We work closely with our clients to identify their key learning objectives before designing each workshop. We regularly conduct customized courses in the categories listed below. We have also designed customized training sessions in these areas for organizations and governments worldwide.

Alternative Dispute Resolution – Conflict Management

We can help people in your organization:

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• Negotiate better deals
• Overcome obstacles to achieve agreement
• Deal more efficiently with internal conflicts and structural changes
• Improve or rebuild relationships with customers and other stakeholders
• Promote effective communication and feedback among staff members
• Use mediation and conflict resolution techniques more effectively
• Save time and money by dealing effectively with conflict
• Avoid work delays or potential litigation
• Develop your managerial staff to better handle disputes of any kind
• Reduce the number of complaints and grievances by preventing unnecessary conflicts
• Build an ADR system to prevent conflicts from disrupting performance

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Negotiation

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

Dealing With Difficult People

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

Mediation

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

Customer Service and Handling Complaints

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

Running Effective Meetings

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.