We can help people in your organization:

• Build effective mediation and facilitation skills
• Mediate complex cases and multi-party disputes
• Deal with power imbalances
• Address harassment issues in mediation
• Handle people who lie or are not forthcoming in mediations
• Plan and implement a dispute resolution system, modifying the model appropriately for your organization
• Handle inflammatory conduct, difficult personalities, and emotional people
• Deal with gender issues in mediation
• Facilitate communications in a charged atmosphere
• Maintain and build relationships
• Transition from interests to options
• Help parties craft appropriate settlement agreements that are stable, clear and enforceable
• Mediate distributive problems (a fixed pie) when parties do not desire an ongoing relationship
• Close the gaps between parties and move them through closure
• Mediate legal disputes, workplace issues, and other issues
• Mediate when lawyers are present
• Manage confidentiality concerns
• Facilitate in contexts where settlement is not the goal (e.g. group consultations)
• Encourage reluctant people to use ADR

We can help people in your organization:

• Use interests, options and standards of legitimacy to get better results and persuade others
• Become more powerful negotiators and not be taken advantage of
• Prepare for complex negotiations, sometimes involving multiple parties
• Become better salespeople
• Better understand and achieve their goals in negotiations
• Deal with difficult people and tactics in negotiations (e.g., positional/hard bargainers, power imbalances, emotional situations)
• Understand and recognize different negotiation styles and know how to deal with them
• Communicate effectively and listen interactively
• Create value for your organization by negotiating better deals
• Build and maintain long term relationships better
• Know when to say yes, when to keep bargaining, and when to walk away
• Strategize effectively to maximize results

We can help people in your organization:

• Analyze and prepare for the difficult conversations they face
• Recognize and anticipate the six primary challenges in difficult conversations
• Understand their own triggers and hot buttons to enhance their self-control
• Deliver difficult messages to co-workers, clients, suppliers and others
• Deal with an array of challenging personalities and situations with assurance
• Say no, when required, in ways that minimize relationship harm
• Enter challenging conversations with confidence using templates that are flexible and effective
• Develop a range of preparation tools and approaches, from the quick and dirty prep for day to day issues to a complex review for more important conversations
• Deal with bullies in the workplace
• Respond effectively to unreasonable demands
• Repair workplace relationships
• Overcome the fear and anxiety that leads them to avoid difficult topics or people
• Manage difficult emotional situations
• Minimize the loss of productivity and morale caused by interactions that were handled badly or conflicts that were avoided and allowed to fester

Managing a workplace requires significant skill to get the best from your staff. The challenge today is to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers. Managers need the skills to motivate a diverse and highly skilled workforce.

To do that, you will need to be able to recognize and understand different personality types. You can then apply that knowledge to motivate and retain employees.

We can design a workshop to help you mine the potential of your employees and turn that potential into performance so that you increase productivity and increase workplace satisfaction.

We can help your managers within your organization:

• Learn how to identify specific talents within their staff
• Motivate employees to achieve their best results
• Communicate information effectively
• Improve team performance by using everyone’s strengths
• Have difficult conversations when things don’t go as planned

Customer service representatives, clerks, and complaints departments deal with members of the public who are dissatisfied with the organization’s services or products. We have designed workshops to assist customer service representatives, complaint handlers, and their front line managers, in both the public and private sector. We give people a simple but effective model that allows them to respond effectively to irate, upset and even abusive customers, whether in person or on the phone. In the workshops, participants learn how to identify and manage strong emotional responses on both sides and how to resolve the underlying issues brought to them. We provide tips, tools and techniques to use when they have to engage difficult people.

Participants leave the workshop with the ability to manage their jobs with greater skill, increased confidence and less stress.

We will help you:

• Give your front line staff the practical tools and techniques they need to manage challenging customer conversations and complaints more effectively and with less potential damage to the relationship
• Save your company money by improving customer satisfaction, loyalty and company image
• Turn potentially difficult front line conversations into productive exchanges
• Minimize unnecessary escalation of disputes
• Lower the stress in such customer disputes on both sides
• Give jaded front-line staff a new perspective on customer service
• Standardize an effective customer response model across your team
• Showcase the image of your organization as respectful and responsive to clients, while getting results that are fair to you
• Allow your staff to deliver hard messages and say no, when required, in ways that minimize damage to client relationships
• Choose the optimal customer response from our helpful checklist of options

Our coaching workshops give your staff the coaching skills to complement their managerial skills, allowing them to extract the very best from their teams and maximize performance. The coaching skillset will allow them to empower employees and get buy-in to growth and development in core areas. We have developed effective coaching pathways for the four main kinds of coaching conversations that managers tend to face. Our coaching model is practical and flexible, attuned to the realities of the workplace. We help your managers approach their staff with a more facilitative coaching mindset that brings out the very best in both your top employees and the ones that need the most help.

We can help you:

• Get the most from your people by building on their potential
• Use coaching to improve individual and overall organizational effectiveness
• Apply a consistent coaching approach across your organization
• Improve skills and fill gaps in under-performers
• Develop talent and do development planning in your good performers as well
• Help your own staff to better manage conflict situations and challenging people
• Increase accountability in all of your staff
• Develop your staff’s ability to coach others to make better decisions, and design and implement plans for continued growth and development
• Empower your employees to improve and change for the better
• Keep employees on track and encourage follow through so that doable plans are created and then implemented
• Develop managers who can confidently deal with a range of conflicts and people more effectively
• Give your managers the confidence they need to undertake good coaching conversations and apply these skills when they have the opportunities
• Design the coaching model that most suits your organizational culture

Many people responsible for leading meetings have no training in how to do so effectively. A poorly run meeting wastes time and energy. Participants leave the meeting feeling frustrated, and ideas and opportunities are lost. Knowing how to run a meeting effectively requires more than the ability to prepare an agenda.

Organizations have retained us to provide workshops on how to run effective meetings because they recognize the cost to the organization in staff time and the missed opportunities when large groups of staff are involved in an ineffective meeting. These interactive workshops have helped participants to refine their abilities to establish an effective process to get the most out of meetings. Specifically, participants learn how to: identify key interests and frame issues for productive discussions; encourage reluctant speakers to share their ideas; manage people who may hijack a meeting; promote creative problem-solving; bring issues to closure; and ensure follow-up after the meeting.