Social Intelligence Training for Managers and Professionals

Course Summary

Training Objectives

This course is designed to help you increase your social and emotional intelligence skills. Through this training, our aim is to help you better understand the dynamics of relationships and build stronger connections. You will learn how to better communicate with others and become more assertive, more empathetic, handle difficult conversations, and win the cooperation of those who may not entirely agree with you. You will build your ability to foster rapport, listen, lead, persuade, provide feedback, manage upwards, and coach a colleague. All of these skills can be developed on this course, as helping you become a more inspiring leader and manager.

Develop Your Emotional Intelligence

You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.

Transferable Skills

The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.

Develop Skills

This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.

Repeated Practice and Feedback

In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.

Video Analysis

We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.

Sustained Change

That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.

Course Dates and Price

For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.

Free Initial Session

This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.

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What makes this social intelligence training so effective?

For more than 40 years this social intelligence training course has proven to be one of the most highly acclaimed. Over the years we've had thousands of managers, leaders and professionals through our hands. Many have said it's one of the best social intelligence training courses they ever attended. We have helped our clients develop their skills so they can communicate more effectively, and succeed in both their personal and professional lives. Here's how we could help you develop range of practical skills and strategies you develop their skills, build strong relationships, and succeed in both their personal and professional lives.

• Understanding human behaviour and emotions. On this training course, you will gain a deeper understanding of how your behaviour and emotions influence the development of social intelligence. You will become more self-aware in order to recognise and express your feelings more accurately, as well as hone your ability to read the other person's emotions and to respond to them with diplomatic sensitivity.
• Active listening skills. Good social intelligence requires the ability to actively listen to others, understand their perspectives, to reflect back, to paraphrase and then respond compassionately. You'll learn this essential aspect of building and maintaining your relationships. You'll learn what it is, and practice doing it until you can do it well.
• Communication skills. On this training course, you'll first focus on developing your empathy skills (see above), and then practice assertiveness, so you can stand up for yourself and make reasonable demands. With this combination of skills, you'll be able to handle situations such as conflict resolution with more confidence. Through plenty of practice, feedback and support, you'll be able to hone your social intelligence and develop your communication skills, which you'll then be able to apply every day, and make sure all of your relationships are successful and fruitful.
• Emotional intelligence. This social intelligence training program will help you develop your emotional intelligence skills and practice your social skills with the assistance of an experienced trainer. You'll have the opportunity to rehearse in a safe, small group environment and gain confidence in your interactions with others. With one-on-one coaching, you'll be able to recognise and regulate your own emotions, as well as understand and influence the emotions of others.
• Real-life scenarios and practice. Theory is important, but it is even more important to practice social intelligence skills in real-life scenarios. On this course you'll have plenty of opportunities to practice and apply what you've learned in realistic settings.
• Personalised approach. Social intelligence is personal, and this training program is tailored to meet your needs and goals. You won't be receiving an off the shelf, generic training. You'll be discussing and working on your material, your colleagues, your relationships and your career.

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How the skills you practise on this course will increase your social intelligence

A tried and tested way of connecting with people

There's an ancient wisdom known around the world as the Golden Rule. It's about how to get on with others. It says, very simply, treat them as you like to be treated. This course on the skills of social intelligence focuses on the skills that'll enable you to apply this wisdom at work and develop it into a powerful source of success in building harmonious and successful relationships.

Case Study Example

Here's a case study of someone who came on the course to improve his social intelligence. It shows how the course enabled him to lay aside some of the habits that were hindering his performance, and replace them with new social skills that greatly enhanced his performance.

He was a capable accountant with sound ideas and lots of energy. But because he talked a great deal and didn’t listen much, people complained that he didn’t seem to understand them. They had little confidence in his advice and were reluctant to take it. This made him very impatient because he knew he was usually right. He couldn’t understand people’s reaction, and put it down to their stupidity. His boss, who thought highly of him, was very concerned about his reputation and tried to make him aware that he was putting people off by not listening. But nothing changed.

His strengths

In his own specialist field there was no-one else in the organisation who knew as much as he did or who was as likely as he was to come up with the right answers. And that is what he felt he was being paid for – to provide answers that no-one else could provide. His mental self-reliance was an asset. It enabled him to contribute a great deal to the business. But unfortunately he had taken it to such an extreme it had become a dysfunctional habit. He had become so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he was unable to pay attention to anyone else’s. This meant that all he was able to do in conversations was say what he was thinking. Consequently his conversations were seriously out of balance - they were almost completely one-sided.

Mental obstacles lowering his social intelligence

He was going to find it very hard to change. There were two serious obstacles. The first was that he was behaving as though there was only one set of thoughts in the world, his own. He'd forgotten (if he ever knew it) that other people had thoughts and feelings quite different from his own. And he'd forgotten (if he ever knew it) that it is possible to decide to switch the focus of one’s attention from one’s own thoughts to someone else’s. He exercised no choice in the matter. Whenever he had a thought he had to say it. It never occurred to him that he was free not to say it and instead to try to focus his attention on what the other person was thinking.

The second mental obstacle was time pressure. He was very busy and felt under pressure to give the answers. He felt he had no time to waste considering the thoughts of people who knew much less about the subject under discussion than he did. But in spite of these obstacles he accepted that unless he changed his approach he could damage his career, and though he knew it would be very difficult and uncomfortable to change he was keen to try.

New skills to replace the old habits and increase his social intelligence

It’s no use vaguely advising a poor listener to listen better. What he needed was first to be shown how to do it, in other words, precisely how to phrase a listening response. Then he needed to be made to practise it instead of his habitual telling response. And he needed to practise it again and again until his extreme discomfort began to subside and he began to feel at home with a more balanced conversational style. In the months that followed the training he persisted and discovered that winning back his colleagues’ confidence in him did not require a total summersault from him. He didn’t have to do it all the time. It was satisfying enough for them if he listened just some of the time. A small change in his behaviour made a very big difference to how other perceived him.

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