The Art and Science of Professional Relationships: The Practice of Repair

What options do we have when professional relationships threaten to inhibit our growth rather than promote it? We will discuss options and strategies for salvaging less effective relationships, and for repairing ones that feel broken. Participants will learn frameworks for difficult conversations, conflict management, boundary setting, and repairing relationships while maintaining professionalism and psychological safety.

This workshop is the fourth in a series, The Art and Science of Professional Relationships: Evidence-Based Practices for Graduate Student Success. 

Professional relationships are as important as ideas in graduate education, contributing to student learning, research development, personal wellbeing, and career success. This workshop series offers students a reflective, collegial space and evidence-based tools for building productive relationships with mentors, graduate faculty, research collaborators, and peers. The series fulfills Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training and also integrates frameworks from the relationship-based helping professions of therapy and professional coaching. 

Learning outcomes. Participants will: 

• Gain an appreciation for professional relationship-building as an essential learned practice;  
• Understand the attributes of healthy professional relationships, including reciprocity, mutual positive regard, and trust; 
• Develop effective practices to support relationship-building, including self-reflection, initiating connection, and active listening;
• Acquire a range of tested frameworks and tools to support-relationship building;
• Emerge feeling more confident and competent about building professional relationships  

Each in-person session will be two hours long, and lunch will be provided. Facilitators: Yan Li, Associate Dean for Graduate Programs; and Maria Wisdom, Assistant Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.

Attending this workshop earns participants 2 hours of RCR credit. You must arrive on time and stay through the entire workshop. For questions regarding RCR credit, please contact the RCR team at grad-rcr@duke.edu.