How to Prepare Your Team for Challenging Conversations
Change can feel uncomfortable. As organizations work to create more equitable and inclusive environments, conflict avoidance is one of the most common barriers to progress. These recommendations can help you prepare your team to lean into conversations that might feel challenging by grounding them in the greater importance of anti-racism work.
Explain how a deeper commitment to equity is mission-critical. In order to foster mindset and behavior changes among individuals on your team, it should be clear to everyone why diversity, equity and inclusion are integral to your specific work. This message is most impactful when it comes from and/or is reinforced by top leadership.
Share what you hope your team will gain from the specific session. Because the work of developing cultural competency can be challenging at a personal level, there may be people on your team who are uncomfortable with this type of vulnerability in a professional setting. Make sure that the importance of this content for their professional development is just as clear as the personal value.
Set explicit expectations for participants. In addition to setting a high bar for how your team should participate, explicit expectations help staff prepare emotionally for the experience. You can set the tone and help shift your staff mindset towards recognizing discomfort as part of the learning process
Prepare a response if tensions are surfaced during the session, or if participants react defensively from a place of privilege. Advancing equity within your organization is emotional work, because it can surface existing tensions in your workplace or spark feelings of defensiveness from participants who are uncomfortable acknowledging their privilege. Knowing the context of your team and organization, you can predict what dynamics might come up and plan in advance for how to engage with them productively.
Our youth-led professional development is grounded in research and led by highly trained youth facilitators. We are happy to work with you to identify the sessions that best align with your learning goals and an implementation plan that supports an impactful training experience for your team. Contact us for more information.