University of Washington Human Resources

Facilitator Catherine Bachy discusses her Challenge of Allyship class with a past participant in this 4-minute video. The class will next be offered in January 2022.

A few words about Mindfulness and Leadership

Make a better tomorrow! Plan now for skill-building, targeted learning and career development in 2021 with live online and self-paced workshops designed for UW staff and leaders. NEW: Human-Centered Design for Innovation and Creative Problem Solving examines involving people’s perspective, prototyping solutions and adapting during times of change. Other winter leadership offerings include Core Strengths — Results Through Relationships, Managing Employee Performance and Interviewing Job Candidates

Just released, the UW Staff Demographic Baseline Report focuses on data points for select staff employment categories and includes contextual information about each unique data set. This report was created to establish a baseline that will allow for reviewing our progress year over year, and the data included provides the opportunity to accomplish workforce planning and related efforts in response to the University of Washington Diversity Blueprint.

Join Catherine Bachy and Jeff Leinaweaver for a 10-minute guided meditation session at noon starting October 26 and continuing daily through November 6. This meditation session will have you calm, focused, and empowered for the rest of the day. Learn more.

By Josina Garnham, Training & Organizational Development Consultant How can you contribute to employee engagement? As a manager within the UW community, you are uniquely positioned to create conditions in which people feel fully engaged. In fact, recent research from Gallup (2018) found that “the quality of the manager is the single most significant factor in your organization’s long-term success. It’s you, as the manager, and the relationships you cultivate with your employees that create an inclusive and productive workplace, and Professional & Organizational Development has created tools to support you in this area. Why now? This year has brought a unique and powerful set of challenges that have impacted workforces across the globe. At a time when tension and anxiety are running high and employees may be balancing a host of responsibilities, many of us are not experiencing in-person interactions that foster positive working relationships. Now more than ever, we need increased connection and communication. Managers need to create space for open conversations where employees can share their needs and aspirations authentically. We need to let each person we work with know that they are seen, heard and cared for. In support of these aims, Professional & Organizational Development has created an Employee Experience Toolkit and a set of wrap-around resources for managers to use in skillfully holding thoughtful and intentional conversations with their employees. How do you get started using the toolkit? Start by familiarizing yourself with the toolkit — even if just scanning it page by page — in its entirety. The toolkit is designed to ...

Watch a one-hour Zoom session facilitated by POD’s Josina Garnham and Jeff Leinaweaver. Whether you regularly work from home or are new to teleworking, brush up on some best practices for working effectively from home, how to manage and facilitate remote meetings, and how to work collaboratively in a remote context. Sign up for free spring Leadership Fast Track sessions.

In this challenging time, POD is offering a series of free one-hour Zoom sessions to provide leaders with just-in-time tools, tips and strategies. Register to join us: Managing Change in a Turbulent World on March 18, Working Remotely on March 25, and Building Resilience and Personal Synergy on April 1. UPDATE: These workshops are also being offered in spring quarter, on April 8, April 15, and April 22, respectively.

According to POD consultant Josina Garnham, “Leadership is always an adventure, and not without its share of risks. The beautiful thing is that once we take a risk, we expand our capacities to lead in the future.”

Partnership for Organizational Excellence consultant Catherine Bachy talks about the leadership and team building lessons found in The Boys in the Boat.

Join Keya Burks, organizational excellence partner with POD’s newly formed Partnership for Organizational Excellence (POE), for a 90-minute workshop on succession planning that utilizes the Succession Planning Toolkit developed by UW Human Resources. Register now for the September 10 workshop, or mark your calendar for the October 24 workshop (autumn quarter registration opens August 19).

Training & Organizational Development Consultant Josina Garnham shares leadership-oriented summer reading recommendations.

Senior consultant Jeff Leinaweaver explores storytelling and the constructive and destructive roles it can play in our lives and organizations.  

