Preconference: Leadership Institute (PM): Managing Change and Holding Effective Difficult Conversations: Tools for Every Leader

Learn how to invoke change with the least amount of upset and the most movement toward stated goals. Discover systems thinking and consider how people in organizations typically respond to change, how you respond to change, and how this affects the overall library. Understand how to respond to feedback to better hear concerns from your employees and to better evaluate that feedback for inclusion in a change process. Think about typical expectations around the terms “transparency” and “feedback” and how that can lead to confusion throughout an organization. Apply this new knowledge to help change interpersonal dynamics within your organization.

Once you have moved from selling a change to talking about decisions, how do you have effective conversations with those who disagree?  One of the most often used skills in leadership, whether leading teams, collaborative projects, or a group of employees, is the ability to hold difficult conversations. When expectations are not met or agreed upon deadlines or processes are ignored, the need to communicate is essential to the success of the project, team, or library. Learning to have effective difficult conversations will allow you to excel in all areas of leadership.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of this workshop attendees will be able to: Explain systems theory according to Barry Oshry in order to understand typical organizational dynamics and to understand how they personally contribute to current dynamics. Define important concepts of feedback and transparency in order to reconsider how these terms are used in day-to-day work. Describe new ways to think about resistance in order to make progress toward stated goals and hold yourself and others accountable.Execute and evaluate a difficult conversation in order to hold yourself and others accountable and to lead an individual or group toward agreed upon goals.