Navigating Tough Talks: Managing Challenges with Confidence

 Course Description​​

Effective leadership means having the conversations you’d rather avoid—and doing so with clarity, empathy, and confidence.

This course equips school leaders, department heads, and educators with the skills and strategies needed to navigate difficult conversations with parents, faculty, staff, and supervisors. Grounded in real-world school scenarios and built on a foundation of organizational psychology, this course demystifies conflict and offers a powerful framework for resolving it in healthy, productive ways.

Participants will learn to differentiate between delivering bad news and navigating conflict, use positional authority thoughtfully, and approach emotional conversations with both structure and empathy. Key topics include managing workplace dynamics up, down, and across; moving from opposition to cooperation; establishing professional boundaries; addressing bullying behavior; and staying grounded in a student-centered approach.

In a time marked by heightened expectations, social complexity, and constant change, this course provides school leaders with the tools to engage in hard conversations while preserving trust, dignity, and mission alignment.

Course Objectives

• Develop the confidence and clarity to lead high-intensity conversations with empathy, candor, and authority—whether with colleagues, your boss, or direct reports or parents and guardians.

• Apply actionable strategies for setting boundaries, delivering hard messages, and choosing when flexibility supports or undermines your school’s mission and values.

• Strengthen your leadership presence by building relational trust and addressing conflict in ways that promote a student-centered, collaborative school culture.

Course Facilitators