I did my first Harvard development course this week and it was very enjoyable. The goal of the course was to bring some light on the importance of communication inside an organization.
On day one, we talked about the concept of Humble Inquiry. I even received an Ebook on the topic. The idea is that our culture is built around telling people information (rather than listening) and doing our best to act like we know everything. Organizations wrongfully promote the idea that if you know things then you must be more valuable than other people. This then causes us to feel the need to flaunt our knowledge so that we are seen by upper management. The issue with this culture is that it does not do a good job of building relationships because people do not usually like being told information. Humble Inquiry is about asking questions to empower those around us and focus more on building relationships because that will be more beneficial for us in the long run. We then broke out into breakout rooms where I got to speak to someone from New Jersey. She was a manager of advertising for a pharma company. We had a pretty candid conversation and we used up the whole 20 minutes just talking about our thoughts on how COVID changed the advertising industry and also how to communicate within our organization.
On day two, we talked about persuasion. We looked at emails and YouTube videos of people that were either successful or unsuccessful at persuading audiences. We looked at what these had in common and took away a list of common themes to assist when trying to persuade an audience to take our point of view. We were then given the assignment to prepare a presentation where we try to persuade a group of people.
On day three, we looked at how to write effectively and what to focus on when giving a presentation. Most of this was geared to Pre-COVID mentality, but overall it was still useful. My presentation was on a blog post that I had been working in my mind for a few months now on condemning actions rather than condemning people. Since the presentation had to be 2 minutes and I oftentimes find myself embellishing, I did not do a great job, but I enjoyed working with the group I was put with. We had a group of about 8 people and it seemed to be perfectly balanced between men and women. I am now reflecting if that was intentional or not given what we did the fourth day.
On the final day, we talked about gender differences in communication. We read a pretty outdated article on how when we are younger, boys and girls typically learn how to communicate differently because of the gender roles they are assigned. Most people disagreed that this idea did not apply in recent years. I think I believe that it is more of a personality thing. If parents are willing to raise their children to exist outside of the ‘boys bottle their emotions’ and ‘girls must know their place’ then I think we break the mold a bit.
Overall, I feel it was worth it for me. I think that if or when I become a manager, I’d like to promote these kinds of classes and further education. Not sure if my current employer is about it or not. It seems like for the most part they are focused on earning degrees, but I could see a benefit for these week-long types of courses. My next step is for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate. I think the two ideas will play quite nicely off each other.
