Understand People and Conflict — A 3-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

• Do you find certain types of people difficult to understand?
• Is conflict difficult for you to deal with?
• Do you want to be able to motivate people?
• Would you like to see how others may see you?

If the answer is "YES" - this is the course for you!

This course will show you how to understand people and conflict.

This course uses SDI (Strength Deployment Inventory) to show you how you appear to others, why certain groups of people will frustrate you and how to deal with them as well as neutral, practical ways of diffusing conflict.

Creating trust and respect in relationships by understanding why people are motivated to do the things they do.

The simple to understand tool belies its power in creating neutral language to discuss what are usually seen as 'tricky problems'.

Course Objectives

On completion of this training course, delegates will be able to:

• Assess their motivational standpoint (using SDI)
• Understand other people's motivations
• Realise how they may be seen by others with different motivations
• Learn the key ingredients of successful working relationships
• Understand how to sell their ideas to other people in their terms rather than their own
• Increase rapport and trust with colleagues through understanding their motivations (whether they attend or not)
• Have an understanding of how two colleagues see them (by use of pre-course questionnaires sent in advance)
• Create of a personal action plan to enable them to put what they have learned into action
• Gain 22.5 Professional Development Units from this course towards PMI recertification as it is approved by Institute of Management Consultancy (IMC)

In the Practical Workshops, students will:

• Assess their personal first impression
• Complete a self-assessment of your position on the SDI Triangle
• Understand how people in other areas of the SDI Triangle are motivated and what frustrates them
• Practice using influencing strategies to get your views understood
• Understand what conflict looks like / sounds like / feels like for others and how to pick up the signs
• Realise the best (and worst) strategies for dealing with different conflict styles and understand how your own style effects outcomes
• Gain feedback on your conflict style in a safe environment
• Practice selling your ideas for other people's reasons

Intended Audience

This course is suitable for:

• Anyone who wants to understand people's motivations and improve relationships in teams and on a one-to-one basis
• Anyone who wants to improve the breadth and depth of their understanding of people by using this exceptional tool

Benefits for your Company

Cohesive teams, who understand each other, work and perform at higher levels than those who are in conflict. In addition the amount of sickness from stress caused by conflict in the work environment will be reduced.

Therefore companies gain time and increased productivity from having staff that understand each other and can work together without accidentally causing conflict or tension.

Benefits for You

You learn what motivates you enabling you to choose activities that will make you feel most satisfied.

Also, you will be able to understand the motivations of people who currently frustrate you and see how you may be perceived by them. This helps enormously in creating harmony and avoiding causing conflict in all your relationships.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Introduction & Welcome

You will meet like-minded people and share your reasons for wanting to be on the course. You will write down what is most important in your work.

An experienced, friendly trainer will help you visualise where you want this course to take you.

Personal Identity

We will look at Johari Windows to assess the types of behaviour you are aware of and those parts of your personal impression that may be blind spots. We will use interviews and meetings to share information with others. Work Association is covered to show the stages a relationship goes through and the importance of not falling into 'recruitment agent' mode where everyone is your best friend as soon as they are introduced!

You will role play real world interviews or meetings with course colleagues and gain feedback on your personal impression.

Beliefs

In this module we look at what you believe to be true about yourself (and for people generally). We discuss where these beliefs come from and whether they create Inner Friends or Inner Enemies. We discuss getting rid of irrational negative beliefs by rational argument about the usefulness or validity of the statements.

You consider things you believe to be true about yourself, strengths you have that help you do your job and weaknesses that prevent you performing as well as you would like.

Behaviour

We will use a tool called Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) to assess your motivational preferences and plot your position onto the SDI Triangle and discuss what it means for your perception of others and theirs of you (absolutely fascinating.) We then look at behaviour planning to start working out how people are likely to react to what we want to say and planning how to put it across in the best possible way.

You fill in your own SDI form and plot your total on the SDI Triangle, you compare your position with that your peers chose for you. You will use the Behaviour Planning Casebook to practice behaviour planning.

Conflict

We look at what sends you and other people into conflict (both personality disputes and issue based disputes) and the various stages of conflict. You will plot your SDI Conflict Total on the SDI Triangle and discuss your conflict pattern with others who share similar patterns. This feedback will be used to share typical reactions as a group: how to recognise the signs, how to treat them and what to avoid - insightful information.

You plot your SDI Conflict Total on the Triangle and compare this with the feedback from your colleagues.

Relationships

We look at modelling relationships and use transactional analysis as well as personal profiling to give you some insight into how you react to others (includes parent / adult / child ego states).

You play with quizzes and games to understand what the various transactions are and what they sound like / feel like when you hear them. Also, it will allow you to see how conversations can be sidetracked from their original purpose and how to get them back on track again.

Influencing

Here you will learn about the four influencing styles and the difference between pull and push influencing. There will be a number of behaviours associated with each style and you will practice choosing when to use each style.

You role play situations where you need to influence someone, taking care to plan the strategy first.

Selling

To maximise the impact of what you say and to get the maximum chance of it being acted upon / listened to, you must first decide what the key message is. This will be influenced by what you want the person to do as a result of your communication. The clearer you are about this mentally the more confident you will be in delivering your message. We will use the SPIN model to illustrate how structured questioning can provide a good base to conduct coaching sessions and when aiming to build confidence in your approach (both are times when you need to 'sell').

You will see how to use the answers you get to tailor the message to the intended person's motivation and their wants. Do that and you 'sell them' your idea for their reasons - very powerful? You practice selling your ideas to various types of people.

Action Plan

This combines all the sections so far, as well as your top 3 tips from the course, into an action plan with dates for completion. You can then ask your manager or a colleague to help you stay on track.

You devise your action plan to take away with you.