If you are a manager of people, at some point in your career, you have or will find yourself in the position of having a difficult conversation with an employee around organization changes that you are making or that are being made and you are responsible for executing.

There are times when someone on your team will approach you saying that something needs to change, maybe it’s a piece of company culture or a practice.

As leaders, we talk often about offering good feedback and direction, but we often fail at its deceptively difficult counterpart—the craft of listening. How can you better understand the underpinnings and science of a listening practice applied specifically to difficult situations—in which you have little opportunity to control the context—and build better skills for comprehensive, empathetic listening?

In this session, we will discuss tactics for supporting safe and open one-on-one spaces for listening and understanding constructively.

In this session, two speakers will give their perspectives on a situation involving a difficult conversation. One perspective will be from the manager, and the other from the person being managed.

It may sound clear cut, but we know that no process is 100% foolproof and it’s much messier in the real world.

In the final talk of this session, we’ll be exploring what happens when a process is no longer fit for purpose, how this can affect people’s jobs and their identities within an organisation, and how you can ensure the next process will be an improvement from the last.

In this talk we’ll take a look at processes and scaling up, thinking about the types of processes that help to establish growth, when it’s too early or late to introduce a process, and the times you’d choose to not apply a process.