Navigating your skilled relationships within the workplace might be quite the challenge, especially with the ever-changing landscapes of today’s workforce. But whether you’re working from home, within the office; whether you’re ready of leadership or ready of support, you never really stop learning tips on how to grow in your interactions together with your co-workers.

In the course of the ESSENCE E-Suite experience on the 2022 ESSENCE Festival of Culture, Walt Disney Outreach & Engagement Director Dayna Lee unpacked this very topic in an enticing conversation alongside Walt Disney Senior Vice President & Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton, Walt Disney Senior Vice President Carmen Smith, and Walt Disney Studios Vice President Jan Coleman.

Keep scrolling below to ascertain out 4 things we learned from the panel about constructing authentic relationships within the workplace, after which take a look at the video above to listen to the conversation in full.

For more of the whole lot you missed on the 2022 ESSENCE Festival of Culture, visit our official video content hub HERE.

Find Your Tribe
“At work, I kind of search out tribes,” Latondra says. “We created this group that we call the 5 Heartbeats and, there are five women of color who get together and travel together, call one another to complain about whatever, rejoice one another and it’s only a tribe that I don’t know what I might do without.”

Be A Leader Who Helps Your Team Unlock Their Full Potential
“I feel within the goodness of individuals and that folks need to rise to their full potential, but you’ve to unlock it,” Latonra says. “So, I feel like I spend most of my time working with leaders and other people across the country just unlocking their potential.”

Listen
“I actually have learned that listening to my team may be very vital and I feel it’s a really under-utilized characteristic,” Jan says. “I feel plenty of times as leaders, you’re feeling like you’ve to point out up and be the loudest person within the room and the one actually coming up with the solutions but, I actually have learned to be a frontrunner and show up for my team by just learning tips on how to take heed to what they’re saying and what they’re not saying. And plenty of times, what that has done for my team is de facto teach them tips on how to problem-solve. It doesn’t must be the way in which that I do something; it might be the way in which that you simply do it and it really works as well.”

Take An Intentional Approach To Mentorship
“Mentorship, I feel it never ends,” Carmen says. “But, I feel it’s also vital to make sure that that we now have some agency even in that and we will select mentors which have the attributes and the abilities that we would like to have in our lives.”