Negotiating, Communicating & Influencing
Introduction
Stakeholders are the heart of every business. From customers and employees to shareholders and suppliers, these are the people who provide your business with the practical and financial support it needs to thrive.
In return for their loyalty and support, the higher priority stakeholders must be engaged, their expectations understood, and strategies developed, planned and implemented to recognize and address their concerns.
Stakeholder management involves both hard and soft skills, with some understanding of human nature, culture and communications added, finished off with the ability to influence and negotiate with integrity.
This workshop will introduce you to the relevant tools and techniques, as well as a leading standard, that will help you to engage and manage stakeholders effectively and efficiently.
This will include learning the stakeholder management processes, developing an understanding of human behavior and how to influence it, analyzing and planning communication, as well as using the techniques of principled negotiation and influencing without authority, to achieve your goals.
Key Benefits :
- Lower levels of conflict making people more productive in operational functions
- Projects/programs completed in less time
- Projects/programs delivered with lower expenditure
- Operational efficiencies improved, leading to better organizational performance
- Enhanced risk and opportunity management outcomes due to collaborative working
- Less time spent resolving conflicts
- Longer lasting agreements, leading to better outcomes
Course Content
Overview of stakeholder engagement and management
- Identifying stakeholders
- Producing the stakeholder register
- Creating and analyzing stakeholder profiles
- Assessing interests, positive and negative
- Analyzing the gap between current stakeholder and required perceptions
Planning Stakeholder Communications and Measuring Effectiveness
- Planning stakeholder engagement communications
- Identifying and delivering the key messages
- Creating stakeholder communications
- Planning and managing stakeholder meetings
- Dealing with stakeholder objections
- Escalating stakeholder issues for resolution by senior management
Interpersonal Skills in Stakeholder Management
- Empathy and how it can assist in managing stakeholder relationships
- Trust – the foundation of on which relationships are built
- Influencing, persuading and manipulating – why they are different and the impact they have
- Personality factors affecting stakeholder management (including feedback on a personality type questionnaire, to be taken in class)
- Behaviors, their relationship to personality and how to read them
- Influencing without authority – how to do it
- Emotional intelligence, what it involves and benefits
Negotiating for Success
- The negotiating environment and backdrop
- Reservation points, zones of potential agreement and best alternatives to a negotiated agreement
- Differences between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ negotiation techniques and why they are important
- Principled negotiation, hardball tactics and important choices
- Negotiation protocols and processes
- Negotiation tools and techniques
- Managing a negotiation