Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Interpersonal communication is built on the bedrock of confidence, presence, social and emotional intelligence, and being open with others and yourself. This course will cover all of these dimensions, including how they play into your management style and your workplace actions like holding difficult conversations.

Professor Pam Stepp, Ph.D., of Cornell University’s ILR School will guide you as you discover how interpersonal communication will impact your team. In the course project you will assess yourself and others on the aforementioned key dimensions. You will reflect on your past performance, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, and determine an actionable plan for future performance.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Identify how confident you are in yourself and your peers and how to create a plan to improve a lack of confidence
• Compare and contrast different levels of presence and determine the appropriate level of presence for yourself as well as how to improve your presence if needed
• Evaluate how open minded you are and create a plan to become more so if needed
• Assemble the dimensions of good interpersonal communication and apply these skills to difficult conversations

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

In this course, developed by Professor Diane Burton, Ph.D. of Cornell University's ILR School, you will learn the skills necessary to reassert your HR role as a trusted, neutral advisor to employees at all levels within your organization. Students will develop coaching skills and learn how to foster a coaching culture while managing organizational HR needs with the most effective response for each situation.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Tips for familiarizing yourself with the employee development landscape at your organization
• Ways to determine how to allocate your coaching resources
• How to diagnose the root causes of a situation and determine who in the organization will be the primary focus of an intervention
• Ways to develop interventions to facilitate employee development through coaching

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

For people all over the world, in-person interaction has been the medium through which personal and professional communication has traditionally taken place. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered this norm and made it clear that effective virtual communication is a skill that not only business professionals need to master, but also schoolteachers, medical professionals, students — essentially, anyone hoping to make connections within the virtual space.

In this course, you will learn to communicate effectively in a virtual environment and address the complexities inherent in online communication that are largely absent from face-to-face communication. You will learn how to create and adapt to virtual interactions, which includes activities such as setting up your physical space, adjusting your camera, and focusing on intonation and gestures. Finally, you will plan and prepare a high-stakes virtual presentation or communication by putting what you've learned into practice.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Recognize challenges and differences between communicating virtually versus in person
• Adapt to routine virtual communication, including setting up your physical space, practicing intonation and gestures, and delivering engaging content
• Prepare for high-stakes virtual communication with visual aids, audience participation, and screen sharing

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

The workplace is filled with employees, clients, and leaders from different backgrounds and cultures. Your Social Style® plays a role in how you communicate and behave in the workplace. This course will prepare you to communicate effectively, efficiently, and empathetically with different cultures no matter your Social Style®.

In this course, you will practice becoming more aware of how your Social Style® is interpreted by others and how that impacts your interactions with others at work. You will also develop strategies for overcoming social blind spots in order to mitigate the risk of ineffective communication in cross-cultural settings. Finally, you will discover the ways you can adapt your Social Style® without compromising your core values for effective communication. By the end of this course, you will have gathered the tools needed to communicate appropriately and effectively in a cross-cultural environment.

Social Style, Social Style Navigator and TRACOM are registered trademarks of the TRACOM Corporation. Social Style Model is a trademark of the TRACOM Corporation. Related content is used with permission from The TRACOM Corporation.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Evaluate how your Social Style® is interpreted by others
• Become aware of your social blind spots in the cross-cultural work environment
• Adapt for effective communication

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Leadership is not just for leaders. Whether you have formal leadership authority or not, everyone faces leadership challenges. At heart, companies are people, and many challenges in the workplace come down to how to inspire, support, and reward people.

In this course, you will explore several different strategies to help motivate and lead people. Initially, you will distinguish between factors that increase job satisfaction and factors that decrease job dissatisfaction, as research shows these are not always connected. You will also design strategies to influence motivation, effort, and job performance. You will identify the types of capital in a group or team and explain how this capital can help build and support high-performing teams. Finally, you will design conflict resolution strategies and employ negotiation tactics when conflict inevitably occurs in the workplace.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Distinguish between the factors that increase job satisfaction and decrease job dissatisfaction
• Design strategies to influence motivation, effort, and job performance
• Identify the types of capital in an organization and explain their relevance within high-performing teams
• Create strategies for forming and supporting high-performing teams
• Resolve conflict within a high-performing team

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Inclusion is a relational construct. It’s ultimately about how your team functions and performs based on the quality of social connections, openness to learning, agility, and depth of decision making. How can you foster greater inclusion within your workgroup? Throughout these modules, you will be asked to reflect upon your own experiences and apply the lessons in the modules in your own role.

