Wisdom Cafe Wednesday

Archives of past Wisdom Cafe Wednesday newsletters.

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Managing Stress for Positive Change

In the workplace, stress is often viewed in purely negative terms. It's seen as a response that should simply be minimized or pushed aside; however, it's possible to use stress to fuel positive change.

In this course, join instructor Heidi Hanna, PhD as she discusses what stress is, exactly; how you can train yourself to use stress in more effective ways; and what managers can do to reduce employee stress when an organization experiences difficult times.

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Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking is the ability to think on a big and small scale, long and short term, and into the past and the present. While strategic thinking is a valuable skill for everyone in an organization, it becomes increasingly essential as you ascend the ladder. In fact, you may have a difficult time being promoted or succeeding as a leader without it. Yet, no one formally teaches strategic thinking—so it's critical to take the initiative and learn how to do it yourself.

Career and personal branding expert Dorie Clark shows you how to carve out time to think...

Questions to Ask Before, During and After Development Experiences

Guide employees to ask themselves critical questions before, during, and after a development experience to ensure that they are extracting the most from the experience. While preparing employees for their development experience, use this template during the orientation conversation. Encourage employees to populate this template across different stages of their development experience. It's important to ask yourself these key questions to help you transcend your career path.

Some questions include:

What do I hope to learn from this project/experience? What will I be able to do...

Qualities of a Critical Thinker

Critical thinking is an approach to the world, a way of life that goes beyond skill or technique. Effective critical thinkers go beyond surface level exposition while digging deeper into other arsenals of knowledge in an attempt to fully understand a given situation or scenario.

Read here for essential qualities that distinguish effective critical thinkers from the rest.

People Skills for a Multicultural Workplace

Working in a cuturally diverse environment is a rewarding and fufilling professional experience that provides opportunities to expand your communication skills. Self-awareness and other practices, such as patience and understanding, are necessary qualities to have when working and thriving with colleagues in a multicultural workspace.

Learn more here.

Manager Success: Driving Innovation

Encouraging innovation in the workplace increases the ability to effectively generate, evaluate, and execute new ideas. This is helpful as it prevents the work environment from being too risk averse and isolated from the rapidly changing outside world. Boosting innovation in the workplace can be done through team challenges and exercised that include generating and improving employee ideas....

Leading Productive Meetings

Feel like you're having too many meetings? Wonder if they're as effective as they could be? In this course, productivity expert Dave Crenshaw demonstrates a simple, usable framework that can help you get the most from your meetings—turning them into productive avenues for communicating, connecting, and accomplishing real work. Dave provides insight into how to effectively schedule, conduct, and follow up on meetings with minimum time and maximum results.

Learning Objectives: Plan how to use technology successfully in your meetings. Determine how to select and support a...

Is Informal Learning The Same As Social Learning?

While social learning and informal learning share similarities, it is important to understand that they are not entirely identical. The most evident difference between these two practices are structure. Social learning involves participation and can take place in either a formal (i.e. working on a course together with a cohort) or informal (i.e. daily, casual occurrences of working and learning in a team) settings. Informal learning, however, refers to the unstructured and impromptu ways that people can learn in the workplace, such as through mentoring programs or networking.

In...

Guide to Building Team Transparency

Encouraging and practicing team transparency means facilitating a trusting system of communication between organization members.

Use this guide to start building an open, skill-sharing team environment and better understand the context in which your direct reports work.

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