Catherine Bachy, Organizational Excellence Partner Leadership can be a lonely venture. Whether early in a career or after many years of experience, leaders inevitably develop blind spots in their awareness and in their effectiveness, yet the dynamics of authority and power sometimes get in the way of receiving honest feedback. A 360-degree assessment can be a vital tool in discovering what’s working and what’s not. As the name suggests, 360 assessments rely on collecting feedback from people all around you, which may include staff, stakeholders, customers and the person or people you report to. It’s good to know what you’re doing well, where you are innately skillful, where you are brilliant! It’s also important to know where the shadows of your leadership style lurk. What are your blind spots? Where might you be getting in our own way? Thinking about receiving this level or type of feedback makes some people feel anxious. I like to remind leaders that asking for feedback via a 360 assessment is a sign of courage and dedication to excellence. It models ongoing professional integrity and the willingness to invest in continuous learning and development. POD’s UW ARC 360 program is designed to keep the leader in the driver seat of their learning and development. We offer guidelines on how to assemble a balanced group of raters to give you feedback. Responses to an online survey are collected anonymously and synthesized into a report that focuses on how you are doing against a set of leadership competencies. Once your ARC ...

Recommended by Catherine Bachy, Organizational Excellence Analyst, UW Professional & Organizational Development Overwhelmed by change? This engaging, seven minute video summarizes the key points of the Heath brothers’ popular book on change. Delight in the graphic storyboard review and refresh your toolkit on how to manage change for yourself and your team. For a deeper dive and real world examples and tips on how to navigate change, read the book. And if you don’t have time to read the whole book, check out these free resources offered by the authors (registration required). Also, take note that The Learning Lab, offered through POD for UW leaders and staff, includes the entire Switch audiobook, as well as a 9-minute audio summary and 4-minute book summary. Subscriptions to this online platform run through the end of the year.

Self-awareness is, arguably, one of the most important traits for a leader. In a recent blog post, consultant, speaker, trainer and coach Dan Oestreich writes that “whatever we must be creates a blind spot because, as good as we are, we cannot fulfill our preferred self-image all the time. In turn, this creates an inability to see our full personal impact on others…” Dan is a member of the University Consulting Alliance. Read his full blog post here, and learn more about him through his Alliance profile.

  Recommended by Catherine Bachy, Organizational Excellence Analyst, UW Professional & Organizational Development What does it take to build and sustain a successful team? This short New York Times article (5 minute read time) highlights key actions for leaders and team members. Top among these: ( 1) Create a clear road map to answer the questions, “Where are we going and how are we going to get there?” (2) Agree on shared milestones and a scorecard for how to measure success, and (3) Be specific about the values and behaviors that your team agrees to live by. No matter how good you believe you are as a team, it’s always useful to review these key principles to sustain high performing teams.

In this six-minute video, Assistant Vice President Ujima Donalson shares insights about her career path and leadership milestones. https://youtu.be/MmXc7if0H-o  

Being a learning organization within a larger learning organization means that we and our partners are often tapped to be interviewed or to contribute articles. Here are a few from 2018: Gayle Johnson, an external trainer who taught the new class Creating an Inclusive Workplace Through Emotional Intelligence for POD last fall, shares tips with UW Medicine Right as Rain on not irritating your coworkers. Pierre Khawand, productivity expert and founder of POD webinar vendor People-OnTheGo, presents five empowering — and practical — habits  for increasing your effectiveness at work. POD’s own Lynne Lazaroff acts as the subject-matter expert in this UW Medicine Right as Rain article on dealing with conflict in the workplace.

  Through our University Consulting Alliance, we partner with carefully vetted external consultants who are approved by UW Purchasing and who Increase our ability to offer affordable, experienced, apt, and available consultants for UW clients. For the fall issue of The Leading Edge, we asked three members of the University Consulting Alliance to contribute articles. Jean Smithson-Bell wrote about strategies for making change easier, Wally Wilkins offered suggestions for dealing with obstacles and making mistakes more gracefully, and Helene Cho highlighted the importance of organizational and team visions.