You will examine the concept of climate, specifically inclusive climates, as well as learn about the specific behaviors and skills you need to demonstrate in order to be successful in shaping an inclusive climate.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Define an inclusive climate
• Examine the critical role of leadership in setting an inclusive climate
• Explore the dynamics of inclusive climates
• Assess the inclusiveness of your unit's climate
• Articulate and model standards for inclusion
• Examine strategies for enforcing ethical standards

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

The management of diversity and inclusion has evolved from a focus on compliance to a strategic-level effort with a demonstrated positive impact on an organization's performance. In the current business climate, companies that strive for both diversity and inclusion are achieving intended business results. They provide the proof that diversity and inclusion are much more than a legal or moral requirement; they're also a competitive advantage.

This course provides an overview of the evolution of the management of diversity and inclusion and presents targeted and high-involvement diversity practices. It examines diversity in the contexts of teams and leaders, and it frames diversity in terms of current business and cultural challenges.

During this course, you will complete a project in which you identify sources of inclusion, align inclusion to improve employee engagement and business results, and determine methods to assess the effectiveness of inclusion initiatives. At the end of the course, you will use the results from the project to prepare a final presentation describing how to apply your work to your organization.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Distinguish between diversity and inclusion
• Assess stereotypes and prejudices that may influence behavior in work groups
• Describe methods to reduce prejudice and improve psychological safety in work groups
• Assess the three sources of inclusion in a workplace (organizational, work group, and immediate supervisor)

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

There is no such thing as a workplace that lacks diversity. Despite decades of legal and social reform aimed at reducing discrimination in the workplace, inequality continues to be a significant problem in all societies and most workplaces.

In this course, you will identify the perceptual and psychological processes that impact the way that individuals interact with people who are demographically dissimilar from them. You will examine the psychological processes that impact decision making within organizations and identify how professionals can design better work practices and help to more effectively leverage the potential among employees.

As a trained psychologist with research and consulting expertise related to diversity and inclusion, Cornell University Professor Lisa Nishii is uniquely positioned to help course participants understand the complex dynamics underlying diversity challenges and opportunities within organizations.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Identify the dimensions of diversity that matter most in organizations and why
• Recognize unconscious bias and how it affects the way that people perceive, evaluate, and react to others
• Identify interventions that will help override errors in judgment and decision making

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Research shows that engagement is the key factor that promotes higher performance and effort, greater returns, and lower turnover. Yet across companies, industries, and countries, studies show that only 11-19% of employees are highly engaged. In this course, you will examine the foundational drivers of engagement, explore the components of successful engagement initiatives, and identify strategies for creating stronger engagement in teams.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Make critical distinctions between engagement and satisfaction or commitment
• Assess a work group for evidence of suboptimal engagement
• Apply the framework of engagement drivers to diagnose root causes of sub-optimal levels of engagement among employee groups and develop hypotheses about appropriate solutions
• Choose appropriate strategies for improving engagement within your work group and organization Identify ways to take effective actions to improve engagement

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Virtual teams are often also multicultural teams, which brings opportunities but also challenges that can easily derail teams. You will identify those opportunities and challenges and explore structural strategies for managing cultural issues. You will also examine recommended best practices for improving a team's cultural intelligence. A heightened cultural understanding will give team members and leaders the opportunity to fully capitalize on your team's opportunities.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess a cultural or diversity issue facing your team and come up with a plan to address it
• Examine how cultural dimensions affect your team and come up with plan to address any issues that might arise
• Assess the cultural intelligence of your team and come up with a plan to improve it

Interacting with Others

COURSE OVERVIEW

Leading across cultures is about adapting, communicating, thinking critically, and understanding your own biases. Dr. Jan Katz of Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration will help you explore the five key dimensions of cross­-cultural leadership: culture, context, risk, linear/parallel hierarchy, and individualism/collectivism . After defining and sharing examples of each, Professor Katz will help you explore their impacts on business and how you can adapt to variations in different cultures. This course gives you the tools you need to continuously improve your cross-cultural leadership skills.

In the course project, you will examine the cultures and dimensions you work in, explore how compensation relates to risk, examine the hierarchy at your company, and evaluate your own leadership style as it relates to the cultures you work in. You will also get to investigate the 2015 Greek financial crisis and interview an international colleague before creating an action plan for your own future education around the impact of cultural variation on leadership.

KEY COURSE TAKEAWAYS

• Assess your perspective so that you can develop a broader understanding of how cultural rules, stereotypes, and assumptions inform the way you think and work
• Develop a greater awareness of three key cross­-cultural dimensions: context, risk, and linear/parallel so that you understand why you think the way you do, which will lead to more effective interactions with people from other countries
• Examine two key dimensions: hierarchy and individualism vs. collectivism, so that you can recognize differences within the group, circumvent issues that are likely to arise, and develop constructive strategies that leverage everyone's expertise and perspective
• Develop your own skills to lead across cultures, using proven strategies and best practices