OG Tuesday Issue #319

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• When you can’t delegate, collaborate
• Your post-conference playbook
• Why an outside expert can get your team on board faster

🗳️ It’s Election Day in the U.S. If you’re voting today, make your plan before the meetings start piling up!

🤔 Riddle me this: Read me forward and I’m how you feel the week before the holidays. Read me backward and I’m what makes it all worth it. What am I? (Find the answer on the bottom).

QUICK LINKS

CONFERENCE PLAYBOOK

Bring Home More Than a Tote Bag From Your Next Conference

Fall conference season is in its final stretch, and the next wave starts after the new year. Whether you’ve got one more event on the calendar or a pile of notes from the last one, here’s how to make the trip pay off.

Before you go

Pick two or three questions you want answered and let them decide which sessions make the cut. Block one no-agenda hour each day, and pack protein snacks and a water bottle, because conference food runs heavy on pastries.

The hardest part is saying hi (so make it easy)

Introduce yourself to whoever’s sitting next to you before a session starts, since they’re probably feeling just as awkward. Skip “What do you do?” and try “What brought you here this year?” Then ask one follow-up before you change the subject. Harvard research found follow-up questions make people like you more, and after a chat, strangers tend to like us more than we think (the “liking gap”).

Ready to move on? Try “It was great meeting you. Can I grab your LinkedIn before the next session?” In the app, tap the search bar, then the QR icon to show or scan a code (step-by-step here), and add a note with one detail from your chat.

After: the part most people skip

Block an hour the next morning, before your inbox takes over and the names start to blur.

Let AI sort the business cards. Snap one photo of them laid out and upload it to ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt: “Pull each person’s name, title, company, email and phone number into a table, add a ‘Where we met’ column that says [event name], and flag anything you can’t read instead of guessing.” Then ask for a CSV and import it into Google Contacts.

Sort everyone into three groups: follow up this week, check in next quarter, and nice to meet. For the first group, ask for “a three-sentence follow-up to [name] that mentions [the detail you remember] and suggests a next step.”

Send your boss a five-line recap before Friday:

• Three ideas worth stealing
• One thing to test this quarter (with a date)
• People worth knowing, and why
• Resources to share with the team
• What I’d do differently next time

Save a copy in your wins doc. Review season is here, and a recap that shows what you brought back holds up when you ask for a raise or for the budget to go again next year.

💡 TA Team Tip: Joanna wore a Plaud NotePin S at a recent event so she could stay in the conversation while it took notes. (Just get people’s okay before you record a conversation.)

A few things that make it worth packing:

• One charge covers the whole day. It records for up to 20 hours, so you’re not hunting for an outlet between sessions.
• Wear it your way. It comes with a clip, magnetic pin, lanyard and wristband.
• Short-press to flag the good stuff. Long-press starts recording, and a quick press marks that moment as a highlight, so the best ideas are waiting in your transcript and summary.
• Build your recap from the highlights. Those flagged moments become the three ideas worth stealing in your note to your boss.

TRAINING THAT STICKS

Stop Giving Everyone the Same Harassment Training

Your warehouse team, your nurses and your office staff all sat through the same harassment video last year. Most of them couldn’t name a single scenario from it, because none of the scenarios looked like their jobs.

Traliant’s Preventing Workplace Harassment training is attorney-authored and shot like a TV series, with situations employees recognize from their own workplaces. Industry editions (office, healthcare, retail and more) plus global and country-specific versions keep it relevant across your whole organization.

• One assignment delivers the right course for each employee’s role and location, so HR stops sorting by state
• Built to meet state and local training laws in all 50 states
• Short Micro Reel videos keep the lessons fresh all year, long after the annual course wraps

👉 See the training in action.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Told to “Delegate More” With No One to Delegate To

“My biggest challenge is dealing with comments like ‘delegate more’ when I don’t have a team and when I do assert work on teams and ask for accountability from others, I get pushback….and ultimately the work comes back to me.” — Angie

Hearing “delegate more” when nobody reports to you is maddening, and watching handed-off work boomerang back to your desk is worse. Part of this sits outside your control, but the part that lives in how work gets handed over is something you can change this week.

Consider who is telling you to delegate

If your manager is the one saying it, that’s a fair thing to push on, because nobody has told you who gets the work. Ask: “I don’t have direct reports, so who should I hand this to, and what comes off their list to make room?” That puts the decision with the person who has the authority to make it.

If the advice comes from coworkers on other teams, they’re likely being helpful without seeing your setup. Thank them and move on.

Notice your own word choice

You described asserting work on teams, and that phrase isn’t collaborative language. When you’re overwhelmed, a request easily turns into a list of orders: you take this, you take that, you take the rest. People handed work they had no say in tend to push back or let it slide, and it lands on your desk anyway.

Collaboration is a skill, and anyone who has been underwater has had to build it. You can too.

Bring the problem, then invite people in

Open with the problem and invite people to help solve it. Try: “I’m stretched thin on the Friday launch and want to get it right. Here’s the full list. Which pieces fit best on your side, and what would you need from me?”

People who help decide what they own feel ownership of it. Accountability across teams develops through influence, and influence starts when people help shape the plan. Bring the goal, ask for input early, and let them choose their pieces.

Get a clear yes and check in halfway

People can be held to a commitment once they’ve accepted responsibility for it, so end the conversation with a yes: “Can you own the vendor list by Thursday?” Send a two-line recap covering who, what, and when, then book a short check-in at the halfway point.

If a piece slips, let the work do the holding and escalate only when necessary. Bring in whoever owns the priority and ask for a decision: “This feeds Friday’s launch and I’m seeing a risk. Who should we loop in to reprioritize?”

Stop being the automatic catch basin

When work boomerangs back, absorbing it without comment teaches everyone that pushing back works. Name the tradeoff out loud: “If I take this on, the budget review moves to next week. Which matters more?”

A lot of what lands on women’s desks is non-promotable work, and absorbing all of it leads to chronic stress and burnout without moving your career forward. Before you say yes, ask whether the task moves your own goals forward.

Start this week with the one task that keeps boomeranging. Bring the problem, invite someone to solve it with you, and get a clear yes. Influence built this way follows you into every role, with or without a team.

TEAM TRAVEL

Why the Expense Report Takes Longer Than the Trip Itself

The airport car, the client lunch and the offsite rides went smoothly. Then came the camera roll full of receipts and an expense report due Friday.

Uber for Business puts work rides, meals and deliveries on one company account, and the receipts flow straight into Concur, Ramp and the other expense tools your finance team already uses. You set the policies once and see every trip in one dashboard. It’s free to sign up, with no long-term commitment.

👉 Set up your free company account.

STAFF PICKS

Stuff We’re Loving This Week

💄 Makeup still fresh hours later? This setting spray is Joanna’s travel go-to.

JUST FOR FUN

COMMUNITY

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