Change Conversations: Growing YOUR IMPACT

Wellbeing, psychological safety and performance: all things critically important for organisations to cultivate in contexts of pressure and continuous change. A common thread is the quality of conversation. This in-company course is designed to assist managers and professionals improve their effectiveness and impact in these and other areas involving change, through engaging safely and productively with others.

Available in Foundations (6 hour) and Change Enabler (2 day-equivalent) versions, the course combines short, sharp and engaging self-paced learning modules and reflective exercises with highly interactive virtual (or face-to-face) workshops. The course can be adapted and customised for your organisation’s needs.

All managers and professionals need these skills!

The Quality of Conversation Matters!

It’s well established that how managers relate to their team members has an outsized effect on their wellbeing at work. We know, too, from research at Google in 2014 that psychological safety was the biggest differentiator between highly effective and less effective teams in the company.

These factors point to the need for managers – and other professionals – to have high quality, open, respectful, and safe interactions with their team members and other stakeholders. This needs to happen continuously in contexts of pressures for performance and ongoing change. It’s not enough for managers just to “be nice” to people. Tough decisions need to be made and difficult issues dealt with.

Conversation is the key for “shifting the dial”. But we’re not talking here about a typical “difficult conversations” course, with one-way giving of feedback.

The emphasis in this course is on helping participants learn to engage with others and deal with change and other challenges in ways that are more mindful, attentive, empathic, and authentic.

Research at Google in 2014 demonstrated the relationship between psychological safety and performance.

Google Building

Photo: Jonny Gios Unsplash

There are no magic bullets, of course, and these skills need practice. What the course does, though, is give participants a framework and tools that they can try out and apply in all manner of change and other situations over time, progressively sharpening their skills and lifting their impact.

The Foundations and Change Enabler course versions are outlined below.

FOUNDATIONS COURSE

Participants in the Foundations-level Change Conversations: Growing Your Impact course learn how to:

  • Create a solid basis for safer and more productive conversations by grounding what they say in data and evidence
  • Demonstrate practical empathy for others, to build more genuinely shared understandings
  • Tap into and express more of their own truth, to support greater trust and openness and the achievement of desired outcomes
  • Prepare to speak up on virtually any topic on which there are differences of view.

Examples of such topics include stuck change, respectful behaviour, teamwork, collaboration, conflict, development and performance.

In areas like these, conversations commonly are avoided or handled poorly. Yet, stronger results as well as improved emotional safety are possible with the skills and tools introduced in this course.

The approach they learn is simple to grasp, powerful and deep-reaching in its impacts, and generalisable to virtually any change-related or uncomfortable interpersonal situation. The power in the approach is that it helps make discussable topics that might otherwise be seen as off-limits or too threatening.

The Foundations course involves 2 hours of punchy and engaging online modules – average running time about 10 minutes – as well as reflection activities, to introduce the basic concepts, along with either 2 x 2-hour workshops, or a single 4-hour workshop, to explore applications and participants’ challenges.

This learning approach:

  • Minimises time away from regular work;
  • Gives participants freedom to choose when they learn the basic content and;
  • Ensures that valuable workshop time is focused on participants’ needs and concerns as well as practical applications.

Participants learn to apply the Australian-developed and internationally-recognised OBREAU conversation model (observation, reasonableness, authenticity), a method they can use to help figure out, and approach, pretty much any change or interpersonal issue they need to deal with.

As evidence of OBREAU’s international recognition, a workshop on the model was awarded “Outstanding Educator Workshop” at the (US) Association of Leadership Educators Conference in 2016. OBREAU is also used by HealthCareCAN(ADA)’s learning arm, CHA Learning, in an e-learning course, ‘Talking About Tough Issues”, in partnership with Don Dunoon.

As a standalone mini course, this is an ideal accompaniment to a leadership, professional development, or coaching program, or as a unique and valuable development opportunity for a team.

The skills introduced in this course are also foundational capabilities underpinning other soft skills such as influence and managing relationships. We’re getting people started on a set of practices they can potentially apply in a wide variety of contexts to better achieve desired outcomes and grow emotionally safe and healthy work environments.

