Wisdom Cafe Wednesday

Archives of past Wisdom Cafe Wednesday newsletters.

How to Manage Students

When I mention that my department (Student Affairs IT) has more than 100 student employees working alongside our 60 career staff, campus colleagues usually remark, “Wow, that’s wonderful!” and then ask, “How on earth do you do that?” As a manager who is committed to student leadership and staff development, I am passionate about this subject, and happy to share with the Wisdom Café community some insights and best practices that I have learned and developed over the years.

In my view, good management is good management, regardless of the level of professional experience of one...

Building Business Relationships

Have you been eyeing a promotion or new job? By learning how to form and leverage relationships with others in your professional orbit, you can propel your career to new heights. In this course, join Simon T. Bailey as he helps you master the art of building business relationships. Using scenarios and personal experiences from his own career, Simon explains how to build authentic professional relationships by focusing on four key areas: inspiring, influencing, impacting, and integrating. Discover how you can build meaningful rapport, set yourself up for visibility and success, manage up,...

How to Make Better Decisions and Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

In today's fast-moving world, we are always under pressure to act now, rather than spend time reasoning things through and thinking about the true facts.

Not only can this lead us to a wrong conclusion, but it can also cause conflict with other people, who may have drawn quite different conclusions on the same matter.

Learn how to avoid making wrong conclusions using the Ladder of Inference. Read More Here.

Find Your Time Management Style

When it comes to time management strategies, one size does not fit all. To create your optimal workday, you must consider many factors, including the nature of your job, the level of interaction you have with others, and your personal preferences. In this course, productivity expert Dave Crenshaw expands upon the concepts covered in his other time management courses to help you boost your productivity by crafting a personalized approach to time management. Dave takes you through an assessment to discover your time maangement style and then shows how to adapt fundamental time management...

Efficient Time Management

Did you know that if you save just one hour per week, you could gain a whole week of uninterrupted time each year? That's the power of time management. This course will help you reclaim those hours by managing your time more efficiently and increasing your professional and personal productivity. Author Chris Croft explores how to establish a productive environment by establishing systemic approaches for repeating tasks, reducing inefficiency, organizing your work area, and using an effective system to reduce filing. He also discusses how to best create and manage to-do lists, organize the...

Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isn’t about being nice, she says. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. And she argues that kind of organizational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy. Edmondson is the author of the new book ...

Bring Resolution to Your Conflicts

Improve your relationships with your coworkers, clients, and managers and find your way through conflict back to cooperation. In this LinkedIn Learning course, negotiation and leadership coach Lisa Gates shares the secrets of effective conflict resolution and reveals simple, repeatable techniques that apply in most business situations. She presents "The Resolution Roadmap," a practical framework for exploring and navigating conflict resolution,...

Why You Never Seem to Have Enough Time

As researcher Cassie Mogilner and her colleagues write in a 2012 paper, “With waking hours largely consumed by work, precious minutes remain for the daily list of to-dos, including exercise, cleaning, and socializing with friends and family.”

At first glance, the issue seems straightforward. Time pressure comes down to a lack of time, right? Well, partly. It’s the feeling that we don’t have enough time to do what we want to do—but it turns out that feelings...

Want to Find FulFillment at Last? Think Like a Designer

You’re going to learn how to find a fulfilling career. You’re going to learn how to better navigate life’s big-moment decisions and kill your “wicked problems” dead. How? By training yourself to think like a designer.

That, anyway, is the premise of “Designing Your Life,” a class taught at Stanford University (the school’s “most popular class,” according to Fast Company magazine) as well as the just-published book that grew out of it, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life” (Knopf).

The two men who created the class and wrote the book are Silicon Valley...

Counter Potential Unconscious Bias

We're all biased. Our experiences shape who we are, and our race, ethnicity, gender, height, weight, sexual orientation, place of birth, and other factors impact the lens with which we view the world. In this course, diversity expert Stacey Gordon helps you recognize and acknowledge your own biases so that you can identify them when making decisions, and prevent yourself from making calls based on a biased viewpoint. Stacey explains some of the most common forms that a bias takes: affinity bias, halo bias, perception bias, and confirmation bias. She helps you recognize the negative effects of...