Mark Weber - Session Info

Managing Difficult Conversations

These days, educators face daily social interactions (and possible interactions) that have the potential to create significant anxiety and spiral out of control, thus undermining desired outcomes (e.g., addressing performance problems, dealing with the failure of others to deliver on their promises, explaining why you can't follow through on a promise of your own).

Meanwhile, human beings — and educators among them -- are generally highly conflict avoidant. The deep-seated desire to avoid anxiety-producing situations often leads to deep managerial and leadership dysfunctions: avoiding conversations that should not be avoided and botching conversations that you cannot afford to botch. This interactive session is designed to offer practical tools, approaches and frameworks for effectively handling those difficult conversations and reducing the anxiety associated with them in the process. It will draw on research related to the psychology of negotiations, perspective-taking, and the self.

Participants will learn to:

Understand the underlying structure of most difficult conversations.
Identify and recognize the dynamics that frequently make difficult conversations disastrous.
Employ a set of strategies to reduce the stress of difficult conversations, and improve their outcomes.