Susan E. Woods

Susan Woods specializes in learning, facilitation and consulting services for the workplace designed to assist organizations to improve outcomes through relationship building, conflict resolution and participatory change.

In the labor-management arena, she facilitated a series of labor-management workshops on customized topics such as Community, Change and Civility. Susan has over twenty years’ experience with interest-based bargaining training and negotiation facilitation for clients like Perry’s Ice Cream/UAW 686 Unit 18, Quaker Oats/RWDSU Local 110, and Southern California Gas UWUA 135 & ICW 995 (through Cornell University ILR). She worked with NYS DOT Region 6/PEF Labor-Management Committee to revitalize their initiatives.

Susan’s work with diversity and inclusion includes workforce-based awareness and leadership training as well as facilitation and consulting on the organizational change aspects of diversity and inclusion. Examples of past work include: leadership training – So. Nevada VA Healthcare System, City of Ithaca, National Grid; diversity awareness – NYS Governor’s Office of Employee Relations/PEF Communicating with Respect across Differences (through Cornell University ILR); diversity council facilitation – Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, American Society of Civil Engineers. She developed and delivered the diversity and inclusion train-the-trainer curriculum, Amplifying Membership Participation Equals Strength, AMPS, for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. From 1992 to 2002, she co-directed The Workplace Diversity Network (WDN). Through the network, she facilitated the development of a framework for organizational inclusion and is one of the developers of a validated organizational inclusion climate assessment. She has published practitioner articles on diversity and is featured in the Experts Forum of the Workforce Diversity Network.

Susan has been a presenter at national, state and regional diversity conferences. For the major portion of her career, Susan was a Senior Extension Faculty for Cornell University School of Labor and Industrial Relations, where she was affiliated with the Program for Employment and Workplace Systems, PEWS, and the Organizational Change Group. Her work at Cornell focused on the high performance workplace, organizational change, interest-based negotiation, and diversity and inclusion culture change. In her early years with Cornell, she organized public conferences to update the labor relations community on new workforce policy. In 2006, she left Cornell to form Henderson Woods, LLC. She continues to serve as adjunct faculty for Cornell University ILR where she teaches online labor studies courses in Unions and Diversity and Conflict Resolution.

Susan holds a M.S. in Labor Studies from the University of Massachusetts and a M.A. in Economics from Duke University. Prior to joining Cornell University ILR, she taught Economics on the undergraduate level at Smith College and Western New England College in Massachusetts.