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Impactful Communication for Managers

Learn to break through pushback and resistance, deal with emotions – even strong ones – and truly make another person feel heard and seen. The key to deepening your relationships with others is being genuinely interested and fully shifting your attention to them. This means temporarily putting aside your own solutions, assumptions, judgements and goals.

Learning Objectives

Understand the true meaning of empathy and how it differs from sympathy.

Discover concrete behavioral techniques that help you empathize, build trust and create a connection with someone.

Learn to avoid common pitfalls and mistakes that undermine empathetic and trust-building behavior.

Frameworks taught in class​

Framework 1: Behavior toolbox

The Behavior Toolbox contains all the behaviors that can be used to make empathy and trust-building skills more effective. The behaviors are listed in terms of who they shift their attention to. When you’re trying to be empathetic toward someone, remember this rule of thumb: The other person should be talking roughly 80% of the time. Sometimes, you can open up a little about yourself to keep it from feeling like a one-way conversation. But talking too much can feel like you’re hijacking the discussion. It’s all about balance!

Toolbox

Framework 2: The Seesaw Metaphor

The Seesaw Metaphor assists in breaking down the behavioral toolbox. It shows which of the behaviors direct the focus of the conversation towards yourself, the other person, or both. Therefore, the metaphor helps with understanding which behavior should be used given the type of situation or person. Beyond this, it allows the learner to understand the effect of each behavior in the Toolbox.

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How you can support​

Goal check-in

  • Ask the learner what goal they set for themselves in this module.
  • Discuss how you can support them with achieving this goal.

Inspire

  • Share how you’re able to communicate with empathy and build trust with others.
  • Can you think of situations that required empathy? How did you handle them?

Activate

  • Ask the learner to share the most challenging situation from their past – or one coming up in the future – that requires empathy.
  • What steps did they take or what plan do they have for tackling it?
  • Provide them with feedback, tips and tricks.

TIP: in your next 1:1 meeting go through the questions above