If your leadership skills plateau during conference attendance, it's essential to reignite your growth by actively seeking out new challenges. Engage in deeper conversations with speakers and peers, attend workshops outside your comfort zone, and take on leadership roles in breakout sessions or panels. Focus on applying the insights you gain in real-time, whether through networking, mentoring others, or volunteering to lead a group discussion. Continuous learning and active participation are key to breaking through the plateau and elevating your leadership abilities.

When you get to know that your leadership skills are falling you need to revamp it by attending conference and not resorting to sessions you are conversant with but instead resort to ones that are outside your comfort horizons. It will help you to be more creative and boost your leadership skills.

This is a great question! I am a firm believer that stasis is an illusion; you're either growing and getting better or shrinking... The first step is being vigilant about your growth: are you hitting short term goals, are you engaged, are you strengthening your core strengths and bringing weaknesses at least up to par. Whenever I feel that I am getting stagnant I try a multipronged approach in my skills. I take a course or read a book about something I love, and this keeps me engaged and positive. I do the same for something that I am curious about, and the same for something that I might not love, but need to improve in. I try to cap these by producing something meaningful, like a revamped program, a new sop, or trying something new!

My colleagues always comment on how many people I know and my networking skills. This hasn't happened by accident. I work at networking. I always review the conference attendee list, looking for old and new colleagues I'd like to meet for coffee (or a cocktail!). And because I read extensively (as all good leaders do), I use the attendee list to locate an author I'd like to meet to learn more about their work. The easiest way to do this is to attend their breakout session and stay after the session to introduce yourself. If that's not an option, the conference app is a great way to arrange a time to meet the author. In this way, there is a natural, easy way to start a conversation.

Ein Plateau ist eine Chance, innezuhalten ... inzensiv zu reflektieren ... den Status quo zu analysieten und zu hinterfragen. Es ist die Chance, zu verschnaufen ... zu regenerieren ... Dann Neues zu planen ... und ... schließlich anzugehen.

What's important to remember are the 6 leadership passages. From managing self to managing others to managing others to managing managers all the way to the 6th passage-group manager to enterprise manager. Along this journey some skills are left behind, different skills are emphasized and new ones learned. I found it incredibly helpful to learn about these passages in order to better understand how I felt about my day-to-day work. I learned at some higher phases of leadership the work of the leader is to read and think--in particular thinking ahead (or visioning if you prefer). This never quite felt like work to me because it's what I do well and enjoy. You too may find it helpful to read about the leadership pipeline.

Ich hatte 5 mal in meinen 50 Arbeitsjahren eine Situation, meinetwegen auch ein Plateau, erlebt, bei dem entweder eine gravierende Marktsituation entstand, an der ich teilnehmen wollte oder sich ein Markt totgelaufen hatte, einfach gesättigt war. Im ersten Fall, es war 1985, ich war 33 Jahre und Prokurist eines 60 Personen Unternehmens, suchte ein Consulting-Unternehmen einen Vertriebler für damalige Speditionsprogramme auf IBM /36 Systemen für ganz Deutschland. Ich bekam den Job ! Im 2. Fall, Juni 1988, ergab sich die Gelegenheit eines Management-Buy-Out der Abteilung, in der ich angestellt war, da man sich auf andere Bereiche konzentrieren wollte. Auch das hat geklappt. So ging es 3x weiter. Man muss offen und mutig sein !

At the later stages of one's career it can be challenging to find topics of interest at a conference. Typically, I find the keynote sessions are always of interest due to the nature of the topic. It's the breakout sessions that are the "same old same old." When this happens I make it a point to seek out sessions that I have only cursory knowledge of, but yet I am interested in learning more. At the very least, I walk away with another example of how transferable leadership skills are. And if I've chosen the session well I learn something new too.