On this week’s episode I was able to connect with Laura Hayes and former guest Lora Steele to discuss the upcoming SEE Conference. You may remember Lora Steele from Episode 29 where we discussed all the great things that are happening for the logistics world in the Hendricks County area of Indiana. Now she is organizing the SEE Conference which is happening next week! Laura Hayes is the Director of MAVPAK Leadership at MAVPAK and will also be a speaker at the conference.

Laura Hayes of MAVPAK

Laura discusses how MAVPAK came to be and the different types of products and services they offer. They are primarily a packaging supply company but over time they had customers starting to ask them about their leadership and culture. Their mission is to serve and from that they developed a training arm of their business which Laura leads. The training is all about leadership and developing a culture that continues to grow leaders.

Key Takeaways

• Building trust with your team is key to having a solid team that can communicate and work well together. Part of this is understanding your teammates and learning how to communicate with them.
• Learning to understand your teammate is all about understanding how their personality works. Through the training with Laura, employees personality types are identified so others can understand why they behave in a certain way and also understand how to effectively interact with that person. Being able to understand how to communicate with your team is a key to building the trust but also a key to being successful as a team.
• Ask intentional questions to employees. Ask what was your best day of work in the last 3 months or what was your worst day in the last 3 months? This can tell you a lot of things about that employee.
• Laura’s classes are over the course of 6 months which makes them much more effective because there is more reinforcement and accountability. This is a big contrast to a lot of the one day or two day trainings that often do not stick. She also uses peer pressure to help influence those that might be resistant to the concepts to participate and eventually embrace the concepts.
• Overall, the growth of not only the leaders being trained but the employees that work under those leaders helps to build a culture that will truly make a difference in your operation.

Pallet Games

MAVPAK is also the brains behind the Pallet Games which Hendricks County Econimic Development and others have partnered with her to host the last few years in Central Indiana. It brings teams from local logistics companies together to compete against each other. They compete on games that are centered around all the activities we do within the warehouse. Think racing through obstacle courses with pallet jacks. This is a really great team building event they put together and has gotten very big with over 60 teams competing this year. I love the way the logistics community has been built up in this area and think it is a great example of how you can enrich your area as well.

SEE Conference

The SEE Conference is being hosted by the Hendricks County Economic Development Partnership and is going to be a supply chain focused event bringing the Hendricks Count community together as well as others from across the country (I will be there myself on Friday). It is two days on March 12th and 13th in Plainfield, Indiana. SEE stands for Supply chain education & exposure which is incredibly important in our rapidly growing industry.

For the education portion there will be multiple speakers from across the industry representing companies like Hyster Yale, Fedex and Bastian Solutions as well as academics from Butler University and Purdue. For the exposure portion of the conference they will be having multiple companies exhibiting their solutions and probably the most exciting thing is that they will have a robotics playground. The robotics playground will be a chance for attendees to be up close and personal with some robotic solutions.

Really looking forward to the first SEE Conference and cannot wait to see how it grows over the next few years. If you can make it to the conference I would highly recommend it.

For more information on The SEE Conference head to their website to register here.

Listen to the episode below and leave a comment on a creative way that you engage with your employees.

For more information on MAVPAK you can find their website here.

To connect with Laura Hayes you can find her on LinkedIn here.

To connect with Lora Steele you can find her on LinkedIn here.