Relationship Building Skills - Management & Leadership Training

Course Summary

Training Objectives

This course is designed to help you develop your relationship building skills, and increase your abilities to connect with others in both a professional and personal setting. You'll receive a generous amount of one-to-one coaching sessions, as well as group learning to help you improve your communication, interpersonal, collaboration and conflict resolution skills that will help you build and maintain strong working relationships.

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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Is This Relationship Building Course Right For You?

Proven training for managers, leaders and professionals who want to build rapport, improve relationships and have honest meeting of minds

• Achieve a meeting of minds by tuning in on other people's wavelength, and then getting them to tune in to yours.
  You'll create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, be more connected and have better relationships.

• Be skilful at broaching difficult subjects.
  You'll be able to avoid conflict and misunderstandings so there'll be less tension in the workplace.

• Repair relationships when they get damaged by conflict and disagreement.
  Resolve practical problems more quickly and create a more functional working environment (as apposed to dysfunctional).

• Practice the art of creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding instead of being abrasive.
  You'll have a happier more productive atmosphere, and a more successful team.

• If you're a woman working in a male dominated environment find a better way to influence others than by behaving like an aggressive man.
  You'll meet less resistance, and you needn't pretend to be someone other than who you are.

• Don't bite your lip when you're frustrated, learn how to talk about it openly and constructively.
  You'll be able to maintain good working relationships, and you'll develop a reputation for being approachable because there's nothing that can't be talked about.

Are you a manager, leader or a professional keen to build better relationships?

Training for managers under pressure

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A Practical Guide To Relationship Building

How emotional intelligence can help you build successful relationships

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.

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