After attending the 2014 Salesforce Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco and listening to Arianna Huffington's (@ariannahuff) keynote address, I felt called to action. Moved by the #Thrive message, I decided one of my action items was to get as many people from Talent Plus as possible to read Huffington's newest book, #Thrive. I created a book club with a Salesforce chatter group and recruited people for this journey.
At #TalentPlus (a #Salesforce super user), we help companies around the globe hire better people by focusing on what they do well -- their talents. We believe every person has talent, and the science behind our assessments and development solutions aid in the discovery of these talents to drive results and create more engaged workplaces. Even though we have an amazing company with an award winning culture, we realize we can do a better job of taking care of ourselves. When you take care of your associates you can do a better job of taking care of clients.
Of our 150 associates, nearly 30 of us have gathered to discuss how we can create a life of "Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder." I was confident that if we read this book and implement some of the strategies and principles in our culture, we will be better people, associates for Talent Plus and give the best version of ourselves to our client partners.
The impact the #Thrive message has had on these associates has been profound, to say the least. Tears have been shed. Hard questions have been asked. And all of it in the effort to reevaluate and stimulate a new way of thinking for how we lead our lives and the lives of our children who are our future.
We kicked off the book club by sharing Arianna Huffington's Dreamforce Keynote. Watching this presentation together set us up for a great discussion around what we would like to accomplish in our time together and helped set the stage to review the introduction of the book. We examined questions like:
To redefine success and what it means to lead "the good life," what does "the good life" mean to you?
When you have not performed as well as you can, think about your stress levels, your mental stability and sleep levels... Any correlation?
I challenged each person to take 5 minutes of quiet meditation time the very next day as Huffington suggests in #Thrive -- no phone, no music no TV; just some calm quiet to start their day. It was a small call to action, but an important one in changing behavior one simple step at a time. We also assigned out the 4 sections of the book (Well-Being, Wisdom, Wonder and Giving) to different people to take the lead and facilitate our #Thrive journey! Stay tuned for these facilitators' blog posts on how we applied Well-Being, Wisdom, Wonder and Giving in our culture at #TalentPlus.
To hear what Arianna Huffington, President and Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post Media Group (@huffpost) thinks about the way Talent Plus is Thriving, click here: http://qlnk.io/ql/55688341e4b040d4962c9fe9
Kara Bunde-Dunn
Director of Client Engagement
kbunde@talentplus.com