A career conversation with your mentor-manager is essentially a negotiation. It's a time to discuss your career path, what types of support your mentor-manager is willing and able to offer, and the level of productivity they'll need to see to continue to support you. Using best practices from Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Stone, Patton, Heen and Fisher), participants will go through the steps of preparing for a negotiation (including identifying conversational goals and concerns about the conversation, assessing their research mentor's position and preferences, etc.), brainstorm different conversational tactics for each stage of a negotiation (including opening the conversation, negotiating different issues, coming to agreement and ending a conversation) and consider steps post-conversation.
- Workshop participants will come away with strategies to:
- Identify the steps to prepare for a career conversation
- Consider how your mentor-manager would prefer to have this conversation
- Develop talking points to keep the conversation on track
- Discuss how to open, have and exit the conversation
- Identify strategies if a conversation becomes contentious
- Describe next steps post-conversation(s)
Presenter: Naledi Saul, MPM, Director, UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development
- Workshop
- Bio and Chemical Technologies
