For many of us, it’s hard to speak up when we notice our teammates struggling. We don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or make things awkward. Sometimes it just feels like too much work to organize our thoughts into a coherent message that could help someone who’s falling behind move forward. Even knowing when it’s time to draw attention to a problem can be challenging.

We’ll start the session by covering our bases. When should we address uncomfortable situations at work? How can we keep personal feelings from derailing the conversation? And what happens afterward? Can we evaluate the effectiveness of our feedback? How can we move forward, growing as a team? We’ll answer these questions as we begin to build the skills necessary to provide teammates with specific, actionable feedback. Participants will receive a reference sheet to help them remember these techniques and work through difficult conversations in the real world.

Several sections of the workshop will involve hands-on role-playing exercises. Participants will be broken up into small groups and given several scenarios to work through. Each scenario will outline a challenging situation from multiple points of view to help participants further explore the techniques and principles covered in the lecture portion of the session.

This is an extended version of a talk I’ve given twice at the time of writing. I’ve received feedback from several participants that they’d like to spend a lot more time practicing and would like to see this as a workshop as long as a full day. This workshop is a deep dive into the topic, featuring more detailed and authentic scenarios, a walkthrough of a reference sheet participants can take home with them, examples for every technique discussed, and including a much larger discussion of how our biases affect our daily interactions. It’s approximately half lecture and half hands-on group work.