Lessons in Leadership: The Importance of Fostering Compassionate Intergroup Dialogue Skills in Organizational Leaders & Community Spaces

Abstract

Stanford University's Office for Inclusion, Belonging and Intergroup Communication (IBIC) named an interest in increasing the office's ability to train, navigate, and support conflict resolution and disagreement-related dialogues on campus. I participated, across the 2023-2024 academic year, in a field project with IBIC to help them pursue this goal in actionable, iterative, and long-lasting ways. The first phase of our work, carried out primarily during the autumn quarter, related to developing and integrating training materials relating to conflict into the onboarding of IBIC's Peer Facilitators, a yearly cohort program of primarily undergraduate students who facilitate dialogues and workshops on campus around belonging. After iterating on this process for several months with my supervisor, I transitioned during the winter quarter to helping IBIC with the management, curriculum development, and facilitation of a course offering, "LEAD 152: Dialogue Lab: Exploring and Cultivating our Ability to Engage in Dialogue Across Difference." After canceling the course due to low enrollment, we pivoted in the spring quarter to re-developing the course and its marketing strategies to run with more success in the upcoming autumn quarter. We also formed the Conflict Working Group, a staff-level working group designed to continue incorporating and generalizing conflict-adjacent work into IBIC's processes, mission, and vision. This deposit includes facilitative workshop content, curriculum for LEAD 152, and a directory for the potential use and importance of this work.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred citation

Poling, T. (2024). Lessons in Leadership: The Importance of Fostering Compassionate Intergroup Dialogue Skills in Organizational Leaders & Community Spaces. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/qg181jv7812. https://doi.org/10.25740/qg181jv7812.

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https://purl.stanford.edu/qg181jv7812

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