Cascade Courses
Effective Communication: Resolving Disputes and Fostering Collaboration
Jim Reid
Public employees frequently find themselves representing their organizations in formal processes involving a multitude of community or regional stakeholders. Such processes are readily labelled and recognized as “Negotiations.” Equally important are discussions within organizations that are neither defined nor recognized as negotiations, yet they are. They involve creating a project team, designing a work plan, or changing an organization’s culture. They are also conversations within the context of appraising an employee’s performance, producing an annual budget, hiring new staff, producing a strategic plan, or improving cooperation between departments. Managers routinely find themselves at the center of these “negotiations;” to be able to resolve or mediate them, they need dispute resolution and communicaiton skills.
Working in the public and non-profit sectors is challenging because of limits to authority, diverse constituencies, and the glare of the public spotlight. To succeed, public managers rely more on their talent to influence than their power to direct. To be able to influence the actions of others, professionals must be effective communicatiors.
The focus of this course is on mid-level managers and supervisors, including those who are relatively new to managing people and those who aspire to do so. The course will help participants understand and appreciate fundamental principles and gain experience in applying practical tools and techniques. Woven throughout the course are concepts, practices, and “lessons learned” about communications in negotiations. The goal of this course is to strengthen the conflict resolution and communications skills of participants to enable them to build teams and partnerships, improve decision-making, manage change, and revitalize organizational cultures.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the importance of communications, particularly the need to use the language of the organization in the negotiations process.
- Know the fundamental principles of dispute resolution, including under what circumstances consensus is the appropriate decision-making model for resolving disputes.
- Recognize the difference between “interests” and “positions” and be able to apply an “interest-based” approach to the negotiations process.
- Learn how to accurately assess the parties’ interests, relative power or influence, and Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA).
- Be able to “stage the negotiations” by learning how to design a structure or framework that is tailored to the nature of the particular dispute.
- Learn how to apply such tools as ground rules, meeting agendas, meeting summaries to the dispute resolution process.
- Identify and apply a variety of communications tools and techniques to increase your ability to influence others.
- Understand the role of the manager as mediator, and the challenges inherent in that role.
- Recognize that conflict is often about resistance to change, and learn how to reduce resistance to it.
Instructors
Jim Reid is Founder and Principal of The Falconer Group. Jim is also a senior lecturer at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington where he teaches “Conflict Resolution: Negotiation and Mediation as Instruments of Public Policy and Management.”
Jim earned his Masters of Public Administration (MPA) from the Evans School. His certification in 360 Leadership Assessments was earned at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is also a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.