Tessa West

Most of us spend more time at work interacting with our colleagues and bosses than we do with our close relationship partners. But few of us actually learn effective strategies for having healthy workplace relationships, including how to manage conflict.

In this dynamic talk, psychologist and author Tessa West teaches you how to prevent, detect, and address conflict across five common workplace situations:

• working with bosses who micromanage;
• working with coworkers who free-ride off of others;
• giving and granting credit for ideas and hard work in teams;
• decision-making in teams in which all members have a voice;
• and “complaining up” to bosses or managers about coworkers with whom one has conflict.

A practical, engaging speaker, Tessa provides hands-on strategies that will help you develop a healthy culture of workplace relationships, teaching people how to effectively manage conflict early and often, and and create structures for healthy team decision-making. This talk is vital for leaders looking to build healthy cultures at work and for individuals looking to improve their own skills at relationship building and conflict management. Audiences will walk away equipped and encouraged to communicate well at work and at home.

One of the toughest challenges organizations face is preventing leaks in the talent pipeline: understanding why employees are unhappy, and in turn, predicting who is most likely to disengage and start looking for jobs elsewhere. Dr. Tessa West studied the experiences of thousands of employees, bosses, and hiring experts to write Job Therapy—a book that offers a fresh perspective on why some people leave their jobs, and others are able to turn things around and find happiness where they are. This talk is for organizations looking for concrete guidance on how to hire and retain top talent, promote from within, and ultimately, stop the leaky talent pipeline.

In this talk, you will first learn to identify the 5 main sources of employee unhappiness at work that if left unaddressed, lead people to quit:

1. feeling like you no longer identify with the organization (having an “identity crisis”);
2. task switching so much at work that you can barely keep your head above water (being “stretched too thin”);
3. feeling left behind in a rapidly evolving workplace (feeling “drifted apart” from your job);
4. failing to land a promotion or raise and not understanding why (being a “runner up”);
5. feeling like the workplace is taking advantage of your expertise, and not compensating you for it (feeling like an “underappreciated star”).

Then you’ll learn how to treat these 5 main sources of unhappiness with a rich array of strategies. These strategies include communication guides designed to close the knowledge gap between what employees think they should be doing and what they actually should be doing, concrete guides for networking (whom people should network with, and what they should ask of these connections), and hands-on tips for task-switching smartly. Tips on how to structure the office in a way that reduces unnecessary interruptions, are also included.

This talk includes teaching tools and self-assessments that participants can bring back to their teams. For organizations looking to improve their interview strategy, it also includes interview guides designed to create healthy, honest interview conversations that leave no stone unturned. This talk can also be given as a workshop.

Organizations often struggle with helping employees improve their performance, and consequently, fostering innovation. Often, a culture of overly nice feedback is to blame. Many of us avoid giving critical yet essential feedback to avoid the anxiety and discomfort that comes along with having tough conversations. But that fear is holding our organizations back from true growth and creativity—and we can fix it.

Dr. Tessa West has spent 20 years researching how people communicate and how we deal with conflict. In this talk, she reveals the surprising ways in which anxiety shapes how we behave and the impressions we create, and then provides an actionable guide for creating a culture of healthy feedback in any organization. A charismatic and practical speaker, she offers strategies for getting more comfortable with conflict, giving tough feedback the right way, and ultimately fostering stronger and more innovative teams across your organization.

Getting inside the minds of others is critical for maintaining healthy relationships, negotiating good outcomes, and managing teams, but it requires effective perspective taking. Unfortunately, our attempts at reading other people often go wrong more than we realize. While we may think we know what other people are thinking and feeling, our best attempts at mind reading often fail. Leveraging insights from decades of her research on interpersonal communication, Dr. Tessa West explains why we often fail to read people accurately, and the concrete steps we can take to become better at reading one another.