Igniting Learning with a Story: Compliment – Can’t a person compliment a woman anymore?!

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We continue to create Vignettes – short, succinct, micro-scenarios – to help you with an example on how you can use stories to ignite and provoke learners to interact and learn.

The Vignette “Compliment” revolves around officemates, Roxanne and Tim. Roxanne has been , oftentimes, uncomfortable to the point of feeling violated whenever Tim compliments her. Tim contends that his remarks are completely devoid of malice.

When is a compliment not just a compliment? Is Tim guilty of sexual harassment? Is Roxanne simply paranoid? Listen to their conversation and let us know your thoughts.

How to Use the Vignette

While the situation presented is specific, this vignette covers a wide range of topics to include conflict-resolution, work ethics and other management-related issues. Use this vignette to spark learner interest in your training session, show it as part of your lessons or utilize it as a post-training test. Face-to-face or online, this vignette is intended to push your learners to the EDGE!

Vignettes have proven to be powerful stimuli in classroom training, eLearning activities and even in social learning communities. Click here to preview “Compliment – Can’t any person even compliment a woman anymore?!



This is part of our continuing new series of Vignettes designed for Story Impacts.

These provocative vignettes are for your use, with our compliments.

In next week’s vignette, “Do You Think Age is a Problem?” – A case of age discrimination, a company production manager investigates if a supervisor is guilty of age discrimination. When does a remark or question amount to discrimination? In day-to-day decision making and selection of the right person for a job can be tricky business especially in the hands of inexperienced or new managers – even for existing ones with possible biases. Where does one draw the fine line between the ability of someone to perform job requirements and age? What dangers are posed by certain assumptions about job requirements and possibly ignoring basic employee rights?

Join us and let us know how you like the vignettes. We sincerely appreciate your thoughts. If you have any suggestions , improvements or topics of interest to you, please let us know.

Ray Jimenez, PhD

Vignettes Learning”Helping Learners Learn Their Way”