People Skills
To perform at peak levels, you can't afford poor communication. Each interaction counts. Skillful conversation drives results by building a network of rich, reliable relationships. But such communication isn't achieved easily: it takes time and attention. You must continually clarify your own needs and understand others' as well. This lays the foundation for trust and accountability, and gives relationships the strength needed to catalyze and support top performance.
People Skills teaches the skills that create powerful interactions with clear, mutually compelling dialog. Simple yet sophisticated, People Skills teaches you how to adapt its powerful Listening and Speaking skills to your own style. This allows participants to build relationships, get information, and achieve results in a variety of situations.
Whenever you depend on people for your success, you can depend on People Skills to help you:
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Listen, to get up to speed on new information and solve problems efficiently
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Get agreements that build others' commitment to action
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Confront poor performance professionally and effectively
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Work through conflicts to creative solutions that address core needs
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Coach and develop to improve performance
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Manage strong emotions with an even keel.
By combining the following People Skills modules, you can build the course that meets your performance needs:
LISTENING
Most people don't feel they have time to listen. But when you learn to listen effectively, you realize you can't afford not to. Poor listening contributes to misunderstandings, lack of cooperation, and incomplete information—the cost of which can be counted in time and money, not to mention the stress on you and the organization. When you listen well, you build your knowledge base and your relationships as you get up to speed quickly on new information, prevent misunderstanding, demonstrate understanding, and convey empathy. This module teaches people how to use reflective listening skills naturally while managing their business interactions professionally and efficiently.
RESULTS-BASED LISTENING
This module teaches participants to advise and counsel others collaboratively so that together they solve the right problems the first time around. It teaches a variety of situational tools to use depending on the needs of the other person—to be a sounding board, to peel back the different layers of a problem until they reveal the core, to work cooperatively through different possible solutions, to empower the person with the problem to follow through on a chosen action plan. And through it all, participants learn how to keep ownership of the problem where it belongs: on the other person who is now able to move it forward.
AGREEMENTS
How can you get people to do what you need them to do? You make Agreements. Sound simple? In theory, yes, but not in practice. It's surprising how often expectations aren't structured in the form of agreements and how poorly this effective management tool is managed. Establishing solid agreements is how to get others to do what you need done. Thus our Agreements module provides participants with:
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An easy-to-use template for clarifying their expectations of others' performance
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A simple, effective interpersonal process to ensure understanding and create commitment to get things done
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A roadmap for following through on the agreement.
Because the Agreements module is easy to use and easy to conduct, it's easy to apply back on the job, whether to enroll people persuasively in new approaches or to establish a watertight baseline for performance expectations.
CONFRONTATION
People dread having to confront substandard performance. The person being confronted becomes defensive, and things quickly deteriorate from there. But once you know how to manage the dynamics of this difficult discussion, the challenge becomes more straightforward: to gain renewed and active commitment to what needs to be done. Our Confrontation module helps people understand those dynamics and prepare for them so that they can disarm defensiveness, focus productively on the task at hand, and get stalled projects back on track.
CONFLICT MANAGEMENT
Conflict arises from a difference in point of view. It's the uncontrolled emotional energy that can create lasting damage. But when channeled, conflict can result in breakthrough solutions and transform adversaries into allies. Ridge's Conflict Management module gives people the skills to deal effectively with strong differences of opinion, and to straightforwardly address, rather than avoid or attack, the strong emotions that give voice to those differences. With these skills, people transform the energy of conflict to work through conflicts and arrive at creative solutions that address core business needs.
COACHING
If you're a manager, you're a coach by default. Most managers are stretched so thin that their coaching suffers, thus decreasing their employees' performance.
For those involved in coaching and developing others to improve performance, Ridge's Coaching model helps focus coaching efforts on the most powerful strategies for facilitating behavior change. You learn how to:
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Empower those you coach to learn from their mistakes and successes
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Focus your feedback on a few behaviors that will leverage the greatest improvement
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Communicate your insights and feedback so that you're heard and understood
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Develop a mutually-desired, collaborative coaching relationship.
MANAGING STRONG EMOTIONS
Strong emotions are one aspect of human nature most people would rather do without, particularly if these emotions show up at work, and especially if the emotions belong to someone else. However, simply having the skills to handle resistance or strong emotions with an even keel makes them a lot easier to deal with. This module helps people prevent resistance and strong emotions by learning how to speak clearly and objectively, how to listen to strong emotions, and how to respond in a non-inflammatory, productive way.
Copyright 2008 Ridge Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.