Rejuvenate and Strengthen

I have an enthusiastic story to share with you. I enjoy working with talented young people. I admire their enthusiasm and their laidback style of communication. I am hugely inspired and motivated by young professionals and I like to think that I can do the same for them. Combining fresh ideas and the power to break the waves with experience and familiarity in my opinion provides an excellent basis for achieving great plans. This combination energises teams, fostering job satisfaction and inventiveness while also providing a solid foundation for the company.

Since the radical restructuring of my own company, I feel that we have such a team! The engine got a good servicing and now has the power and the dynamics to grow faster. I wholeheartedly embraced this opportunity for change and set about creating a working environment for seven young people. We now are a multicultural team that can’t wait to offer quality, to innovate and to explore new horizons. I truly enjoy the pride that this team feels for each other, for our readers and for our clients.

I often hear people in the meetings industry say that we should give the younger generation a chance. But do we really? And if you do, then ask yourself “How should we deal with young people”? Management experts believe we should discuss “How to become attractive to each other (the older crowd to young people and vice versa)?”. As time goes by, older employees seem to become less appealing while the younger generation feel that they are not appreciated, often expressing their discontent about managers who behave like schoolteachers.

My second conclusion about the meetings industry is that we should discuss leadership styles more. I myself firmly opted for the horizontal management style, in which the group, and not the manager holds centre stage. This leadership style aims to create more individual space and freedom, more involvement in the end result. But above all, it focuses on the employee’s own and shared responsibility. This dynamic paves the way for an entirely different vision of each other, for a new kind of collaboration. Shaping a new company together, even though it was founded 30 years ago. It is possible and I feel very good about what is happening. I also want to thank Jesus, Vivian, Elise, Katie, Saïd, Vikas and Ghadisha for the amazing kick-off with the new team. And to make sure our endeavor is successful, I intend to invest in the following:

1.   Appoint more foreign representatives to be closer to our readers and clients (Dubai, Australia and New Zealand and Boston for North America).

2.   Reduce the number of printed copies (one printed magazine for every association, supplemented with five online magazines). We are working with one of the leading digital media producers for this.

3.   A sizeable investment in the database, which will further develop in a protected iCloud environment, where it will be enriched with plenty of data.

Dear HQ reader, dear HQ clients, can you tell spring is coming? 

Marcel A.M. Vissers

Editor-in-Chief

HeadQuarters & MIM Europe magazine