<div style="font-size: 0.95em; line-height: 1.4;"><p align="justify">In late 2023, Sylvia Mackay, founder of New Beginnings Architecture, found herself facing a challenging dilemma. Isabelle Goodwin, a junior associate who had joined the firm in 2022, had shown significant talent and potential. However, she quickly earned a reputation for her combative demeanor, straining her relationships with her colleagues and mentor. The situation escalated when Mackay received a call from a trusted subcontractor, Miriam Collins, who was the interior designer on Goodwin's project. Goodwin had yelled at Collins during a meeting, leaving the designer angry and the firm's reputation for professionalism bruised. How was Mackay going to handle this talented yet problematic employee?
This exercise introduces the L.E.A.R.N. dialogue process, a structured method for creating a psychologically safe space in which people with diverse experiences, knowledge, skills, and perspectives can discuss the complex challenges facing organizations today. During the session, students are introduced to the method, learn how to work through the five L.E.A.R.N. stages—Launch, Explore, Acknowledge, Reflect, and Notice—and are given the tools to craft and facilitate their own L.E.A.R.N. dialogues. The exercise includes an example of the L.E.A.R.N. dialogue process in which participants explore the question “How much access should employers have to monitor employees working remotely?” The L.E.A.R.N. process allows the company executives in the example to hold dialogues with employees to further understand the challenges and, over time, find solutions. Having conversations about difficult topics with people with diverse lived experiences is challenging, so this exercise provides a set of tools to guide these conversations.
This classroom exercise is designed to guide students through the steps of launching a successful project team. It is ideally implemented at the beginning of a team project to help students get to know their teammates; build a better understanding of the knowledge, skills, and experiences that each team member brings to the project; and set the ground rules for effective team functioning over the course of the project. This exercise provides practical tools for building strong, cohesive project teams, helping to set the stage for collaborative success in real-world scenarios.
This exercise is designed to take students through the steps of creating a project scope document for a course project. The students have the opportunity to practice defining a project scope using a scenario with Friendship Coffee. The project scope document is often used in the workplace, and defines the project requirements, deliverables, and process at the onset of the project. It sets the project up for success and ensures all team members understand the important milestones and due dates, as well as the final deliverable.
By September 2022, Elizabeth Hooper had been working for 100 days as chief human resources officer at AccelleWell, a contract development and manufacturing organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just before her arrival, AccelleWell was acquired by the private equity firm Evenhuis Equity Partners. The company’s chief executive officer who hired Hooper was fired shortly after she started and was replaced by a new “fixer” who was brought in to turn around the company. Initially, Hooper thought that she could work well with the new leader, who voiced his support for Hooper publicly at an all-staff meeting and approved her plan to add new positions to the human resources team. However, he soon proved to be a toxic leader, making sexist and ageist comments and firing various executive team members. Hooper wondered if she could hold on to her own job. Was there any hope that she could still be successful as part of the executive team that had transformed AccelleWell into a leading life sciences employer?
Jill Herzog founded Caring@Work Support Services (Caring@Work) in 2014 with a desire to give back to the community. After running a successful plastics recycling business for many years and building goodwill in both her community and in the recycling industry, Herzog saw an opportunity to start a second business dedicated to social impact, one that focused on providing both paid work and support services for clients with intellectual and developmental disabilities.<br><br>Herzog expected that her team members would be highly engaged in their work, which involved helping people with disabilities live healthier and happier lives. However, she was shocked to find out that the opposite was true. Herzog noted several instances of Caring@Work employees lacking motivation and spreading gossip. Even more problematic was the fact that the service provided to the clients was being compromised, and employees frequently failed to complete the required note taking for Medicaid reimbursements. Herzog wondered if her goal of giving back to the community while earning a modest profit would ever be realized. Were the problems due to her leadership style? Were there larger, more systemic problems precipitating the counterproductive workplace behaviour?<br><br>Clearly, something had to change. After eight years in business, Caring@Work had yet to earn a profit. Herzog knew that her business could not grow to the point of being financially sustainable without a committed workforce that shared her passion for the company’s mission. When one of Caring@Work’s top performers, Sylvia Ward, threatened to leave due to the toxic work environment, Herzog knew she needed to act fast. Over the weekend, she drafted a speech to deliver at the next staff meeting on Monday, but she wondered if this was the right approach. Would the speech alienate her workforce even further? Or might it urge them to take their jobs more seriously?