Event Details

Featured Presenter: Sharon Steed

North Star SHRM will be hosting a virtual seminar titled: Driving Inclusion with Empathy. This is a virtual presentation via Zoom on Wednesday, January 10, 2024, from 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. 

The workforce is more diverse than ever, yet the way we interact with each other does not always reflect these ethnic and cultural differences. Navigating a world where we must constantly engage emotions, opinions, and ideas that we do not always understand or agree with does not have to be impossible. In fact, it can be beneficial to team productivity, innovation, creativity, and overall company success. This talk shows HR professionals how to create, build and maintain organizational inclusion by engaging in everyday empathy behaviors.

Keynote speaker Sharon Steed offers a fresh take on how to make empathy actionable as a person who stutters; she uses her speech impediment – and the funny, difficult and life-long lessons it taught her – to teach HR professionals how to define empathy as individuals and as organizations and the key empathy behaviors required to build inclusive cultures.

Learning objectives:

1. Identify and examine the potential biases that are impacting their ability to be effective communicators
2. How to give feedback from a place of empowerment and receive feedback from a place of support
3. Determine the difference between sympathy and empathy
4. Use the key empathy behaviors to take empathy from an idea to an action that attendees can integrate seamlessly into their day.

Our presenter, Sharon Steed:

Sharon Steed is an international keynote speaker, author, and founder of Communilogue, a corporate empathy and communications consultancy. She is a subject matter expert on empathy at work, and she teaches teams and organizations the key empathy behaviors necessary to retain top talent and improve individual and team performance. Sharon has spoken at companies and conferences in 18 countries spanning five continents, with a focus on improving team communication and collaboration through engaging empathy and vulnerability as a professional asset. She has given a TEDx talk on empowering insecurities. A lifelong stutterer, Sharon uses her speech impediment to both teach what empathy is and to inspire audiences to engage in empathy actions daily. An author and course instructor for O'Reilly Media, Inc., her eBook Empathy at Work is available in the O’Reilly library. Sharon’s LinkedIn Learning course "Communicating with Empathy" has been translated to over a dozen languages; it has over 7500,000 views. A Midwest, USA native, she currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA.