Personality Matters: Collaborating Successfully with Others!

Thursday, July 16, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring – Mary Abbajay, President of Careerstone Group.

Personality preferences and communication styles play a significant role in our interactions with coworkers, team members, supervisors, and staff members. Working successfully with others requires developing self-awareness and an understanding of how we, as individuals, impact others—both positively and negatively. In this high-spirited webinar, participants will gain heightened awareness of their own distinctive personality type, communication style and preferred ways of working with others. This interactive and eye-opening webinar helps participants understand their own personalities, personal strengths and potential areas for improvement. Participants learn to:

  • Raise awareness around preferred work style and behaviors—of self and others.
  • Increase understanding about how they communicate, receive information and make decisions.
  • Develop insight into their own style and the style of others.
  • Develop flexibility during workplace interaction in order to interact effectively with people who have different personalities and communication styles.
  • Understand how personality type impacts leadership and teamwork.

The Careerstone Group is a full service organizational and leadership development consultancy that delivers leading-edge talent and organizational development solutions to business and government.  Mary is also the author of Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work and Succeed with Any Type of Boss.

Become a Virtual Meeting Virtuoso (Bonus Seminar)

Thursday, June 4, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring – Christine Clapp, President of Spoken With Authority

Just a few weeks ago, proficiency in technology-mediated communication was optional; today, it is essential for connecting with colleagues, clients, and other stakeholders who are located in another part of the city, state, country, or world. In Become a Virtual Meeting Virtuoso, Spoken with Authority will equip you with expert tips on your content, physical setting, technology setup, and speaking style that will dramatically improve your confidence and effectiveness in virtual meetings and presentations.

In this session, you will:

  • Identify ways to adapt meeting agendas and presentations for technology-mediated communication
  • Explore strategies for optimizing video conference platforms
  • Review etiquette of speaking online
  • Learn the fundamentals of executive presence and the nuances of conveying confidence in online speaking situations

Mindfulness for Professionals: How to Reduce Stress and Improve Performance

Tuesday, May 19, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring – Jon Krop, Founder of Mindfulness for Lawyers.

Do you want to develop greater focus and efficiency? Reduce stress and avoid burnout? Improve your performance under pressure?

Join lawyer and mindfulness expert Jon Krop for a hands-on introduction to mindfulness, a simple mental practice you can use to reduce stress and improve productivity. Jon will guide participants through short exercises that sharpen focus, calm the mind, and cultivate resilience in the face of anxiety and stress.

Back to the Office: Re-Entry Strategies Under COVID-19 (Bonus Signature Seminar)

Thursday, May 14, 2020 – 1:00 pm EST
Featuring – Manar Morales, President & CEO of the Diversity & Flexibility Alliance
Manar Morales, the Alliance’s President & CEO, will lead this webinar on best practices and suggestions for re-entry success as organizations and employees prepare to return back to the office.
  • Does your organization have a game plan for when physical offices re-open?
  • How will you continue to support your teams when they come back but schools are still closed?
  • What will your organization’s definition of a “new normal” and return to the office look like?
  • What new support systems will be in place?

Business Continuity, Success (and Sanity) During COVID-19 Telecommuting (Bonus Signature Seminar)

Tuesday, March 24, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring – Manar Morales, President & CEO of the Diversity & Flexibility Alliance

Whether or not you have a telework policy already in place, there are best practices to follow, both as a supervisor and as a teleworker, when unforeseen circumstances force organization-wide, unscheduled remote work.  It’s not always a simple matter of logging in, especially when you may not have been prepared to telework for an unspecified length of time.

The Alliance has always been a proponent of teleworking, and we’re here to share best practices for business continuity, success, and maintaining your well-being during this time. What can managers do to make sure employees have the resources they need to keep workflow seamless? What can employees do to stay engaged and productive? What can we all do to support each other? What are additional telework policy considerations to think about moving forward?

Join us for our special webinar for members where Manar Morales, the Alliance’s President & CEO, will share guidelines on these issues and answer your questions. Although we will be taking questions during the webinar, please feel free to forward any before the webinar (email manar@dfalliance.com) so we make sure we get to everyone.

Transgender Inclusion in the Workplace

Thursday, March 5, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring Lily Zheng, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Consultant and author of Gender Ambiguity in the Workplace: Transgender and Gender-Diverse Discrimination (2018) and The Ethical Sellout: Maintaining Your Integrity in the Age of Compromise (2019).

In this Signature Seminar, Lily Zheng will share stories and research findings from Gender Ambiguity in the Workplace, and contextualize them within larger industry and cultural trends. They will offer their suggestions for actionable organizational and individual solutions to end discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression and create inclusive workplaces for transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive employees.

