Feedback and Difficult Conversations: Communication Skills for Farmers

Wednesday, March 15, 2023, 11:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Building great relationships and motivating farm employees are important aspects of a successful operation. Many farm management challenges are outside a farmer’s control. Managing and motivating the team doesn’t have to be.

Feedback is a tool that most farm managers don’t know how to use well and possibly haven’t thought that much about. On top of that, many farm managers aren’t comfortable receiving feedback—positive or negative. And many avoid difficult conversations in hopes that the issues will go away. In any business, giving and receiving feedback and dealing with difficult conversations is hard. Becoming skillful at these conversations can strengthen your ability to create and sustain successful teams, which is essential for achieving outstanding performance on a farm. Meaningful feedback helps employees and farm managers understand what they’re doing well and know when they need to change to improve their effectiveness in meeting workplace goals.

The skills presented here are learnable. The workshop will be interactive and experiential. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Workshop will include:

Key mindset shift for successful feedback

Getting clear on purpose

Challenge of defensiveness and what we can do

Transforming blame and criticism to consideration

Preparing for difficult conversations

Instructor Bio:

Claudia Kenny: Co Director, NYS Agricultural Mediation Program

Claudia brings over 25 years’ experience as a farmer and food system activist working on agriculture related projects with diverse stakeholders in the Hudson Valley. She and her husband own and operate Little Seed Gardens, a 97 acres family farm in Chatham, NY. As a farmer Claudia is aware of the economic and social challenges and stressors unique to farming.

Claudia holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Analysis and Engagement with a concentration in environmental conflicts. She is a trained mediator & facilitator, passionate lifelong student, and teacher of Compassionate Communication. She brings empathy and understanding to her work in the farm community and years of process expertise in helping people with challenging conflicts.

Free, including a locally sourced lunch. Please register at link below.

NOTE: This course is capped at 20 participants.