Building Rapport - Training for Managers and Professionals
Master the Art of Connecting With Others
Management Skills
Strengthen relationships with your team, clients, and colleagues by improving communication and interpersonal skills.
Honest Communication
Foster a positive, supportive atmosphere by inspiring enthusiasm and motivating through constructive, honest feedback.
Powerful Leadership Skills
Develop crucial skills and emotional intelligence techniques to gain trust, respect, and cooperation from others.Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
Why Choose This Training?
More Than Just A Course Of Lectures
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What Makes This Training Stand Out?
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Testimonials
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
Clients We Have Worked With
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
Course Summary
Training Objectives
This course is designed to help you develop a clear understanding of what rapport is, and how to use it to improve your relationships and communication. You will learn emotional intelligence techniques and strategies that will help you build stronger rapport, such as active listening, empathy, and assertiveness. This training addresses common challenges faced when building rapport, such as miscommunication, misunderstanding, and preconceptions and provide you with some practical tips and strategies for overcoming them.
Training Objectives
This course is designed to help you become more confident in delivering bad news effectively. You'll develop empathy and assertiveness skills to make giving bad news easier. This includes warning the receiver, admitting discomfort, giving the news straight, and being prepared with empathy and assertiveness.
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.
What Makes This Rapport Building Training So Effective?
Unlock the Power of Building Rapport
For more than 40 years this training course on how to create rapport has proven to be one of the most highly acclaimed. Over the years we've had thousands of managers and professionals through our hands. Many have said it's one of the best rapport building 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 could use to improve your communication skills, and build stronger relationships.
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Features |
Benefits of this Course |
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Understanding Rapport |
Develop strong relationships and communication with team members, clients, and colleagues. |
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Examples of Rapport Building |
Analyze successful and failed attempts at building rapport. |
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Recognising & Improving Rapport |
Identify jeopardised rapport and learn how to improve connections. |
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Rapport Building Techniques |
Practice techniques like active listening, empathy, and assertiveness for reliable rapport building. |
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Engaging Presentation |
Enjoy practical, engaging presentations of rapport-building techniques and strategies. |
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Addressing Rapport Challenges |
Learn to handle difficult people, cross-cultural relationships, and misunderstandings. |
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Tailored Training |
Customised training to address specific needs and challenges in relevant situations and relationships. |
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Practical Tips & Strategies |
Gain a toolkit for daily use in overcoming workplace challenges. |
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One-to-One Support & Collaborative Group Learning |
Receive private coaching and engage in supportive group discussions. |
Learn a clear understanding of rapport and how to achieve it
You'll develop better, stronger relationships and communication more easily with your team members, clients, and colleagues.
Examples of successful and failed attempts at building rapport
You'll be better at recognising when rapport when rapport is jeopardised, and learn how to improve the connection if you notice something's not quite right.
Techniques and strategies for building rapport
You'll learn a range of techniques for building rapport, including active listening, empathy, and assertiveness. You'll not just be taught theory, you'll practice until you can do it repeatedly and reliably.
Practical and engaging presentation of techniques and strategies
Most people say they find this course extremely engaging. They often say they don't know where the time went, it was so good. Even if it was a bit exhausting.
Addressing common challenges faced in building rapport
Learn how to deal with difficult people, manage cross-cultural relationships, and overcome misunderstandings.
Tailored training to specific needs and challenges
Training customised to address the specific needs and challenges of the participants. You won't just be practicing generic examples, you'll rehearse creating and building rapport in the situations, scenarios and relationships that matter to you the most.
Practical tips and strategies for overcoming challenges
You will gain a practical toolkit you can use on a daily basis in the workplace to overcome the challenges you face.
One-to-one support in addition to group learning
You'll receive a generous amount to of private and confidential one-to-one coaching, on top of the opportunity to discuss your challenges in a supportive group environment.
Supportive and collaborative learning environment
We go to great effort to help you feel comfortable sharing your thoughts and ideas, and experimenting with your new skills.