COMMONWEATLH BANK STAFF TESTIMONIALS

Here’s what five participants from a recent demo course for Commonwealth Bank (Australia’s largest) have said (more info. can be provided on request):

OBREAU is a practical framework to apply to change conversations… The framework enables structure and confidence to lean into change conversations whether small or large. Thank you again, really enjoyed the sessions and working through the model.

The Change Conversations course provided an insightful view into how best to approach not only conversations about change but also how to tackle any challenging workplace scenario. The OBREAU model, which is the basis of the course, is a straight forward guide to keeping conversations alive and robust. Don is an engaging facilitator and created a comfortable space for all participants to share thoughts and ask questions.

Don’s ability to engage and trigger thoughts around being more conscious and mindful about how we approach daily conversations is really effective. The online modules provide a healthy foundation for understanding some of the principles that can be applied… When combined with discussion sessions that he facilitates personally, it really allows for us to truly think about and spark a change in the way we think and act during these conversations.

The OBREAU principles helped me look at change management from a whole new perspective. The principles are relatable and can be applied to our personal lives as much as to our work lives. Thank you for introducing these to us and running the sessions.

I enjoyed the format of learning about the principles of OBREAU prior to attending the workshop and allowing the space for discussion in the workshop. Don was a fantastic facilitator of discussion and allowed us to bring real-life situations to the table and begin to unpack how we could apply the OBREAU method to help build psychological safety.

Change ENABLER COURSE

Combining 3 hours of engaging self-paced learning with 3 x 3-hour highly interactive workshops over 2-3 months, the Change Enabler course version incorporates, builds upon, and deepens the learning from the Foundations version. To take a dive-training analogy, while the Foundations version visits a “relatively shallow, protected reef for diving practice”, the Change Enabler version involves “a series of visits and practice sessions at deeper, more challenging reefs”.

“I think this course has really allowed me to step outside my comfort zone and approach situations with more confidence. By doing so, I've also learnt to be more open minded as well as gaining the ability to shift perspectives in my interactions with colleagues but also with everyone outside of work too. I have become more aware of my actions, but more importantly my reactions in challenging situations.”

Nancy Cai, 2023 course participant

Whereas the Foundations version builds skills to have needed conversations that can be applied with virtually any change-related issue, the Change Agent version helps participants develop the wherewithal to change the conversation. This involves building capabilities in three critical areas.

Building Capabilities in Three Critical Areas

In the Change Enabler course, we’re using the combination of additional e-learning modules plus challenges brought to the virtual table by participants to further develop capabilities in critical areas including change-enabling skills, personal impact skills and mindset skills - as shown in the graphic. These capabilities are essential in changing the conversation: in enabling higher quality, deeper-reaching and more inclusive interactions, as well as in offsetting some of the detrimental effects of intense workplace pressures and associated defensiveness.

Building Capabilities

Leading to Outcomes:

• Faster progress on change and transformation
• Better achievement of business results
• Emotionally healthier, more open workgroup cultures

Building Capabilities in Three Critical Areas

In the Change Agent course, we’re using the combination of additional e-learning modules plus challenges brought to the virtual table by participants to further develop capabilities in critical areas including change-enabling skills, team growth skills and mindset skills - as shown in the graphic. These capabilities are essential in changing the conversation: in enabling higher quality, deeper-reaching and more inclusive interactions, as well as in offsetting some of the detrimental effects of intense workplace pressures and associated defensiveness.

Building Capabilities

Leading to Outcomes:

• Faster progress on change and transformation
• Better achievement of business results
• Emotionally healthier, more open workgroup cultures

Change-enabling Skills

  • Fostering collaboration across boundaries
  • Inquiring to get “underneath” issues
  • Working through stuck change and resistance
  • Building support for desired change

Personal Impact Skills

  • Speaking up with greater confidence
  • Tackling issues that previously seemed too difficult
  • Communicating more clearly
  • Influencing for better outcomes

Mindset Skills

  • Working from observable data
  • Comprehending more of the complexity of change
  • Shifting perspectives to learn from and understand others
  • Tapping and expressing more of one’s own truth

Engaging Through Deeper Conversation, Dialogue

In the Change Enabler course version, participants learn how to move beyond common defensive patterns, and engage with others more mindfully, through deeper conversation, dialogue. With practice, they learn how to see more of the complexities, explore differences, get to the heart of the underlying issues, and authentically share what’s important, thereby creating a solid platform for moving ahead.

