Tips and Insights for Difficult Conversations
A lightly edited post from the archive, new to the many new subscribers
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Talking Out of School/Stony Creek Strategy news
My sessions with AISNE and CAIS on crisis communications gave me several tons of food for thought. I also felt as if I were giving people a Wheat Thin when what they need is a three course dinner. I really appreciate hearing what’s on people’s minds and how they’re dealing with really complicated situations. And it’s always a bit of surprise what particular topics are top of mind. Still processing! More soon! Thanks to both AISNE and CAIS for giving me time. Crisis comms is stressful and I’m happy to keep thinking about creating means of support. I salute you all.
Connections series
The first Comms Directors cohort Zoom meetup is in the books and it was great. Thanks to the powerful group of comms professionals who came and I look forward to shaping the content and providing space and connection. The date for the February meetup will be announced shortly!
The first one hour webinar - Grappling with the Triple Threat Model: Diagnosis and Design will be at noon on Friday February 9th, hosted by me and Greg Martin from Vermont Academy. Registration here. We’ll provide about thirty minutes of content, discussing the presenting issues and then talking about how boarding schools can start to take practical steps forward with a true 2024 dilemma. This first webinar will be free to all subscribers.
Your Career series
We’ll kick off the Your Career series as I’ve set time aside between February 6th and 16th for 20 minute 1-1 coaching calls on salary negotiations - sign up here. Make sure you sign up using the same email used for your subscription! You can find my article on salary negotiations here (paywalled). It was originally created for the Carney Sandoe Women’s Forum but the advice pertains to everyone. This is an offering for premium subscribers - check out here for other premium subscriber benefits.
Finally, Peter Baron of MoonshotOS has provided free access to stream the webinar I gave for his TransformED Summit last November on moving to a talent development model for hiring. And check out the exciting work Peter is doing by launching his Moonshot Lab community.
Onward!
So this is the first time I’ve repurposed a post. There are a lot of new subscribers and hopefully, you’ll find this one helpful. My reason for repurposing is that after the CAIS and AISNE sessions, I went back and started to fundamentally revise my post on crisis comms 101 from spring 2023 but it turns out trying to do a 2.0 on an old post is super hard to get right and you can end up with an unsatisfying Frankenstein’s monster that is an unattractive hodgepodge of good advice, smart sentences that no longer really work and something that just plain reads funny. It felt weird trying to patch it up adequately to send it out. After hours of trying over the course of this week, I looked up, it was 7:30pm on Friday night, I realized the album I was listening to had repeated itself multiple times and yet I hadn’t sent anything out. And I just really wanted to eat dinner. Lesson learned. Back to the drawing board we go, Fritz! (Young Frankenstein, anyone?) Writing, man. It’s a cruel mistress.
A crisis comms post I start from scratch will arrive in your inboxes soon.
Tips for Difficult Conversations
I’m writing this week about complex employee situations. You all know the ones - the one that you think about as soon as you open your eyes in the morning; the person you dread sitting down next to you in the cafeteria when either you know very well what’s coming towards them OR you are so incredibly frustrated at their behavior but you still have to make polite small talk.