Is This The Right Training Course For You?
Discover how two crucial emotional intelligence skills every successful leader needs for creating or building rapport
Practice listening with empathy and speaking assertively
You'll create rapport, and be more successful with people.
You'll give and get honest feedback, so that everybody learns.
You'll be able to disagree without argument and conflict, so there'll be a better atmosphere.
Transform relationships from uncooperative to cooperative
You'll achieve more, and avoid fights.
Create rapport even if there's tension
- You'll have an alternative to telling jokes, and relax people more quickly
- You're don't think you're as successful as you want to be at winning people's trust and cooperation.
- So you'd like to get honest feedback from people about how they feel when they're working with you.
- You've never paid much attention to the art of building rapport with people at work, but it could have an impact on your career, and therefore you're ready to start paying attention to it now.
- You particularly want to be good at building rapport with people you disagree with, because when there's a disagreement you've a tendency to get into argument and conflict.
- You've never paid much attention to the quality of my relationships with people at work. You just get on with the job and assume the relationship will take care of itself.
- You've never made a special effort to build better rapport with people at work. I've always assumed that if people don't want to cooperate with me it's up to them and there's not much I can do about it.
- Your way of building rapport is to have a laugh with people. It usually seems to work well. You don't know any other way.
- If someone doesn't want to cooperate with you, you're stuck. You don't know how to change their mind and create more affinity and good will when it seems to be missing.
- You're nervous about being over-familiar.
- People have told you that you come across as arrogant. It's not true because you don't feel superior to anyone, but you'd like to understand how they've got that impression.
- You don't know how to build or maintain a harmonious relationship when you have a disagreement of conflict with someone.
- You're a different person at work from the one you are outside work. You don't believe you can really be yourself at work.
- You'd like to know how to repair relationships when they break down, and how to create a more friendly, harmonious and cooperative atmosphere.
What You'll Take Away From This Course
Are you frustrated about how long it takes to develop relationships?
How to be more successful creating and building rapport - a London UK management training course and leadership development programme called Skills with People?
- How to create harmony and rapport instead of misunderstanding and conflict. We'll help you develop your understanding, skills and confidence.
- How to swiftly tune in on other people's wavelength and help them tune in on your wavelength.
- How to handle delicate conversations with more sensitivity.
- Develop your emotional intelligence.
- How to win people's confidence and co-operation without appearing pushy or arrogant.
- How to be more confident when handling difficult people, difficult situations, uncomfortable or awkward conversations and clashing personalities.
A Practical Guide To Creating And Build Rapport
Are you a manager, leader or a professional needing to win people round more convincingly?
How emotional intelligence can help you build rapport
Some people call these rapport-building skills 'soft' skills, though we think this is a misnomer because they actually make it much harder for people to resist your influence and say no to you. These 'soft' skills actually make you tougher and yet more satisfying to deal with.
People are difficult to handle when their negative emotions are aroused. If you don't know how to handle emotion you're likely to lose rapport. Trust deteriorates. Misunderstandings arise. Relationships get damaged. In this atmosphere it is very hard to achieve what you want. The key regaining rapport is emotional intelligence, which boils down to mastering two crucial emotional intelligence skills, empathy and assertiveness. Helping you master these two skills is our main objective on the Skills with People course.
To illustrate the two rapport-building skills here are two examples of a brief phone conversation. The first is without the two crucial skills. The second is with them. The comparison shows how much more honest and yet harmonious and successful these skills enable you to be in building rapport and creating affinity.
First example - a conversation WITHOUT emotional intelligence
Anita is phoning Steve because she urgently needs his help. Steve is normally cooperative, but right now he is in the middle of a crisis. As you read the dialogue try to sense how successful Anita was being at building rapport:-
- ANITA: Good morning, Steve. Anita here.
- STEVE: Good morning, Anita. What can I do for you?
