Difficult Conversations

Difficult Conversations: A Skill-Building Retreat for Academic Leaders

Difficult conversations are part and parcel of being an academic leader. Many leaders, however, have little opportunity to build their skills in this domain outside of high stakes “real world” interactions where poor performance can have long-lasting negative ramifications.This daylong retreat breaks down the process of preparing for and engaging in difficult conversations into a series of steps so participants can reflect, practice, and adjust their approaches while learning from similarly-situated peers. In the first part of the day, participants practice ways to plan for, set up, and engage in challenging group conversations. In the second, participants translate those skills to one-on-one exchanges. Leaders have the opportunity to role-play different scenarios with trained performers standing in for faculty. These authentic but lower stakes exchanges give participants the chance to try out different conversational strategies, practice unfamiliar language, and build capacity to be comfortable with discomfort. In this way, participants expand their toolkit and grow their capacity to plan for and engage in difficult conversations in the future.

**The theatrical portion of this session contains role-playing opportunities for participants to practice engaging in difficult conversations in a lower-stakes environment. Those role-plays contain challenging professional dynamics related to identity, hierarchy, and power, and may reference external problems from people’s personal lives and broader current events.

This session is appropriate for aspiring and current academic leaders. This session is intended as a day-long 6-8 hour retreat, and is only offered in a fully in-person synchronous format. It is available by request, depending on the Players capacity.