{"id":4543,"date":"2019-04-18T12:41:52","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T17:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/?p=4543"},"modified":"2020-02-25T12:35:42","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T17:35:42","slug":"workshops-for-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/2019\/04\/18\/workshops-for-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Workshops for Women."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Planning committee member Natalie Chai (SHA ’19) attends a workshop during the Summit.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By<\/strong> Joel Brown<\/em><\/p>\n

Three interactive workshops offered at the SHA Leadership Summit gave women students practical skills for succeeding in the workplace, with role-playing and other exercises to help them get better at conversation, negotiation and managing workplace relationships.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m graduating soon, so I just wanted the last helpful hints before I go into the real world,\u201d said SHA senior Michelle Martinez.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorkshops with smaller groups of people make it easier to learn,\u201d said SHA junior Monica Lee, \u201cespecially when you have the content more personalized to yourself. In class you listen but you don\u2019t talk a lot, and here you engage more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The workshops were scheduled repeatedly throughout the weekend so students could attend all three. By focusing solely on women, organizers hoped to make a small dent in the industry\u2019s gender inequalities by providing young female students with at least the basic skills required to navigate their new beginnings \u2018on the other side\u2019 of college.<\/p>\n

Communication: The Art of Conversation <\/strong>helped students understand why some conversations flow productively and others hit a dead end. The facilitators were Denise Rosenblum, founder and CEO of the Dynamic Development training company, and Lesley Silberstein of Silberstein and Associates, a hospitality sales and marketing consulting practice, also a SHA adjunct instructor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re focused on strong listening skills and creating better relationships through conversation,\u201d Rosenblum said after a session. Questions from students included: How best to address your supervisors when your culture may be different than the culture of the management team? How to present problems in a way you don\u2019t seem like a \u2018problem child\u2019?<\/p>\n

Everybody has a different communication style, they told the students, so you have to \u201cflex\u201d your style, adapting it to theirs to be successful. \u201cSo if you have a very direct personality but you\u2019re managing somebody who is not at all, you can\u2019t approach them in a direct way. You have to approach them in a way that\u2019s responsive to them,\u201d Rosenblum said.<\/p>\n

Students found the sessions useful.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to be leaders in the future, so it\u2019s important to know, what are the best methods of communicating?\u201d said Martinez. \u201cListening is the most important thing. You\u2019re always going to be talking to different people in hospitality, so you want to know who they are to understand the best way to approach them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"

<\/a><\/p>\n

A poster outside of one of the workshops focused on “Managing Up and Managing Down”. <\/p>\n

Managing Up\/Managing Down: Power Dynamics with Superiors and Subordinates<\/strong> taught students to build credibility and nurture relationships across generations and up and down the org chart. The facilitators were Debbie Freckleton, director of quality, learning and development at Langham Hotels, Boston, and Andrea Foster, senior vice president for development at Marcus Hotels & Resorts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is my first involvement with BU\u2019s hospitality program, aside from having interns come to the hotel where I work,\u201d said Freckleton. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to work more closely with them in their \u2018home\u2019 environment and feel their energy and desire to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

She heard their concerns in the workshop: \u201cI think they\u2019re worried, when they\u2019re in entry-level positions, \u2018How am I going to do this?\u2019 It\u2019s one thing to sit in a class and learn the theories. But what we were talking about in our session was much more real-life examples and \u2018this is how I would handle that situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural differences also came to the fore. A student from China who plans to stay and work in the United States and is currently working as a hotel front desk agent spoke about how her US-born colleagues felt comfortable approaching the boss directly; because she was not comfortable doing that, she felt she was missing out in the relationship with her superiors: \u201cI talked to her about ways she could talk to them about that dynamic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another student asked about a situation where other employers staged a slowdown over a workplace issue. How should a manager deal with them? \u201cI said managers would just go in and yell at them, and they would scatter to the wind,\u201d Freckleton said. \u201cA leader would say, \u2018Could you please do what I asked you to do and then later come see me?\u2019 And have a conversation about the issue then.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not exactly an entry-level question, more of a boss kind of question, isn\u2019t it? \u201cWell, that\u2019s their goal,\u201d Freckleton said with a smile.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Students had rich, open, and honest discussions during the workshops.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Negotiation: Influence Outcomes and Negotiate to Win<\/strong> helped students to develop their skills at persuasion and negotiation for personal and professional gain, including salary. The facilitators were Nancy Medoff, founder and chief of sales for AthenaWise Strategic Solutions, also a SHA adjunct, and Denise Reyes, a doctoral student in industrial\/organization psychology at Rice University.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe students want to break the confidence gap,\u201d said Medoff. \u201cThey\u2019re looking for skills to negotiate with clients or potential employers, so that when they go out into the workplace they can advocate for themselves and what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

They told the students the more they practice their skills, the more confident they\u2019ll be, and to \u201cfake it until they become it,\u201d offering negotiating tactics to make it easier for them to act in spite of often having been socialized to be non-confrontational.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Nancy Medoff, Founder and Chief of Sales and Marketing at AthenaWise Strategic Solutions, takes to the whiteboard during a workshop discussion.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cFor women specifically, we focus on the relational approach to negotiating,\u201d Reyes said, \u201cso it\u2019s a \u2018we\u2019 situation rather than just an \u2018I.\u2019 That could be either just using the word \u2018we\u2019 or thinking that you\u2019re negotiating for someone else, because women tend to be more communal, so it\u2019s easier for them to think about others instead of themselves. One student even mentioned she doesn\u2019t like asking for things, and I think it\u2019s easier to ask for things when you\u2019re thinking of others in that situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are certain workplace skills that you just can\u2019t learn through pure observation,\u201d said SHA senior Stephanie Lai. \u201cWorkshops like these are especially helpful, the way they\u2019re facilitated \u2013 we have that focus to help us learn those skills.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know we\u2019ll have other opportunities to learn, but learning these skills now gives us an advantage of knowing them earlier on,\u201d Lai said.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/h6>\n
Joel Brown is a staff writer at\u00a0BU Today\u00a0<\/em><\/a>and\u00a0Bostonia<\/em><\/a>\u00a0magazine. He\u2019s had 794 bylines in the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>, writing about everything from the hiring of Boston\u2019s new arts czar to what it\u2019s like to climb on top of a wind turbine (surprisingly peaceful). He previously worked for the\u00a0Boston Herald<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Greenfield Recorder<\/em>, among others. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where he majored in pinball and the student newspaper. He is a Massachusetts native, a lifelong Red Sox fan and a North Shore resident.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joel Brown Three interactive workshops offered at the SHA Leadership Summit gave women students practical skills for succeeding in the workplace, with role-playing and other exercises to help them get better at conversation, negotiation and managing workplace relationships. \u201cI\u2019m graduating soon, so I just wanted the last helpful hints before I go into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[363,373],"tags":[379],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4543"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5063,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4543\/revisions\/5063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bhr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}