Event

CPMP (the Chinese Project Management Professionals Association of Canada) together with CCFA (the Canadian Chinese Finance Association), and CCPAA (the Canadian Chinese Professional Accountants Association) successfully hosted the Annual Leadership Conference at North York Civic Center on Oct 15th, 2016. The conference is designed to establish a leadership platform for our members and inspire leadership actions within the professional community.

The event started with Tracy Duan, the President of CPMP, who welcomed everybody to the Conference. She introduced the CPMP history, achievements and future. Tracy also encouraged young professionals to gain leadership skills through volunteering in organization like CPMP. Then Dianna Zhang, President of CCFA and Mavis Mu, President of CCPAA, each had a speech on behalf of CCFA and CCPAA to welcome the attendees and mission of their association. Mr. Wu Shang Lue , the Consul of the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, also attended the event and delivered speech on how to strength the bilateral cooperation between Canada and China in future, also congratulated the achievements of CPMP.

CPMP invited several speakers from the financial industry. Ian Laliberte, Vice President of Shared Services Canadian Banking and Wealth Technology Solutions at TD, spoke about how to be the CEO of your own delivery. The next speaker was Pubudu Premawardena, Vice President of Internal Rating Management at Scotiabank. He elaborated on how leadership had totally transformed him and helped accelerate his career from an entry-level analyst to where he currently is. Then Geoff Langdon, AVP of Canadian Banking and Wealth Technology Delivery Shared Services at TD, emphasized the importance of agility to project management. Lastly, Sami Tarazi, Senior Director of Enterprise Information Management at RBC, presented on the concept of “ADI”, Agile, Disruptive, Innovation, and how to apply this concept in the real world working environment. The exciting moment was the executive panel discussion facilitated by Daju Gu, President of Risk at the TMX Group (Parent company of Toronto Stock Exchange, etc). Participants listened in actively, asked questions about leadership styles and how they might contribute into our daily work.

The whole event was accompanied by many activities for fun and engagement. Later in the Conference, Charlie Regan, the President of Leadership Charisma Group, uncovered the secrets of effective leadership. He then projected a bar graph to the screen, which was made by real-time results from the votes at the conference. He asked all registered to choose the most critical skills they thought leaders should have, from a list of 18 skills. The top 3 skills that the participants voted for were “Motivates successfully”, “Communicates effectively”, and “Listens to others”.

Gail Levitt, the CEO of Levitt Communications Inc., spoke on how leadership skills could help and contribute on the path of becoming a successful project manager. At the end of the Conference, Gail demonstrated the importance of leadership and teamwork by challenging everyone with a little fun game “the Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge”. The difficulty of this challenge is to lead a group where every team member has a different idea of how to build the tower and eventually guide the group to complete the task.

“We hope that we sent the message today that even though you are starting from an individual contributor, you can be the leader of something big, something special”, said Tracy Duan, after the Conference. We were glad to have distinguished guests as speakers, as well as young professionals across various industries. CPMP is dedicated to helping Project Management professionals succeed in their career and will host more events soon, the soonest one being the Payment Industry Knowledge Sharing seminar in the end of November. More information to come!