SWARTHMORE COLLEGE
Advancing Inclusive Excellence
February 21, 2019
As promised, I am coming back to Swarthmore. I’m looking forward to continuing to contribute to Swarthmore’s journey towards inclusive excellence. Below is the schedule of modules. If you have a specific question around diversity and inclusion, please feel free to use the form at the bottom of this page, or send me an email at alden@aldenhabacon.com
Confronting Systemic Bias Part 2:
Building a Toolkit for Disrupting Bias
10:00 AM to 11:30 PM (90 minutes)
This workshop is an continuation of the previous workshops (November 12, 2018), providing a deeper dive into the tools and strategies for disrupting and removing implicit and cultural bias from decision making, recruitment and professional advancement. This workshop will also give attendees an opportunity to discuss potential barriers to implementing the tools.
Please see the following link for the pre-work instructions:
Lunch & Learn:
Inclusion Literacy & Six C-Traits for Inclusive and Healthy Workplaces
12:00 P to 1:30 AM (90 minutes)
Inclusive excellence is promised to be at the heart of innovation and is the key to optimizing the health and well-being of a campus. The capacity for leaders and colleagues at Arc’teryx to model inclusive attitudes, language and behaviours is the litmus test of the collective commitment to empowering each other to be and perform our best. Failure to demonstrate inclusivity at Swarthmore drives talent and students away, harbours discrimination, normalizes inequity and has a direct impact on the mental health of the workplace.
In this introductory session, participants will examine the different kinds of diversity in the workplace, the Diversity Business Case for a more inclusive workplace, and using the Diversity Change Curve also explore the organizational stage-by-stage process towards fostering a work environment where people with profound differences thrive. Participants will determine where they are in the D&I journey and what diversity business case benefits are most relevant to Swarthmore.
This module explores the most recent report by Deloitte on when employees feel included, provides a research-based framework around the key traits for inclusive leadership, and further examines differences in what various employee groups perceive as inclusive leadership behaviours.
Intercultural Skills for Managing & Supervising Multicultural Teams
1:45 PM to 3:15 PM (90 minutes)
This engaging and interactive session provides a frank conversation about the complex difficulties of leading more diverse and inclusive organizations and/or teams, the intercultural afterthought, and what is required to convert a team’s diversity into innovation. This module covers:
The impact of cultural differences
The stages of personal change that must occur to formalize an intercultural mindset
Developing Intercultural Fluency
Whose responsibility is it to adapt?
Overcoming the fear of saying the wrong thing
This module will also examine the idea of a colleague sense of “fit” and the related points of cultural conflict in a diverse team. An adaptation of the Bennett Scale (also called the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity) will be presented. The Intercultural Fluency Model will be introduced and participants will be invited to identify area of future development.
How to Be an Active Bystander
3:30 PM to 5:00 PM (90 minutes)
This module aims to empower participants to be active bystanders as members of the Swarthmore community: allies who are prepared to respond and disrupt the impact of non-inclusive language and behavior. By refusing to be passive observers, active bystanders create safer environments in the workplace and in the community at large.
The session will also provide specific strategies for confronting peers, including:
How to overcome fear of retaliation or embarrassment;
Questions to ask when considering intervention;
Reframing intervention as personal, caring, or non-critical;
Group intervention after repeated patterns of inappropriate behaviour.