Manage Difficult Conversations
It’s Hard to Co-Create a Future Without Difficult Conversations
Benefits
People are often concerned about having a difficult conversation because they’re worried that the other party will react defensively. Once mastered, though, this skill increases trust, reveals blind spots, creates opportunity for growth, and is a career stretch that makes leaders.
What This Workshop is About
Being able to manage a difficult conversation is an essential leadership skill. Done right, you can maintain good relationships and inspire cooperation. Disagreements don’t disappear when they’re ignored. They need to be dealt with in a way that achieves the desired result, keeps the relationship intact, and strengthens the organization.
This interactive short-course gives participants practical tips, tools, and strategies to make it easier to handle difficult conversations. Participants learn how to prepare for a difficult conversation, how to get the conversation off to the best possible start, how to manage emotions, and how to end the conversation with a positive outcome. In this course we cover,
How the brain works in a feedback conversation.
What parts of emotional intelligence to manage.
How to plan for the conversation.
How to manage three critical kinds of conversations, a coaching conversation, a negotiation conversation, and a confronting conversation.
Who This Course is For
Team leaders, program managers, supervisors, and executives – anyone who is accountable for bringing problems to the surface and then intervene to make things better.
What is unique in this course?
This practical, hands-on workshop teaches immediately applicable tools, templates, and proven practices to plan real-life difficult conversations. We examine what brain research teaches about people’s resistance to accept messages and then use that insight as an entry point to design and manage a conversation using dialog, mediation, and collaborative negotiation skills.
What You Can Expect in All Our Workshops
Teaching Model
We use a Tell → Show → Do → Teach-Back Model
Tell: We present what we know about the skills being taught.
Show: We demonstrate how the skills are applied through lecture, exercises, facilitated discussion, etc.
Do: We have participants practice the skills using team assignments, role plays, mock activities, etc.
Teach-Back: We wrap up topics with peer-to-peer and instructor advice on how to apply the new skills in the real-world.
How We Present This Material
We come to you and present at your work site or offer remote teaching using Internet sharing tools when appropriate. We use discussion, exercises, lecture, and mock exercises to combine our experience with your staff’s experience and create a dynamic, fun, and highly interactive training.
Transform Your Staff
Learning is not complete until there is application. We ask participants to discuss how they can maintain the momentum in their organization after we, as trainers, leave. We also share our ideas on how to form ‘Master Mind’ groups and other supports so participants have a community of knowledgeable peers who can help one another successfully apply the skills after the course. We also make ourselves available after the event for short consultations for brainstorming solutions, problem solving, etc. for free.
Customization
Depending on the audience and your specific goals for the event, we will tailor the program to increase its relevance and value. While each of our programs is designed as a specific, interactive training session, we can provide anything from a one-hour keynote presentation to the full event and we can provide greater emphasis on the topics that you think are most valuable.