- ANITA: That information I asked you for last week - how's it coming along?
- STEVE: Sorry. Haven't had a moment to think about it. I'll get on to it as soon as I can.
- ANITA: You said I could have it this week.
- STEVE: I know, but there's a bit of a crisis on here.
- ANITA: When will I be able to have it?
- STEVE: Hard to say.
- ANITA: Can't you give me a date?
- STEVE: Afraid not. You'll just have to leave it with me. I'll get on to it as soon as I can, okay?
- ANITA: Okay.
A comment on the first example
Anita's aware she's just failed to build rapport with Steve. She's aware that as a result of this conversation their relationship is even more distant than it was before. She's also aware of feelings beneath the surface of the conversation, but she's held back by an old mental habit, a belief she has held deep down for as long as she can remember: "My feelings are not to be trusted. I must hide them or people won't like me." As a result she keeps her distance and fails to build rapport with Steve.
But suppose she could replace that belief with this one: "I can trust my feelings because they alert me when something's wrong, and if I express them honestly others will take me seriously."
Second example - the same conversation, but this time WITH emotional intelligence
Below is the conversation again. This time she uses the rapport-building skills taught on this course. Once again, as you read the dialogue try to sense how successful she is being in building rapport:-
- ANITA: Good morning, Steve. Anita here.
- STEVE: Good morning, Anita. What can I do for you?
- ANITA (lets him know she's aware he's under pressure and how she feels about chasing him; is also frank about her own urgent need): Steve, I know you're under pressure so I feel bad about chasing you. But I'm very worried. If I don't get the information you promised me last week I'll miss a crucial deadline.
- STEVE (takes her seriously because she's being open and frank about how she feels; and it doesn't even occur to him to shut the door on her because she's also taking his problems seriously; he feels he can be frank with her, too): Sorry, Anita. This is a bad timing, I'm afraid. I'm in the middle of a crisis. I was hoping the information you needed wasn't urgent.
- ANITA (once being open and frank she says why her need is so urgent): Now I'm even more worried. If I miss this deadline we could lose a major customer.
- STEVE (realises that whatever difficulties he faces, even more trouble will be caused if he fails to cooperate; starts thinking about how he can make time to do it): Hmm, I see.
- ANITA (can hear he's thinking, so waits patiently and encourages him time to let off steam): I'm obviously giving you a headache.
- STEVE (sighs): I'll have to explain to my director why he'll have to wait. He's not going to like it.
- ANITA (continues being patient and honest): I wish I didn't have to put you under pressure. Is there any way I can help?
- STEVE (lets out another big sigh; has by now adjusted to doing something he was at first reluctant to do): No, it's okay Anita. I guess it's not the end of the world. I'll get on to it right away.
- ANITA (once again genuine and honest): I'm relieved. Thank you, Steve.
A comment on the second example
- This time, instead of ending up afraid and suspicious of one-another they ended up with more mutual respect, understanding and trust. Anita had been much more successful in building rapport.
- How did she achieve this? The simple answer is that she found a way of talking about her own and Steve's feelings, and that enabled them to connect with one-another and resolve their difficulty rationally and harmoniously.
The Two Crucial Rapport Building Skills?
- Recognising, respecting and acknowledging his feelings and needs - this is what we're calling empathy,
- Honestly admitting her own feelings and needs - this is what we're calling assertiveness.
Poor ability to create rapport is a handicap both in life and at work. This course gives you the two crucial emotional intelligence skills you need for creating or building rapport. We help you examine what you say and the way you say it, the extent to which it builds or detracts from your rapport with others, and what changes you could make that would increase your rapport. Then we help you practise until you're confident you succeed in building rapport. The course includes a great deal of private and confidential one-to-one coaching.
Further Reading
Proven training that gives managers, leaders and professionals the exact steps you need to build rapport - quickly
For more information on this website relevant to building rapport you might also find our pages on customer liaison training, managing conflict and winning friends relevant and helpful.