No one likes to have difficult conversations—that’s why it’s so important to share ideas constructively and mindfully. At Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school, that means launching a specific program designed to teach undergraduates how to have difficult conversations in the classroom and throughout their careers.
“It’s a skill we learn,” Dartmouth College’s new president Sian Belloc said Wednesday at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference in Laguna Niguel, California.
The plan is called Conversation items“seeks to provide the Dartmouth community with the mindset and skills needed for successful dialogue, even in the face of the most emotional or political disagreements.” Mutual understanding, regardless of individual differences, is the key to all kinds of learning, the program description reads. and the “foundations” of “active civic engagement and leadership.”
In the words of Belloc—who discussed the project on a panel about diversity, equity, and inclusion—the idea is to ensure that Dartmouth centers “voices that historically have not always centered.” She added that discussing across differences “is not something we are born with. We have to teach it to our staff, our faculty, (and) leaders.”
Dartmouth is leading the way. Educating young workers and new entrants to the workforce on basic etiquette and norms is becoming an entire cottage industry. Large consultancies such as Deloitte, PwC and KPMG have begun offering specialized training for Gen Z employees, who may be new to the workforce as they lose in-person internships due to the pandemic Opportunity.
Other companies are offering soft skills training to workers of all ages who are off to a more rocky start now that in-person work has resumed. Still, if you ask Gen Z, most will tell you they care more about their ability to handle hard skills than soft skills and are looking for jobs eager to help them improve their skills.
But Belloc might say that conversational skills are both a critical hard and a critical soft skill. Better decisions are always made when people at the table feel they belong and can push each other forward without fear of backlash or personal attacks, Belloc said.
People often worry that what they say will be seen as a necessary requirement of who they are, thus clouding the conversation. “In psychologist terms, we call it the fundamental attribution error,” Belloc said. “Part of it is feeling like you can trust each other and you have a community. And then you can talk, you can make mistakes, you can be uncomfortable, and I think that’s really important to get the best outcome.”
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