Workshops for Women.

By Joel Brown

Three interactive workshops offered at the SHA Leadership Summit gave women students practical skills for succeeding in the workplace, with role-playing and other exercises to help them get better at conversation, negotiation and managing workplace relationships.

“I’m graduating soon, so I just wanted the last helpful hints before I go into the real world,” said SHA senior Michelle Martinez.

“Workshops with smaller groups of people make it easier to learn,” said SHA junior Monica Lee, “especially when you have the content more personalized to yourself. In class you listen but you don’t talk a lot, and here you engage more.”

The workshops were scheduled repeatedly throughout the weekend so students could attend all three. By focusing solely on women, organizers hoped to make a small dent in the industry’s gender inequalities by providing young female students with at least the basic skills required to navigate their new beginnings ‘on the other side’ of college.

Communication: The Art of Conversation helped students understand why some conversations flow productively and others hit a dead end. The facilitators were Denise Rosenblum, founder and CEO of the Dynamic Development training company, and Lesley Silberstein of Silberstein and Associates, a hospitality sales and marketing consulting practice, also a SHA adjunct instructor.

“We’re focused on strong listening skills and creating better relationships through conversation,” Rosenblum said after a session. Questions from students included: How best to address your supervisors when your culture may be different than the culture of the management team? How to present problems in a way you don’t seem like a ‘problem child’?

Everybody has a different communication style, they told the students, so you have to “flex” your style, adapting it to theirs to be successful. “So if you have a very direct personality but you’re managing somebody who is not at all, you can’t approach them in a direct way. You have to approach them in a way that’s responsive to them,” Rosenblum said.

Students found the sessions useful.

“We want to be leaders in the future, so it’s important to know, what are the best methods of communicating?” said Martinez. “Listening is the most important thing. You’re always going to be talking to different people in hospitality, so you want to know who they are to understand the best way to approach them.”

A poster outside of one of the workshops focused on “Managing Up and Managing Down”. 

Managing Up/Managing Down: Power Dynamics with Superiors and Subordinates taught students to build credibility and nurture relationships across generations and up and down the org chart. The facilitators were Debbie Freckleton, director of quality, learning and development at Langham Hotels, Boston, and Andrea Foster, senior vice president for development at Marcus Hotels & Resorts.

“This is my first involvement with BU’s hospitality program, aside from having interns come to the hotel where I work,” said Freckleton. “It’s nice to work more closely with them in their ‘home’ environment and feel their energy and desire to learn.”

She heard their concerns in the workshop: “I think they’re worried, when they’re in entry-level positions, ‘How am I going to do this?’ It’s one thing to sit in a class and learn the theories. But what we were talking about in our session was much more real-life examples and ‘this is how I would handle that situation.”

Cultural differences also came to the fore. A student from China who plans to stay and work in the United States and is currently working as a hotel front desk agent spoke about how her US-born colleagues felt comfortable approaching the boss directly; because she was not comfortable doing that, she felt she was missing out in the relationship with her superiors: “I talked to her about ways she could talk to them about that dynamic.”

Another student asked about a situation where other employers staged a slowdown over a workplace issue. How should a manager deal with them? “I said managers would just go in and yell at them, and they would scatter to the wind,” Freckleton said. “A leader would say, ‘Could you please do what I asked you to do and then later come see me?’ And have a conversation about the issue then.”

Not exactly an entry-level question, more of a boss kind of question, isn’t it? “Well, that’s their goal,” Freckleton said with a smile.

Negotiation: Influence Outcomes and Negotiate to Win helped students to develop their skills at persuasion and negotiation for personal and professional gain, including salary. The facilitators were Nancy Medoff, founder and chief of sales for AthenaWise Strategic Solutions, also a SHA adjunct, and Denise Reyes, a doctoral student in industrial/organization psychology at Rice University.

“The students want to break the confidence gap,” said Medoff. “They’re looking for skills to negotiate with clients or potential employers, so that when they go out into the workplace they can advocate for themselves and what they want.”

They told the students the more they practice their skills, the more confident they’ll be, and to “fake it until they become it,” offering negotiating tactics to make it easier for them to act in spite of often having been socialized to be non-confrontational.

“For women specifically, we focus on the relational approach to negotiating,” Reyes said, “so it’s a ‘we’ situation rather than just an ‘I.’ That could be either just using the word ‘we’ or thinking that you’re negotiating for someone else, because women tend to be more communal, so it’s easier for them to think about others instead of themselves. One student even mentioned she doesn’t like asking for things, and I think it’s easier to ask for things when you’re thinking of others in that situation.”

“There are certain workplace skills that you just can’t learn through pure observation,” said SHA senior Stephanie Lai. “Workshops like these are especially helpful, the way they’re facilitated – we have that focus to help us learn those skills.

“I know we’ll have other opportunities to learn, but learning these skills now gives us an advantage of knowing them earlier on,” Lai said.

Joel Brown is a staff writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. He’s had 794 bylines in the Boston Globe, writing about everything from the hiring of Boston’s new arts czar to what it’s like to climb on top of a wind turbine (surprisingly peaceful). He previously worked for the Boston Herald and the Greenfield Recorder, among others. He graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where he majored in pinball and the student newspaper. He is a Massachusetts native, a lifelong Red Sox fan and a North Shore resident.