Assertive Communication & Conflict Management

Assertive Communication & Conflict Management is a two-day workshop designed to equip participants with practical skills to recognize, assess, and resolve workplace conflicts effectively. The course focuses on distinguishing between aggressive, passive, and assertive behaviors, and teaches strategies to shift confrontations into collaborative interactions. Through interactive exercises and real-life scenarios, participants learn essential communication techniques such as active listening, paraphrasing, and positive language, alongside assertive expression methods like the broken record technique. Additionally, the program covers calming skills, persuasion, negotiation, and structured problem-solving steps to achieve mutually satisfactory resolutions, ensuring participants leave with actionable tools for managing difficult situations confidently.

Duration: 2 Days

Objectives

After this workshop participants will be able to:

• Recognize on-job conflict and assess its characteristics and causes
• Improve the ability to resolve workplace conflicts
• Distinguish aggressiveness, assertiveness and passiveness
• Use assertive skills to shift encounters from confrontation to collaboration
• Contain difficult situations using calming skills, persuasion and negotiating techniques
• Problem-solve to achieve satisfactory mutual resolutions

Outline

• Part I: Brief introductions, roles and goals
  • Warm-up exercise
• Part II: Conflict: how it occurs and escalates
  • Levels of conflict
  • Common causes of conflict
  • Moving from conflict to collaboration
  • Adapting our style of managing conflict
  • Handling various types of "difficult" people
• Part III: General Communication Skills for Resolving Conflict Situations
  • Listening Skills, including non-verbal observation
  • Paraphrasing and Perception-checking
  • Asking questions to gather key facts
  • Positive language
• Part IV: Assertive Expression
  • Distinguishing between aggressiveness, passiveness and assertiveness
  • How we use assertive expression in conflict situations
  • Three steps to assertive expression
  • The broken record technique
  • Practicum
• Part V: Calming Skills, Negotiating and Problem-solving
  • Blending and redirecting
  • Winning ourselves a hearing
  • Defusing situations and managing anger
  • Keys to gentle persuasion
  • Keys to negotiating solutions that work
  • Seven steps to problem-solving
  • Five key actions in resolving conflict
  • Six things to do when nothing else works
  • Practicum on real-life situations
• Workshop Closure and Evaluation

ON-TRACK Corporate Training has a diverse and flexible schedule that can be customized to your needs. We offer group courses (both public and corporate), one-on-one training, virtual (on-line) classroom (Zoom etc.) and on-site training options. We also have easily accessible on-line training videos on OnTrackTV.