Identifying your pain points and goals for the course

- Success isn't ever by accident. However, a very important, yet often overlooked aspect of success, is failure. As a speaker and an empathy consultant, My biggest learning experiences were when I failed absolutely miserably. These moments forced me to examine what went wrong, where I went wrong, and how, if possible, I can turn those mistakes into a new and useful perspective for my next client or speaking engagement. You, as a leader, have to do the same thing for creating a culture of empathic inclusion. You may already be doing things correctly, which is great. Amplify and optimize those behaviors. You are probably also doing a few things wrong, and that's okay, too. These mistakes are only a starting point. They will help you set goals for what your inclusive culture will look like. First, identify your pain points. Do you retain top talent? Are your managers good and effective leaders? Are your inclusion initiatives properly advertised and/or attended? Knowing where your issues lie is going to lead you directly to understanding why these gaps in empathic inclusion exist. Ask those who are most affected how they feel when they are in different situations, like in meetings or or on calls or talking to their direct manager. These questions are going to lend themselves to open and direct conversations around what's really going on in your team as well as your organization. Let's say that one of your big issues is lackluster productivity and a disengaged team. And when you ask a few people on that team what specific situations are impacting their ability to feel included, they describe how their direct line manager consistently cuts them off and corrects them anytime they are speaking about work. The reason why these first two exercises are important is they prepare you as leaders for this crucial third step, setting goals. Goal-setting is an integral part of growth in any venue of life, both personally and professionally. Setting goals for empathic inclusion is absolutely no different. It sets you up for success. Now, I want you to look back at what your pain points were, and then think about the actual experiences individuals had while in different situations at work. These are the things that you are going to want to work on first, so create goals around these issues. And define goals here at every level, and that's individual, teams, departments, and organizationally as a whole. A great goal in this situation would be to offer programming that better trains managers to communicate with empathy. Keep these pain points and goals in mind throughout this course, because we will cover a lot of different behaviors that you can learn to amplify empathic inclusion and solve these issues. These behaviors are geared towards individual action, however, they can easily be scaled for teams and organizations as a whole.