Student Life Coaching Circles

In this one-hour coaching circle, we’ll share practical strategies and real-world insights to help you effectively navigate internal complexity and external collaboration. You will walk away with actionable approaches to strengthen your unit’s impact and stakeholder relationships.

Sensemaking is about slowing down to understand what's really going on in complex or confusing situations. It helps you spot patterns, explore different perspectives, and see how things are shifting or staying the same. By making some sense of the messy stuff, you can make clearer, more confident decisions—even when things feel uncertain.

Change and uncertainty can be hard, exciting, and every reaction in between. Knowing your own approach and experience with change is important, as is your capacity to withstand staff dissatisfaction and disapproval. This coaching circle will explore the challenges to alignment, including the understandable (but often unattainable) desire for consensus, and ways in which the needs of leaders and their teams are sometimes at odd with the organizational mission, vision, and values.

Collaboration is part of what makes U-M such a dynamic place, but we all know it can be tricky at times. This coaching circle is a chance to talk openly about what helps collaboration thrive—and what can get in the way. Bring your questions, challenges, and experiences, and we’ll work together to uncover practical approaches for making collaboration smoother and more effective across our campus.

The conversation will focus on students and our ability to support what they've learned in the classroom, and how to create a learning lab within your office to support and engage. We can talk about offering students jobs/internships and how to solicit large projects (Master's Thesis or MAP work) to colleges like SEAS, Ross School of Business, UMSI, and others.

In this coaching conversation, we’ll explore ways to apply Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering principles to our professional staff interactions. We’ll focus especially on the importance of being a thoughtful host and building a sense of community. Practical strategies from Parker’s framework will guide our discussion, including setting clear purposes, creating inclusivity, and fostering meaningful connections. We’ll reflect on how staff can go beyond logistics to design gatherings that build trust and engagement among colleagues. Bring your own experiences to share, and leave with actionable ideas for strengthening our staff community.