Retirement planning as part of your whole work/life cycle – small steps, big rewards

Held August 7, 2024, online

“Retirement planning as part of your whole work/life cycle” explores how proactively embracing retirement planning – from onboarding through retirement – contributes to resilience, financial wellness, and enduring lifelong wellness. Presenter Carol Hulland shared best practices, resources, tips and tricks, and best practices.

CSN Summer Book Club: Radical Candor

Held June 27, July 11, and July 2, 2024

Radical Candor will teach you how to connect with people at work, push them to be their best, know when and how to fire them, and create an environment of trust and innovation in the workplace.

“Relationships, Not Power, Drive You Forward” – Kim Scott

Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows. Defining those relationships is vital. Managing people is emotional labor, and it’s what being a boss is all about. You can’t focus on your work and “save time” on the people’s side, otherwise, you are not doing your job. Bosses are responsible for results through their teams.

3 of the most insightful lessons about leadership from Radical Candor:

1. To develop radical candor, you must learn to be honest and direct without offending people.
2. Collaborative leadership is far more effective than just barking orders.
3. Get to know your employees’ real motivations by having honest conversations.

The 3 Tasks of A Manager are guidance, team, and results

Guidance: helping individuals grow personally and professionally with your radically candid feedback
Team: making sure the team works harmoniously together.
Results: making sure the team stays on track, and that you have enough time blocked for strategic thinking and planning

The Two Dimensions of Radical Candor: Care Personally & Challenge Directly

Caring personally means you care about the person. The whole person, not just about the employee “doing his job”, and not just him having a good career. When you truly care, people are more likely to:

• Accept and act on your praise and criticism
• Express what they think about your work and attitude
• Engage in this same behavior with one another
• Embrace their role on the team
• Focus on getting results.

Challenge directly means that you give direct, early, and precise feedback on people’s performance, both when they are doing well, and when they can do better.

When you put together the two dimensions of caring and giving accurate feedback, you get radical candor.

Esteemed Confidence

Held May 2, 2024, online

Healthy self-esteem and assertiveness skills are essential for growth and achieving success in both our personal and professional lives. Being assertive can also help boost your self-esteem and earn others’ respect. After COVID and through remote and hybrid work changes, these skills may have changed in us. In this upbeat and interactive session, you will learn techniques to increase both your self-confidence as well as your ability to be assertive in a way that builds and fosters relationships. Being assertive shows that you respect yourself because you’re willing to stand up for your interests and positively express your thoughts and feelings with candor. It also demonstrates that you’re aware of the rights, feelings, and emotions of others and are willing to work on resolving conflicts. Shelly Vils Havel from the Office of Admissions led this session and talked about how you can be on your way to “esteemed confidence”!

Note: this was an online offering of Shelly’s presentation at the Administrative Professionals Conference.

Leading Transitions with Integrity and Heart

A Special Webinar with Harry Webne-Behrman & Julie Kovalaske

Held March 13, 2024, online

We live and work in times that require a new concept of leadership, one that has integrity and heart. This is an approach where leaders fully engage their colleagues in collaborative, creative, and compassionate approaches that meet the challenge of the day, developing purposeful responses that not only address substantive issues but also build healthy, sustainable relationships. In this special one-hour Webinar for CSN members, Harry Webne-Behrman & Julie Kovalaske helped us understand and appreciate the responsibilities and opportunities of such an approach. They introduced tools we can use in our jobs, and discussed a scenario that rings all too present in our work on campus.

Note: Harry Webne-Behrman is the author of the book “What Matters at Work,” which was featured as a CSN book club topic a few years ago.

CSN Winter Book Club featuring Switch—How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Held January 17, January 31, and February 14, 2024, online

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?

The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.

In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results. In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can affect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.