Skillful Communication Training

The failure to communicate effectively in an organization can be costly. Customers become frustrated resulting in a loss of repeat business. Employees harbor disgruntled feelings toward management, or their co-workers which become chronic like a disease. Managers find themselves in an adversarial position with employees diminishing their effectiveness as leaders. This applies equally as well to nonprofit organizations in terms of diminshing the public benefit to the community being served, whether students, patients, or the like.

I offer a training program that teaches skills to effectively solve these kinds of problems, and other difficult or challenging situations that occur in organizations. The result is that cultivating skillful communication both enhances profitability or service contribution and fosters a culture of warmth where people enjoy working for a particular organization and stakeholders enjoy interacting with it. The training consists of both didactic learning and experiential practice with an emphasis on embodying the basic skills into “muscle memory” by the end of the course to promote sustainable transformation of communication skills.

What is Skillful Comunication?

The training is based upon the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph. D., which he has called Nonviolent Communication. See www.cnvc.org. The core principle of the training is to develop a faculty or capacity for Empathy, both with the Other and with Oneself. This consists of consciously identifying thoughts involving judgment, diagnosis, evaluation, and criticism as reflections of underlying Feelings and unmet Universal Needs. Dialogue begins from this vantage point. Put simply, this cultivates a “heart connection” instead of a “head connection.” The result is that people feel truly heard by each other and once that occurs, strategies can easily emerge to solve problems, breach difficulties, heal rifts, and strengthen relationships. For example, “when a company demonstrates that it can consistently sense and solve its customers’ most difficult problems—when it exhibits consistent empathy—it creates unique, unique sustainable customer relationships that are difficult for its competitors to replicate.” Entel, et al., The Empathy Engine, Katzenbach Partners LLC.