Interpersonal Skills - Management Training & Leadership Coaching

What you'll take away from this interpersonal skills training

• How to praise generously without patronising,
• How to offer constructive criticism without attacking,
• How to confront people WITHOUT putting them on the defensive,
• How to create rapport instead of conflict.
• How to tune in on other people's wavelength.
• How to get other people to tune in on your wavelength.
• How to handle difficult conversations with sensitivity.
• How to develop your emotional intelligence.
• How to earn people's confidence and win their co-operation without sounding arrogant.
• How to successfully navigate your way through uncomfortable or awkward situations.

A practical guide - What emotionally intelligent interpersonal skills can do for you

What are interpersonal skills?

These are the soft skills that make organisations function collaboratively and cooperatively, where employees are encourage to talk to one another and to negotiate whenever there is disagreement about how best to solve problems that inevitably arise.

On this training course the first part of the training session concentrates on just two fundamental skills (listening with empathy, and speaking assertively).  The second part of the training concentrates on how to apply those skills.  Instead of setting fictitious role-playing exercises we help participants re-create the situations that are hardest to handle at work.  Participants’ generally identify one or two of the following areas to work on.  The course content and curriculum consists of concentrating on the specific situations participants find most useful, including communication skills, problem-solving, leadership, soft skills, team-work, conflict resolution, feedback and constructive criticism, both verbal communication and non-verbal communication, listening skills, negotiation, persuasion, influencing, conflict resolution, mediation, problem solving, decision making, interpersonal skills both at work and at home, effective speaking, barriers to communication, emotional intelligence and it's impact on stress management, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation and social skills.  Improving any of these can make an enormous difference to the moral and productivity of a workforce.

Rather than a dry academic list of topics some people prefer it expressed with less jargon in the following way;-

• winning people's co-operation when they object, 

• calming people down when they complain, 

• persuading or negotiating without becoming entrenched in fruitless argument 

• resolving conflict and disagreement in an atmosphere of mutual respect, 

• confronting difficult issues without being aggressive, 

• standing up for what you think and be taken seriously without getting a reputation for being difficult, 

• disagreeing without conflict, 

• saying no without causing resentment, 

• being firm but fair - "tough on the issue but soft on the person”, 

• giving really bad news without appearing heartless, 

• giving genuine praise without making people feel patronised, 

• criticising without making people feel attacked, 

• receiving criticism without being defensive, 

• coaching and mentoring helpfully, 

• handling resistance in a meeting with confidence.


The key leadership skills you'll develop on this course

Treating others with respect and understanding calls for empathy.  Speaking up with firmness, clarity and integrity calls for assertiveness.  These two crucial leadership skills, blended together, will enable you to create a robust but harmonious atmosphere of courtesy, mutual respect, trust and understanding.  Such an atmosphere is not only very good for business, it works wonders in other walks of life, too.  We'll help you master these two crucial leadership skills and use them together when you need them most.  They are the two basic communication skills at the heart of emotional intelligence:-

• Assertiveness - communicating in a way that gets others to recognise and acknowledge your concerns.  It's hard to get others to take you seriously unless you can speak assertively.  It's how you give them access to what's really going on in your mind.
• Empathy - recognising, acknowledging and trying to understand other people's concerns.  It's a listening skill.  It's hard to gain their trust and make them receptive to your influence without empathy.  With empathy you gain access to what's going on in other people’s minds, whether they are communicating it clearly or not.

Why is emotional intelligence such a powerful interpersonal skill?

People become irrational when their emotions are aroused.  We are more successful in life and at work if we are aware of, can admit, and can talk about feelings.  However, this goes against the grain because many of us have got used to suppress feelings.  Because our feelings can sometime be painful we learnt to protect ourselves (and others) by denying them with phrases like, "There, there, don't cry", "Pull yourself together", "Let's be rational - let's not get emotional".  We learnt that if we express a bad feeling the worse we feel, so we learnt to stop expressing it so we can feel better.

But ignoring or suppressing emotions is a mistake.  Bottling up feelings makes us tense, defensive, unreasonable, close-minded, rigid and inhibited.  The more we are able to can admit and express feelings and let off steam the more we are able to be relaxed, reasonable, open-minded, flexible and uninhibited.  When we learn to talk about feelings in a safe way it enables us to connect better with others and recover the full use of our rational faculties.  Empathy and assertiveness are the skills that help us do this.

