Communication

Business conversations and managing conflict

“Penny is a fantastic presenter, highly motivated and energetic, immediately created a great rapport with the audience. “The content was adapted extremely well for the purpose of engaging and creating a more proactive approach to selling and working with our Broker customers.  Penny came highly recommended, and did not disappoint!” - Branch Manager, NZI

Over recent years this has taken prominence as a vital competency within organisations. Why?

Business needs to move swiftly, be agile, change fast and that requires the right communication, in particular to be able to resolve problems and issues. Leaders have to be able to guide their people toward great performance and address poor performance, and make nimble changes. Teams across the business need to align, inform and connect. Customers demand customer excellence more instantly than ever before.

The problem is, NZ as a culture, generally avoids conflict or can do it badly when they do confront.

I have provided some recent case examples below. To discuss the needs for your organisation, get in touch.

Invercargill City Council

Refined communication skills

Need: Greater communication skills and personal awareness across this diverse organisation, both internal and external. The council’s customers and employees are becoming more diverse and what may have been ok 20 or even 10 years ago, no longer is. With the world of communication changing, there was a need to tone up the Council-wide human communication to fit today’s world. By bringing together a complete mix of roles to each workshop there was a real opportunity to communicate pan-Council, break down role silos and build a better sense of being one organisation.

How: Called Communicating as One Team, there were 2 modules of 4 hours each and all staff were to attend. The city council employees were extremely diverse e.g. gardeners, maintenance, marketing, pool employees and internal HQ employees. The Executive and CEO also attended. With 20-30 employees attending each workshop, innovative design was essential. Each learning outcome was a short session including some multi-media or activity, together with a group exercise. This also demanded high energy.

Participant Feedback

“Great presenter. Kept me engaged through the whole course.”

“Penny was fantastic, very knowledgeable, had a way to command the room & was easy to pay attention.”

“Was a spicy course.”

“I learnt about myself and how to better manage current difficult relationships.”

“Keep open & be curious as opposed to being judgemental when communicating with others.”

NZTE

Brave Conversations

Need: All levels of staff with greater capability in having challenging and or tough conversations (including feedback and external clients). This included workshops for the Customer Services team, Finance team, Communication team and Internal Growth fund team

How: Based upon a particular preferred Conflict Management model, a variety of workshops were customised and delivered to differing parts of the business. Highly interactive, requiring time for intellectual ideas and rigorous questioning, and real to their business.

What they said…
“Just reaching out to say the team is doing amazingly well and utilising your programme every day. As a tangible result of the year, we received a really significant increase in our NPS scores so the team is very happy and they now see how what they’ve learned relates to their results.” - Olga Speranskaia, IGF team

Participant Feedback

“Finally I now understand how to have a challenging conversation that maintains the mana of the person and our relationship, and gets to goal. Thank you Penny!”

“I recently used the model and steps. It was a conversation that I dreaded but it went so well. I now have greater confidence to try again.”

BNZ

High Performance Conversations blended learning programme

Need: All People Leaders to have rigorous performance conversations that drive results and giving effective developmental feedback is an essential. A suite of tools is required in varying media.

How: There was a planned approach with initial roll-out then leading to a sustainable framework. This included…

• Best practice videos demonstrating how to give praise and developmental feedback.
• Downloadable one page worksheets for use by People Leaders and their people.
• The creation of an interactive e-learn, developed on a highly sophisticated software platform that allowed the user to choose different options that created differing outcomes, so users could see the cause and impact.
• A half day workshop for a small number of People Leaders in a coaching and practice setting.
• A roll out to every People Leader at every level of the organisation.

Participant Feedback

“I dreaded the coaching circle in advance but you made it so safe to try out the learning, practice and even find our own style and words so it was real for me. Thank you.”

“I love the fact you have an answer for everything, even if it is ‘get to know your people so you know what is right for them.’ I now use the learning in so many situations.”