Do you attend professional conferences and events? You don’t always have to travel for them…Depending on how large of a city you live in, it’s possible there are local organizations — or even regional ones — putting on events and programs encouraging networking and information sharing.

I recently participated in SHRM Atlanta, which I attended as a specially invited blogger and tweeter! (You can still view tweets from the conference via the hashtag, #SHRMATL11.)

A few lessons from:

Management Makeover-30 Days to a New Leader | Speaker: Marjorie Treu, PHR, Team Fusion

The session summary: Managers are often not provided with practical tools to consistently build high functioning teams. These struggling managers unconsciously create teams with low employee morale, high turnover, and increased employee relation issues. Team Fusion shares the 30-Day Management Makeover Plan to steer floundering managers back on course!

Marjorie Treu reminded participants of an important lesson for job seekers and all careerists: People perform better when the job requirements are a strong match for their natural skills. She explained, “Employee satisfaction + customer satisfaction = organization satisfaction. Keep this in mind if you are looking for a job; it’s a reminder that employers are looking for people who have exactly the skills they need to do the job; they’re less interested (in general) in your unrelated accomplishments. Their goal is to identify a solid connection between what you’ve done and what they want you to do.

Treu’s talk covered a variety of areas having to do with leadership and management. She believes the biggest manager mistakes are: 1. Being too egotistical. 2. Micromanaging and 3. Being the “missing” or absent manager.

She believes emotional intelligence is a key skill for a manager and reminded us, “55% of your communication is non verbal, most of it is in your face.”

She touched on good listening skills, stages of team building (form, storm, norm, perform) and culture issues.