Conducting challenging conversations around inclusion and collaboration that achieve a meaningful outcome without causing harm is an essential skill for leaders
The performance of modern workplaces is helped or hindered by a variety of factors. A culture that prioritises superficial cordiality over constructive challenge is counter to everything that is known about how optimal teams function over groups of elite individuals. A culture devoid of difficult conversations creates a toxic workplace in which the avoidance of interpersonal conflict allows bad ideas and habits to flourish and allows poor performance to persist without effective feedback to shape it.
Directing difficult conversations is an essential leadership skill and we have created our Mastering Difficult Conversations workshops to address two subjects that have direct impacts on creating sustainable high-performance: inclusion and collaboration.
Diversity and inclusion are more important than ever in today’s global economy, affecting brand value and performance as awareness increases amongst customers, employees and shareholders.
Our Mastering Difficult Conversations workshop is designed to empower employees to tackle difficult conversations around diversity and inclusion that they may experience on a daily basis. By exploring what bias, unfairness and discrimination look like in the workplace, participants are given the tools that shape organisational behaviour by speaking out against, and asserting the necessary changes to promote a positive working environment, increasing productivity and mitigating the risks of reputational and financial damage.
Describing working groups in organisations as ‘teams’ is commonplace, but ignores the psychological and behvioural differences that lead to disparate performace between groups of elite individuals and highly-functioning, optimal teams.
Communication plays a major role in how well people collaborate. It can make or break performance on both an individual, and group level. Optimal teams have fulsome disclosure between colleagues, and recognise that friction is often a byproduct of progress.