Everyone talks about teamwork.  But sometimes its like trying to find a destination without a roadmap.  This event provides one.  Rather than using the word, “teamwork,” as a vague abstraction or poorly articulated value, teamwork must be based on an simple and easily applied model of team development that is shared and used by everyone on the team.  This workshop explores the three essential elements of teamwork:
 
  1. ✦The role of emotional intelligence in relationship development.
  2. ✦Developing a pragmatic understanding of team development that can be applied in building and maintaining teamwork.
  3. ✦The communication skills necessary for creating an environment in which any problem can be addressed with fear.  
 
We begin with exploring the distinction between two overlapping relationships we have with people at  work…personal and professional. Connecting on a personal level provides friendship, support, makes work more enjoyable and enhances your team’s ability to work together.  But developing an understanding of your professional relationships must come first.  Your relationships at work exist for one reason…to get a job done.  Building these relationships requires a practical understanding of teamwork and how teams inevitably break down.  And professional relationships require a different form of communication than we use in personal relationships.
 
Lacking a clear distinction between these two relationships and the communication skills to make both of them work, conflict is all too often taken personally.  When you “personalize” conflict, some issues become so emotionally loaded that they appear too dangerous to discuss.  Or we do attempt to resolve the problem but the emotional charge results in conversations spiraling out of control and damaging the trust and openness required for collaborative teamwork.
 
This event features a method for “professionalizing issues,” including a worksheet to use when preparing for what might be a difficult conversation.  A structured method for managing the conversation is presented, demonstrated, and then practiced in a role-play situation.  When working with intact teams, most of these “practice sessions” will involve people working on real issues, discovering how five minutes of preparation and a structured approach to the conversation makes raising issues possible by defusing the emotions that can derail effective discussions.
 
Your organization is filled with conversations dying to happen.  This event provides the tools to open up communication is ways that you might thought were not possible.
 
Overview
Understanding relationships in the workplace.
  1.  Why teamwork doesn’t come naturally.
  2.  Technical skills and emotional intelligence: Why sheer brainpower is not enough for success.
  3.  Personal and professional relationships: How to make the best of both.
  4.  
Emotional intelligence: The key to success.
  1. What is emotional intelligence?
  2. Why is it so important to success in work and in life?
  3. How can you start developing your own emotional intelligence?
 
Conflict and teamwork.
  1.  Why conflict gets taken so personally.
  2.  Personal or professional: Identifying the real source of conflict.
  3.  “Professionalizing” conflict: The foundation for managing conflict and raising issues.
 
A three-step model for team development and diagnosing conflict.
  1.  The need for a method for building teams in the real world at work.
  2.  Goals, roles, & procedures: The fundamental agreements for building teams.
  3.  How conflict is almost always professional rather than personal.
  4.  Why conflict is so easily “personalized.”
 
Clarifying roles in decision-making.
  1.  Ambiguity of authority: The most frequent source of breakdowns in teamwork.
  2.  Who has ‘The D’?  Clarifying decision-making accountability.
  3.  Understanding participation: Influencing the decision-maker.
  4.  Work is not a democratic process: Influencing is not voting.
 
Coping with organizational change.
  1.  Change: A never-ending experience at work.
  2.  A three stage model of organizational change.
  3.  The impact of change on individuals and groups.
  4.  Implementing change: How managers and teams can collaborate in engineering change.
 
Raising issues and making things happen.
  1.  Developing influence: A core competence associated with emotional intelligence.
  2.  The Raising Issues Worksheet: Preparing to raise a difficult or complex issue for discussion.
  3.  The five stages of a problem-solving conversation.
  4.  Using a structured method to keep the conversation on track.
  5.  How to defuse disruptive emotions.
 
Creating your training implementation plan.
  1.  Taking training back to the workplace.
  2.  Perishable skills: The importance of immediately putting new skills to work.
  3.  Creating management support that will “make training take.”
Working Relationships: Using Emotional Intelligence to Enhance Your Effectiveness With Others
Contact InformationContact_Information.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0
Return to Site MapSite_Map.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0
Coaching For Emotional Intelligence ☞Coaching_for_emotional_intelligence.htmlshapeimage_4_link_0
Return to Training EventsTraining_Events.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0