Dr. Stacey Pearson-Wharton

The Path to Anti-Racism: Supporting your African American/Black Employees

Scholars have studied the most common challenges that African American and Black employees face in predominantly White workplaces. The microaggressions faced by people of color include but are not limited to being overlooked for advancement, being asked if someone can touch their hair and, passive questions of their qualifications to be in spaces. These challenges commonly lead to employee stress that interrupts productivity, employee disengagement, bound creativity, and ultimately attrition of employees. All of these problems can impact a company’s bottom line and its ability to attract and keep customers.

In the program, Dr. Stacey Pearson-Wharton explores concrete and practical ways to support Black employees. She uses the framework of employee engagement and anti-racism to help companies create inclusive and high-functioning teams. Using stories captured from her podcast, Being the Dot, Dr. Stacey provides real life examples to shed light on these challenges that exist in all workplaces.

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• Learn concrete ways they can better support Black employees
• Learn how to be an ally and supporter of groups and individuals with marginalized identities
• Learn ways to help marginalized groups share their story and feel included in the greater community
• Learn tools that can help different communities thrive in an environment where they may not be part of the majority population.

Ideal Audience:

This Program is Perfect For

• People of Color Employee Resource Groups 
• Individuals interested in building a more inclusive workforce

When Intent Doesn’t Equal Impact: Healing Relationships in the Wake of Offense

When we watch the news, it seems like there’s always a hate bias incident happening. These racist, sexist, or homophobic acts need to be addressed, but are we tiptoeing around difficult conversations, too afraid that we might do something wrong or make things worse? Can workplaces breathe life into social justice frameworks without stepping in multicultural “poo”? Sowing the seeds of diversity can be challenging.

This program helps campuses and individuals deal with everything from minor weeds (like microaggressions) to hate bias incidents by teaching tools to heal ruptures, listen without being defensive, apologize unconditionally, and manage fears of saying or doing the wrong thing.

Attendees/Participants will gain the skills needed to help cultivate a more inclusive and socially just community.

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• that everyone will someday experience a time when their personal bias negatively impacts someone else despite their best intentions.
• Ways to heal ruptures created when well-intentioned people say and do dumb things,
• How to hear, listen, and accept someone’s apology if and when they experience a microaggression.
• Offer windows of hope, healing, and help despite the complexities and arduous work need to create an inclusive campus environment.

Ideal Audience:

This Program is Perfect For

• Leaders and employee that a part of diversity team
• Individuals leading  High Impact Anti-racist teams
• Individuals who want to increase productivity and understanding within organizational teams

Difficult Dialogue in a Divided World

Over the last few years, the art of debate has become pure vitriol in our country. From the national political stage down to discussion in the hallways of office environments, we are struggling with how to disagree with civility. When people are engaging in disagreement, they often fail to listen and are unwilling to respect the different opinion. Moreover, people are turning to social media and protest as the vehicle to debate without having face to face conversations.

In this program, Dr. Stacey Pearson Wharton gives participants the tools they need to have authentic, healthy conversations about the “scary stuff” like racism, homophobia, sexism, religion and politics. This program helps systems and individuals by teaching tools to approach difficult topics, listen without being defensive, and manage fears of saying, or doing the wrong thing. Attendees will gain the skills they need to help cultivate a more inclusive and socially just workplace.

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• How to understand the difference between dialogue and debate
• Radical listening skills
• The behaviors that are healthy dialogue instigators

Ideal Audience:

This Program is Perfect For

• Teams that thrive on managing distance 
• Teams that will benefit from increase communications
• Teams in crisis 

Using Stress and Anxiety as Tools of Productivity

The chronic “too-muchness” of life today has increased stress and anxiety more than ever before. This keynote offers tools to help your team members manage and tame stress and learn how to use stress as a productivity booster.

Dr. Pearson-Wharton’s interactive techniques will reveal the difference between productive motivational stress and problematic anxiety, and offer strategies for training a baby dragon before it becomes a full-blown monster.

The discussion will also challenge the cultural mindset around the virtues of being stressed. Your team members will become their own mental health champions and learn to support the people they care about who may be facing anxiety. By taming their stress dragons and finding inner peace, your team members will be on the road to finding “happily ever after.”

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• How to tackle anxiety and develop skills and concrete tools to reduce and manage their stress.
• Methods to increase their performance in their academics and organizations.
• The importance of working together as a community to support and help each other with stress and anxiety.

One Thing You Can Do To Be More Anti-Racist: Lessons from BIPOC

The George Floyd murder and subsequent civil unrest thereafter was an awakening about White privilege and allyship. There were questions about how to be Anti-racist including the appropriate actions, processes, and thoughts.  After interviewing more than 50 people for the podcast ‘Being the Dot’, Dr. Pearson-Wharton report on what African Americans believe is the ONE thing that White people can do to be more Anti-racist, and what can be done to make their environments more inclusive and less racist.

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• Action steps to interrupt oppressive in our daily lives.
• Practical wisdom on how to recognize racism and other forms of oppression.
• Understanding of “Nice Racism” and its role in managing intergroup relationships.

Getting Back Up After a Failure

People are experiencing high levels of anxiety in unprecedented numbers. A huge factor in this experience of anxiety is a fear of making errors or mistakes—in essence, the fear of failure. This keynote will help individuals face their fear of failure and normalize their reaction to it. Attendees will learn concrete skills to increase distress tolerance and resiliency that will allow them to “take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.” No one likes the feeling of failure.

Once we are able to acknowledge that this experience is an inevitable, yet temporary, part of our lives, we can begin to alleviate the negative feelings associated with this state and embrace failure as an essential ingredient in achieving success in life. Learning the proven, practical and concrete skills that this program offers will help lower anxiety and feelings of distress, and can be applied in any situation.

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT:

• How failure (and learning from it) is the path to success and is an important and inevitable part of life.
• How to understand better how to analyze a risk, and make rational decisions based on the real pros and cons of a particular situation, without allowing the fear of failure to sabotage the decision-making process.
• Practical skills to negotiate and mitigate distress and failure.