Inclusive Conversations

Category: Openness, Social Justice, Communication

Number of Hours: 2 Hour

Date: December 29, 2020

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The purpose of this workshop was to comprehend how to bring understand and appreciation of diversity to organizations. When teams are diverse, people tend to bring their most authentic selves to the world -- thus being more productive, innovative, and engaged. When team members are able to be their authentic self, they feel confident about sharing their ideas and speaking up about experiences in their lives that can be based off of their identities. However, it can be challenging to know how to talk about polarizing topics related to people's identities of race, gender, and religion. This workshop was led by Mary-Frances Winters, who guided us on how to build necessary skills to be ready to engage in inclusive conversations. This program shared how to construct "I am" statements, to understand the importance of my own identities and how they guide my world view. Furthermore, the workshop practiced real life inclusive conversations scenarios and the components of the 4E model for assessing readiness.

As I go through my leadership journey, I began to focus on different identities that I have. Some identities can be visible, and others are not as obvious. The social identities that come up frequently in people's lives pertain to their race, gender, and religion. Although I do not think about some of these identities as being crucial to my everyday life, from these categories, I identify as being Caucasian, female, and Russian Orthodox. The dominant group in the United States is considered Caucasian. This means that often times I could have blind spots that make it difficult to engage in dialogue effectively across differences. As I try to pay more attention to what the media is covering throughout the world, I try to put my own life in perspective and try to understand how to fight against injustice and reduce my own blind spots.

When I moved to the United States, I moved into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood where I learned more about that culture, as well as other religions besides my Russian Orthodox one. This made me more aware of how other people view the world and understand how to identify right from wrong. As a female, I understand that this is also a dominant group now and that other people who do not identify as male or female but something in between or neither can be left out or under-represented. I think about this identity the most because I study Engineering, which is male-dominant.

In my career and personal life, I expect for polarizing conversations to arise. It was valuable how this workshop practiced the 4E model by describing and developing a plan to improve the cultural competency. Here, I primarily focused on a time in the future when I would be moving to Missouri to start my new job and how I plan to use Exposure, Experience, Education, and Empathy in my journey. Sometimes, I will not have all the information or a set of different beliefs than others when conversing. This workshop worked on developing shared meaningful conversations where I analyzed a scenario between a co-worker and an immigrant co-worker. This is where I understood more in depth about how to create shared meaning to improve on openness and communication in polarizing topics.