This interpersonal skills coaching and leadership training course can teach you how to become really good at these soft skills.  Here is an example illustrating the usefulness of emotionally intelligent interpersonal skills. 

What makes this interpersonal skills training so effective?

One of the reasons why this approach to interpersonal skills so successful is because it's so memorable.  It's based on a very simple idea (of course, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy).  There are just two essential interpersonal skills.  If the way people respond to you matters to your success at work, these two emotional intelligence skills can make an enormous difference.  Once you've mastered them there'll be few situations you can't handle successfully.  On this course as well as mastering these two basic interpersonal skills you receive a great deal of coaching in how to apply them to the situations you find most challenging.  These two skills are listening with empathy and speaking assertively.

What can make these interpersonal skills hard to learn is that for many people they clash with deep-seated habits, often learned early in life, particularly in the area of how we handle feelings.  But the good news is that with determination and careful attention it is usually possible to break free of our deep-seated habits. That's why so much individual coaching is provided on this course.

How emotional intelligence improves interpersonal skills

An example - a manager baffling people with too much detail

Here is a typical example of the kinds of people who take this training because they need to develop their interpersonal skills.

Problem - how lacking interpersonal skills almost halted a career

A manager who was seen by colleagues as a muddled thinker.  In meetings people became impatient with him and dismissive of him because it was hard to follow what he was trying to say.  He would go on and on and never seemed to get to the point.  He had the same effect on his boss, who was frustrated about it for two reasons, first, because it wasted a lot of time, and second, because he thought the manager would fail to achieve his potential unless he became a better communicator. 

Diagnosis - typical difficulties in using interpersonal skills

The habit he had developed, whenever he had a point to make, was to start with facts and reasons and only get to the point at the end.  So extreme was the habit that he seemed never satisfied he had given enough facts and reasons, and he seemed reluctant to get to the point.  He talked the opposite way round from the way a newspaper reporter writes.  A good reporter knows the reader’s attention span is limited.  They  know that they must put the main point succinctly at the beginning, otherwise it will never be read.  The manager had to learn to present his points succinctly up front - then stop talking and wait for a reaction.

Obstacle to change - what needed to change to use interpersonal skills

When invited to explore what went on in his mind when making a point the manager realised that he was always mentally very busy trying to pre-empt people’s objections.  He wanted to foresee and answer all possible objections before putting his point.  That was the best way, he believed, to get his point accepted.   So strong was the habit that it had become very hard for him to make a simple point succinctly, because he was always being distracted by thoughts about how people might argue against him.  He hated silences because in the silence he imagined people were thinking negative thoughts.  He had developed a fear of making a simple, succinct point and then waiting for the response.   So not only did he appear to be in a muddled – he actually was in a muddle.

Remedy - the benefit of developing interpersonal skills

To escape from the muddle he needed to be shown how to do two things, both equally crucial.  First, he needed to be given a method of marshalling the point he wanted to put across and expressing it succinctly without trying to answer possible objections.  Second, he needed to be given in a way of responding to people’s objections after they had made them rather than trying to pre-empt them.  The harder one for him was the first, because he felt very vulnerable making a simple point succinctly and then keeping quiet and waiting for a response.  So he needed lots of practice in a safe setting before he felt comfortable with this new way of communicating.   He also needed a friendly colleague at work who would nudge him from time to time when he reverted to his old habit.  In the early days he inevitably reverted from time to time, but the feedback he received from his boss and others was encouraging and he was able in the end to put the communication difficulty behind him.

Testimonials for this interpersonal skills training

Feedback from the managers of participants who took this training

• "He has made good progress in two areas: 1. team leadership - he listens with empathy to others well and considers their standpoint as well as his own. He rarely interrupts anyone now which is pleasing. 2. presenting his opinion in a considerate way without upsetting his listeners."
  - Feedback from participant's boss - a Glaxo SmithKline research director

• "Now he actively listens, probes, asks for clarifications and does not assume anymore he knows the answer."

  - Feedback from participant's boss - a WS Atkins director