Overview

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Tough conversations are exactly that: tough. They might involve topics that include heated opinions, arguments, or even biases. But having these conversations doesn't have to be negative, and can instead be a great way to improve your company culture. Join Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Expert Sterling de Sutter Summerville as he discusses how you can allow space to have challenging conversations within your team or organization. Sterling first reviews his tips for creating an environment that has built-in safety for all employees, then builds on this to review the elements of environments that strive for inclusion. With this foundation in place, Sterling then dives into the why conversations like this can get so heated, and what you can do during one of these conversations to maintain a safe space for all parties to express themselves. Finally, Sterling covers concepts that support safe spaces, including company culture, a sense of trust, and collective buy-in. After finishing this course, you'll be able to engage more meaningfully with those around you and help others do the same.

Syllabus

Safe Environments

Your team holds more potential than your current culture may be unlocking, and the gap often comes down to whether people feel safe enough to have the conversations that actually matter. In this module, you’ll identify the characteristics of a psychologically safe space, articulate why tough conversations are an asset rather than a liability, and design the values-centered foundation your organization needs to build one.

Inclusive Environments

Your organization’s culture is shaped by who feels included, and inclusion is rarely as simple as having good intentions. In this module, you’ll examine how intersectionality shapes belonging and exclusion at work, identify the components of a genuinely inclusive environment, and apply a strategic institutional framework that makes your safe spaces trustworthy and sustainable.

Accountable Environments

You can’t build a durable safe space without reckoning honestly with the systemic forces and everyday behaviors that quietly undermine it. In this module, you’ll recognize how injustice and microinequities surface in workplace culture, identify the conditions that block safe space creation before they compound into larger fractures, and build the cross-collaborative networks that keep accountability distributed and alive.

Developing Culture

Your team’s culture is defined not only by what people do, but equally by what no one ever does at all, and both are within your power to shape. In this module, you’ll identify the normative behaviors and communication habits that build or erode safety, and apply psychological safety as a leading indicator to gauge whether your safe space efforts are taking hold.

Trust Building Policies

Your safe space will be tested, and whether it holds depends less on the initial design than on the infrastructure you put in place to maintain it. In this module, you’ll identify how training, organizational expectations, and codes of conduct function as trust-building tools, and design the succession and contingency approach your team needs to sustain safe space culture through disruption.

Leadership and Collective Buy-In

You can have excellent policies and good intentions and still watch safe space culture fail if leadership is not genuinely in it and everyone else does not see inclusion as their job. In this module, you’ll recognize how leadership’s active participation accelerates culture change, identify the roles HR and management play in protecting people after tough conversations, and build the collective buy-in that makes inclusion a shared organizational reality.