Conversation Bootcamp

Step into Your Capacity to Fuel Productivity and Meaningful Engagement

Communication. It remains the top issue for organizations, teams, and relationships. Almost everyone struggles with how to effectively communicate when they are frustrated or facing conflict. The effects of poor communication are costly. They show up in organizations as:

  • Employee disengagement, malaise, and turnover;
  • Dysfunctional teams;
  • Poor performance;
  • Inability to give and receive critical feedback; and
  • Negative attitudes, cliques, and gossip: a culture of “me”.

If you’re dealing with any of these outcomes, the Conversations Worth Having Bootcamp will give you the skills and tools to turn them around. This program is grounded in Appreciative Inquiry, one of the most widely used positive change approaches. Two simple Appreciative Inquiry practices can turn your entire culture around, creating a culture of conversations worth having.

Following this workshop, you will have tools to establish communication practices that will support productivity, engagement, high performance teams, regular feedback, positivity, and a culture of “we.”

COURSE OUTCOMES:

You will walk away prepared to:

  • Keep your cool when you want to explode!
  • Effectively challenge assumptions and preconceptions, including yours.
  • Deal with conflict quickly and effectively.
  • Fuel productive and meaningful engagement.
  • Communicate successfully with people who hold negative attitudes or defensive positions.
  • Give and receive critical feedback in ways that promote learning and high performance.
  • Ask the kind of questions that deepen understanding, strengthen connections, and inspire possibility.
  • Talk with colleagues in ways that invite them to collaborate on projects and strategic outcomes.
  • Listen with genuine curiosity.
  • Frame any conversation, even one around a highly complex problem, to inspire creative and innovative thinking and solutions.

Course Modules:

MODULE 1: THE POWER OF CONVERSATION

PURPOSE: Understand the nature of our conversations, how they affect human being and doing, and develop your ability to choose.

OBJECTIVES:

  • Experience the nature of your conversations and the effects they have on you and others.
  • Choose to be intentional with your conversations: stay calm under stress.
  • Use mindfulness tools to shift reactionary communication to deliberate conversation.
MODULE 2: THE ART OF ASKING QUESTIONS

PURPOSE: Understand the basics of Appreciative Inquiry and improve your ability to ask generative questions to foster effective communication.

OBJECTIVES:

  • Experience the impact Appreciative Inquiry has on individual and organizational capacity.
  • Choose curiosity over knowing and assuming.
  • Use generative questions to shift the dynamics of personal and workplace communication problems.
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MODULE 3: INTENTIONAL FRAMING

PURPOSE: Use positive framing to intentionally foster effective communication and continue to develop your ability to ask generative questions.

OBJECTIVES:

  • Experience flipping negative conversations to conversations worth having.
  • Use flipping to frame workplace communication issues.
  • Develop generative questions to fuel productive and meaningful engagement around workplace challenges.
MODULE 4: STEP UP TO FEEDBACK

PURPOSE: Develop the skill and the motivation to routinely seek out feedback and promptly provide effective feedback, even in the most critical of situations.

OBJECTIVES:

  • Experience and choose to change feedback avoidance patterns.
  • Adopt a learning mindset to support openness and interest in regular feedback.
  • Use effective feedback strategies with common workplace situations.

 

Course Options:

OPTION 1: One-day, on-site training covering 4-conversation modules, plus applied learning and practice.

OPTION 2: Four 90-minute weekly webinars, plus applied learning and practice each week.

OPTION 3: Blending Option 1 and 2 allows all members of an organization to be trained affordably. Leaders, managers, and supervisors attend the one-day training. Their training includes learning to facilitate communication activities and reflection. Following their 1-day training, leaders participate with their teams in four weekly webinars. These webinars blend the introduction of key concepts with on-site experiential activities and reflection facilitated by leaders. Having leadership facilitate the activities and reflection reinforces their learning and accountability, builds credibility for whole systems change, encourages role modeling, and supports their capacity to create an environment that works for all.