Crucial Conversations: A Toolkit for Effective Communication at Work

Aims

Great communication can transform your life, relationships, and career. With strong communication skills, you can achieve your desired outcomes, foster strong relationships, build trust, and inspire others. Conversely, poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, unresolved conflicts, missed opportunities, and strained relationships.

This workshop equips PhD students and postdocs with a broad pallet of communication skills, such as delivering feedback and navigating difficult conversations. This communication toolkit will enable participants to foster collaboration, build trust and psychological safety, and resolve issues before they escalate. By integrating insights from communication theory, neurobiology, and psychology, participants will gain a deeper understanding of how communication affects the brain, helping them remain calm and focused while delivering their message. These insights will help participants skillfully communicate to ensure the other persons can truly hear, understand, and feel motivated to act.

Content

• Giving Feedback: Learn the principles of “brain-friendly feedback,” emphasizing direct communication balanced with care for the other person.

• Receiving Feedback: How to manage your reactions to feedback and use it constructively as an opportunity to grow.

• Handling Difficult Conversations: Explore key concepts to approach sensitive topics with openness, curiosity, and the ability to manage emotional responses.

• Psychological Safety and Trust: Learn strategies to ensure your feedback or conversations foster an environment of safety and mutual respect while avoiding defensiveness, miscommunication, or lack of clarity.

• Neurobiology of Conversations: Learn how the brain responds to stressful conversations and how to leverage this understanding to keep interactions calm and productive.

Methods

The course combines short inputs with interactive discussions and hands-on exercises. Participants will learn through short lectures s on various communication strategies and models, as well as the impact of stress and emotional regulation on communication, with opportunities to apply these insights in practice. Interactive discussions will allow participants to engage with case studies and real-world scenarios, unpacking the principles of giving and receiving feedback and navigating difficult conversations. Role-playing exercises will provide hands-on experience in handling challenging conversations, applying the techniques covered in the lectures. Small group work will encourage collaboration, allowing participants to explore different communication challenges, share personal experiences, and refine their skills. Throughout the workshop, participants will receive valuable feedback from peers and facilitators, with opportunities for reflection and self-assessment to enhance their communication approach.

Target Group

All Doctoral Candidates & Postdocs

About the Trainer

Dr. Djahane Banoo is the founder of Align Coaching. She specializes in helping students and academic professionals maximize their learning and achieve success. She draws on insights from Design Thinking, Positive Psychology and Sociology in her work as a coach and trainer. To learn more about Djahane, please visit her website: www.align-edu.com.

Workload

Course attendance: 8 hours

Feature

Once registration is open, applications will be collected for 24 hours and course places allocated by lot. All registrations received after the initial 24h period will be put on a waiting list and assigned on a first come, first served basis.

Course places/places on the waiting list will be confirmed by e-mail. Course registrations can only be canceled before the registration period ends (send an e-mail to grace@unibas.ch). Full course attendance is mandatory. Participants who fail to attend a course without prior notification or withdraw after the registration deadline are subject to a fee of CHF 30. In addition, participants who cancel their course registration at a later point in time, are absent without an excuse or do not attend the entire course will, for reasons of fairness, not be considered for course registration in the following semester and will be removed from other courses offered in the same semester. Please find the detailed regulations on the Transferable Skills Homepage.