Relationship Building Skills - Management & Leadership Training

What you'll take away from this relationship building skills course

• How to listen with empathy.
• How to speak assertively.
• How to give honest, authenic critical feedback when necessary, WITHOUT ruffling other people's feathers.
• How to develop your reputation for saying what you mean, and meaning what you say.
• How to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding.
• How to adopt a generous attitude - even in the face of other people's rudeness (i.e. how to tune in to what might be motivating other people to be confrontational, and then able to skillfully calm them down). 

A practical guide - How to use emotional intelligence to be more successful at relationship building?

Two crucial skills for relationship building

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.  We’ll give you the crucial skills that'll help you build successful and harmonious relationships by treating others as you like to be treated.   At the heart of relationship building are two crucial skills, how to listen with empathy, and then encourage other people to listen to you when you speak assertively.  They're the two main emotional intelligence main we'll help you master.  These two skills will greatly enhance your ability to build relationships and connect well with others.  Empathy is the art of giving your attention, respect and understanding to others.  Assertiveness is the art of winning theirs.  

An example - How emotional intelligence can improve relationship building skills

Here is an example of someone who came on the course to improve their relationship building skills.  He was putting people's backs up.  This manager had a reputation for being a hard man.  This had its upside, because he also had a reputation for being able to achieve results in a tough industry.  The trouble was that his aggressive approach didn't go down well with colleagues in the management team, and when an opportunity for promotion came up the job was given to someone more diplomatic.  He took this to heart and tried to be less aggressive.  The trouble then was that he felt inhibited about expressing himself and so he began to feel disheartened.

How he handled people before he had the training

He was a courageous man who set a high value on telling the truth without compromise. He had plenty of good ideas and most of what he said made good sense. But when disagreeing with someone he would say, for example, “You’re wrong,”  “What you should do is . . . .”  And he rarely showed any interest in other people’s ideas. The result was that he was putting his colleagues’ backs up and they found it easy to dismiss what he said on the grounds that, “he was just being argumentative”. It was easy for them not to take him seriously. What he needed was to replace the habit of expressing opinions in a divisive and argumentative manner with a different approach, one which created an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect in which it would be much easier for him to achieve a meeting of minds with his colleagues.

How emotional intelligence helped him develop his relationship building skills

He first needed to be helped to see for himself the weakness of the aggressive approach – in other words, that by putting people’s backs up his was making it easy for them to dismiss his ideas. This was done by showing him a video recording of one of his typical conversations. He quickly took the point.

Then he needed to be shown and helped to practise two skills that would enable him to be even more forceful than before but without putting his colleagues on the defensive. The first was to be assertive instead of aggressive. Instead of using an aggressive way of speaking, for example, “your suggestion is rubbish”, he needed to learn a no less forceful but much less argumentative way of speaking, for example, “what alarms me about your suggestion is . . . .”  This would make it harder for people to dismiss what he had to say because it wouldn’t seem like an attack.

The second skill was equally crucial, namely, the skill of listening with empathy to his colleagues' concerns. As well as saying, for example, “what alarms me about your suggestion is …,”  he needed to show he was trying to understanding and empathise with his colleagues, by saying, for example, “I imagine the reason you made that suggestion is that you are worried about . . . .” 

Mental habits he had to lay aside.  What was getting in the way of his relationship building?

It wasn't easy for him to learn this approach because it was so fundamentally different from the one he was in the habit of using. Two long-held assumptions were getting in the way. The first was his belief that feelings are weaknesses and that if you reveal them people will take advantage of you. This is untrue but until he was able to let go of the belief he couldn’t use the kind of assertive language illustrated in the paragraph above.

The second mental obstacle was his belief that to show understanding or “empathy” to someone is also a sign of weakness because it amounts to agreeing with them. This is also incorrect, but he had to learn for himself that it is possible to try to understand someone without agreeing with them and without compromising your own position. In spite of these obstacles and the initial strangeness of the new approach, after a few months of practice he began to feel at home with it and it began to made a big difference to his relationships and his effectiveness at work. He discovered that even a small change in his approach to people made a big difference in how they perceived him.

You might also find our pages on communication skills and dealing with difficult people relevant and helpful to relationship building.

Testimonials - examples of what participants who have taken this training in relationship building skills say

• "Just thinking about last night’s conversation and it’s bringing tears to my eyes - it’s what I’ve always wanted: to be able to talk with you like that." - The wife of a course participant 

• "A lesson for life!  The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listen with empathy" / "speak assertively".
  Definitely a course to be added in the training plan." - A Project Quality Engineer (self funding)