effective Strategies to Improve Your Productivity
Bonnie Dalager
In Iowa 4-H, we stress the value of setting goals, keeping records, and engaging in self-evaluation to plan for the future–competencies that are equally important for us to model as staff in our work. In this workshop, we’ll discuss a variety of strategies to improve your productivity in planning, goal setting, task management, and email management using Microsoft Outlook desktop features. Participants will be encouraged to examine their personal productivity preferences and patterns to select strategies that will fit their personal time management needs. A wide variety of practical tips, tools, and resources will be presented.

Professional Resources

 

No cyCLONE Stands Alone
Michelle Roling
Now, more than ever, Cyclones: faculty, staff & students, are impacted by widespread stressors. These stressors dysregulate our focus, energy and work life balance.  Time will be spent discussing the underlying situations which increase the impact stress & trauma has. Together, we will explore ways to increase compassion toward ourselves. Discuss ways to provide caring to those that are hurting and create a culture of connection and compassion on campus.

Health & Wellness

 

Empowering Leaders through our Super Team
Mae McCarty
In this session, learn how we organize the supervisory structure in SNAP-Ed/EFNEP nutrition education in Extension and Outreach and how we collaborate with each other to support staff and develop professionally. We will share some of the tools we use and invite session attendees to engage in small group discussions to connect with each other.

Leadership

 

Ouch! That Stereotype Hurts
Malisa Rader
Do you struggle with keeping silent in the face of demeaning and hurtful stereotypes? Join us for an interactive session to learn useful, easy-to-learn phrases and skills for speaking up effectively against bias and stereotypes.

Human Interactions