Even where change is contested, or unpopular, or where others express no interest in in-depth conversations, the methods participants learn will put them in a stronger position.

The course helps participants activate more of the potentially available intelligence (their own and others’) in working through the issues. (Think of “potentially available intelligence” as otherwise hidden, trapped, unspoken, as if “below the waterline” of an iceberg – yet potentially accessible through dialogue.)

Change Conversations: Safer, Clearer, More Authentic

Contact us to find out more about Change Conversations: Growing Your Impact and how it can benefit your managers and professionals – and the organisation.

How the Change Enabler Course is Organised and Presented

This is the fuller version of the Change Conversations course, involving the equivalent of 2 days of learning, ordinarily over 2-3 months. The e-learning modules and reflective activities consist of about 3 hours learning over this time, coupled with 3 x 3-hour live, virtual workshops.

As with the Foundations course version, the e-learning modules are designed to be fast-paced and highly engaging. Realistic scenarios, practical advice and action tips will ensure your participants find the modules useful and stimulating. As one put it, “All of the modules were very informative and clear in concept”. The modules include work sheets and resources to help learners put the concepts and tools to work from the get-go.

The live workshops provide opportunities for participants to work together in small groups, helping each other apply the concepts and tools from the e-learning modules in making sense of their challenges, preparing to speak, engaging to advance change, and developing their own mindset capabilities.

The spacing between workshops enables opportunities for practice and reflection, ensuring “fresh material” to work with in the next session. (While 3 x 3-hour workshops is the norm, other arrangements, including for shorter sessions, can be made to suit client needs.)

The combination of these two modes of learning – e-learning modules and live, virtual workshops – gives learners a richer, more compelling and more potent experience than either mode could alone.

Additional options include:

A train-the-trainer service, enabling your internal learning and development people to run the live, virtual workshops directly, supported by the e-learning modules.

Customisation of the e-learning modules to better meet your organisation’s needs, including with the development of locally relevant scenarios.

Individual coaching, to assist learners in working through their own change challenges.

Contact us to find out more about the course, including pricing. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how economical is Change Conversations: Growing Your Impact.

Which Groups Will Most Benefit?

The course will benefit just about anyone needing to work with others to bring about change and grow their personal influence and impact. Examples include:

  • Managers and team leaders wanting to improve the culture and/or performance of their teams, or deal with specific change and other challenges
  • Planners, change managers, and facilitators supporting change initiatives
  • Functional specialists (e.g., HR, Finance, IT, Quality) working to advance change with partner departments
  • Individual contributors seeking change on aspects of concern to them, e.g., regarding the behaviour of colleagues or having their own needs recognised.

The course can be adapted for virtually any cohort, including executive teams and groups of individuals impacted by change.

Summary of Benefits

Individuals will gain in these areas...

Better Prepared to Advance Change

Having a structure and set of skills and tools they can use consistently to think through, make sense of, and engage with virtually any change-related challenge, to help achieve needed outcomes.

Greater Personal Impact

Being able to change the conversation, to speak with greater confidence and clarity in advancing desired outcomes as well as fostering teamwork, collaboration, openness, trust and inclusion.

Enhanced Mindset Skills

Developing personal, mindset skills to help them slow down, ground their responses in data, shift perspectives to imagine and explore other perceptions, and get more in touch with their own truths relevant to an issue.

Organisations will gain in these areas...

Better Progress on Change-related Challenges

From the get-go, participants applying the skills learned can create demonstration and ripple effects, positively impacting change efforts in other parts of the organisation.

Emotional Health

Fostering psychological safety and more open and emotionally healthy work environments, though higher-quality conversation on change-related issues

Aligning Values and Action

Helping align what happens in the organisation, through handling change constructively and safely, with organisational values in areas such as respect and inclusion.

Find Out More

Contact us to talk about running or adapting Change Conversations: Growing Your Impact for your organisation.