Managing Difficult Conversations

This workshop is designed to help participants face difficult situations of interpersonal conflict at work and deal skillfully and effectively with them through conversation.

Duration: 1 Day

Objectives

After this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Move from an adversarial to a collaborative approach in conflict resolution
• Initiate and conduct skilled conversations leading to behavioural change
• Understand and manage their reactive emotions during on-job encounters
• Identify and alter unproductive conversational habits from reaction to response
• Use calming communication skills to bring upset people to the point of reason
• Use persuasion and negotiating skills effectively
• Develop positive language patterns
• Conduct and survive difficult problem-solving discussions
• Manage the dynamics of effective problem-solving in one-on-one interviews

Outline

• Part I: A New Approach to Conflict Management
  • Why we dread certain types of conversations
  • Results when we deliberately avoid these encounters
  • Personal and professional accountability
  • Understanding and changing our conversational habits
  • Three modes of defensive behaviour when we are confronted with conflict
  • Finding common ground: replacing blame with the collaborative approach
  • Keeping our eyes on the prize: setting and sharing conversational goals
• Part II: From Reaction to Response
  • Perceptions and the attribution of motive
  • Understanding our emotions and emotional payoffs
  • What are common Hot Buttons?
  • People’s general reactions to having a hot button pressed
  • A key to understanding difficult behaviour: thwarted intent plus focus
  • The Intent Model
  • Strategies for dealing with difficult behaviours based in intent
  • The Four-Dee plan for effective conversational response
  • More strategies for dealing with specific types of difficult people
• Part III: Calming Skills
  • Moving toward a respectful workplace
  • Five respectful, non-defensive response approaches
  • Checking out our assumptions and perceptions
  • The skill of blending and redirecting
  • How to ask questions that yield useful information
  • Active listening skills
  • Assertive skills
  • Non-verbal alignment
  • Using NLP and the Pygmalion Effect to calm others (and ourselves)
  • Four ways to handle anger
  • Personal relaxation techniques
• Part IV: Persuasion Skills
  • Two sides to effective persuasion: reason and emotion
  • The psychology of effective persuasion
  • Steps to changing a person’s conviction
  • Five effective persuasion techniques
  • Negotiating as a means of persuading someone
  • The alternatives to persuading
• Part V: Developing New Conversational Language
  • Using decisional language
  • Five words that can change your life
  • Delivering criticism in a constructive manner
  • Developing the negative approach with positive expression
  • Using provisional language rather than absolute language
  • Valuable phrases to use in seven difficult situations
  • Using “crediting” to deliver positive feedback to a person
• Part VI: Preparing for the Problem Solving Interview
  • When we have the time and authority
  • When we want the other person to change
  • Use of proxemics
  • Structuring the interview
  • Four phases of a problem-solving conversation
  • One-on-one tactics to avoid
  • Following up and following through
• Part VII: Personal Action Plan
  • Course evaluation and course closure

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.