Research Briefing: Trends from the 2019 Law Firm Flexibility Benchmarking Study

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 – 1:00 – 2:15 pm EST

Featuring Manar Morales, President & CEO, The Diversity & Flexibility Alliance

Manar will provide individuals from all member organizations with insights and in-depth analysis on the results of the 2019 Law Firm Flexibility Benchmarking Study. The presentation will include trends and best practices in flexible working and leave initiatives.

Develop Your Professional Presence

Thursday, January 9 , 2020  1:00 – 2:00 pm EST

Featuring – Christine Clapp

Whether you’re in a meeting, on the phone, around the proverbial “water cooler,” at a conference, or anywhere else: your ability to speak with confidence will drive your career forward — just as a lack of confidence will frustratingly hold you back. In Develop Your Professional Presence, Spoken with Authority will offer an interactive and consciousness-raising webinar experience. If you participate fully, you will gain a set of powerful insights and practical strategies that will rapidly enhance your professional presence.

Objectives:

  • Explore the five elements of professional presence
  • Assess your personal strengths and weaknesses
  • Identify strategies for leveraging strengths and mitigating weaknesses
Christine will provide complimentary copies of her book to the first ten attendees to complete the webinar evaluation (and provide a mailing address).
Christine Clapp is the author of Presenting at Work: A Guide to Public Speaking in Professional Contexts and the president of Spoken with Authority, a Washington, D.C.-based presentation skills consultancy that explores the intersection of presentation skills and inclusion. Through training programs and coaching engagements, Christine and her team help professionals at law firms, corporations, associations, and non-profit organizations elevate their presence and expand their influence.
*Pre-work: Before the webinar, record on your phone or tablet a 60-90 second clip of your response to one of these questions:
  1. What does flexible work mean to you?
  2. If you could have all the flexibility in the world, what would it look like and how would it impact your ability to do your job?
You can do this quick exercise with a colleague before the webinar, or you can record yourself. Please speak standing up, record from the waist up, and make sure it’s a video (not a still photo or just an audio recording). You do NOT need to watch your recording before the webinar, and you will NEVER be asked to share it with others.
You’ll review your recording individually several times during the course of the webinar to raise awareness of your communication behaviors and to start improving them. Bring a pair of earbuds if you’ll be watching in a group setting. By doing this exercise ahead of time, you’ll ensure a robust learning experience.
Members should register in the Member Resource Center.

Ending the Silence: Strategies for Ending Workplace Misconduct & Building a Culture of Respect & Inclusion

Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 1:00 – 2:00 pm EST

Featuring – Lauren Stiller Rikleen

When workplace colleagues engage in harassment, bullying, or demeaning behaviors, it can have a profoundly negative impact on the careers of others, affecting employee engagement, productivity, and even mental health. Too often, victims of workplace misconduct fear to report and bystanders also feel helpless and worried about retaliation.

 

Lauren Stiller Rikleen, author of The Shield of Silence: How Power Perpetuates a Culture of Harassment and Bullying in the Workplace, offers a timely and nuanced analysis of these challenges and describes specific strategies for creating a culture of respect and inclusion. Lauren will discuss how existing workplace structures and dynamics inherently thwart the very result that many policies claim to promote by serving as a protective shield around perpetrators and as a barrier that prevents victims from accessing the system that should offer them protection.

Examples of what you will learn in this program include:

  • Why sexual harassment is not about sex
  • How to protect and empower bystanders
  • Why the #MeToo backlash is a decoy
  • Strategies to create a respectful and inclusive workplace culture
Lauren’s presentation will also include findings from the survey she conducted in partnership with the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts: Survey of Workplace Conduct and Behaviors in Law Firms.
The recording is available to members in the Member Resource Center.

Creating Your Best Life In & Out of the Office: How Women Can Create Meaningful Goals & Live Without Regrets

Tuesday, September 17, 2019 1:00 – 2:00 pm EST

Featuring – Caroline Miller 

Hidden talents. Unused strengths. Unrealized goals. Women are often so busy meeting everyone else’s expectations that their own professional and personal goals get left behind.

Goal setting expert Caroline Adams Miller, author of Getting Grit, inspires women to put their innate strengths to use. She encourages women to become their authentic, ideal selves—not just who they feel they “ought” to be—and provides proven techniques to help them reach their full potential. In this fast-paced, energizing and research-based session, female leaders learn practical steps to create their best self in and out of the office, including how to:

– Identify strengths to increase success.

– Use the new science-based approach to set goals to achieve the best outcomes.
– Develop a supportive “web of influence”—women helping women.
– Build a culture of positive energizers.
– Cultivate a mindset of self-efficacy, resilience, optimism, and grit.