Empathy Among Teams

Duration: 2 hours, online, sliding scale based on # participants, starting around $3000

Why this workshop

You’d like to think that the people you work with can get along, follow the same playbook, and collaborate smoothly. But often there are points of friction. This workshop shows your team how to embrace the gradual growth of relationships between collaborators within a fast-paced context.

What you will learn

You will learn how to listen deeply to each other, to make another person feel heard. Your team will begin to develop awareness of their own thoughts processes as well as what their collaborators are trying to express. Understand that empathy is a skill and not an emotion.

• Build awareness of what collaborators are trying to express, and your reactions to it
• Learn a deeper, standardized technique for listening
• Find common purpose and guiding principles
• Develop rapport and trust

The first step in “dealing with peers” is to become aware that you have your own reactions and history guiding your thoughts. Second, you probably haven’t truly understood their point, either—what’s behind their thinking? Learning how to make a person feel heard is the most powerful skill for team collaboration. But helping them get to the thinking behind their points requires trust and rapport and enough humility to give the other person a chance to explain.

Relationships build over time, trust builds over time, and our culture emphasizes speed: fast food, quick conversation, surveys, move fast! There’s barely any room for thought. This workshop shows you how to embrace the gradual growth of relationships between collaborators. You’ll learn how to listen, to make another person feel heard. You’ll begin to develop awareness of your own thought processes as well as what a collaborator is trying to express to the rest of the team. You’ll learn how to practice this in real-time, as it unfolds. And you’ll get to try out the techniques in class.

Activities

• Presentation with slides and diagrams
• Exercises to practice critical skills
• A demo of a communication between co-workers, where we apply concepts from the workshop

Indi led a workshop for 30 NYC UXPA members in October 2016. Indi’s charisma and energy transcend the digital divide and she took extra care to connect with the audience one-on-one. Indi established clear learning objectives at the beginning and carefully guided the group through applied exercises. At the conclusion of the event, Indi even stuck around for the networking hour and chatted with attendees. We were so pleased to have Indi share her knowledge and appreciated the opportunity to bring her expertise to the New York community.

Elain Matthias, President of NYC UXPA

How to bring Indi and your team together

1. Fill out the request form.
2. We will reach out to answer any questions, and settle on a date, time (across time zones) & fee.
3. Sign the contract (we can use your contract or Indi’s, depending on your procurement system)
4. You will provide a one-page describing what team members are concerned about that makes them want this workshop.
5. Workshop occurs
6. Invoice & payment

Important: Indi will need a one-page transcript of a typical conversation where two team members are failing to collaborate as well as they both wish. You will make up a version of how this plays out for your team so Indi can use it as core evidence to dissect for the workshop. Each team is different, so this is required in order for the best outcome for your learning. The transcript can use typical things that people run into with each other, and can jam together a bunch of different contexts