Melinda and Carol work with individuals and groups to find better ways to make decisions and communicate with others.

When working with individuals, we can support you in preparing for and having difficult conversations or negotiations. In this work, we identify appropriate skills and methods for having conversations with others to gain better understanding of their point of view as well as to reach agreements with others that protect your interests and achieve an optimal and workable outcome to form a productive ongoing relationship. Gaining an understanding of your goals in a negotiation and your needs and priorities for coaching and support is the first step. We work collaboratively with you behind the scenes and assist in the preparations necessary for a successful conversation. That includes understanding your interests, alternatives and options as well as those of others involved in the negotiation. We assist in developing negotiation strategy, dealing with emotional responses, and understanding the psychology of persuasion and effects of timing and techniques. We can help you look at the needs of the other parties involved in a negotiation so that any agreements that you reach will be sustainable and productive.

Your goal may be to develop stronger leadership skills. We help you improve your listening and communication skills, strengthening your ability to lead a team. We focus on identifying your personal challenges and implementing ways to address them. We can also help analyze what the stumbling blocks are in a conflict that you may be dealing with as a leader.

We also assist groups to develop better communication and methods for working together. We have worked with non-profit boards and work groups in large and small companies to find better ways to meet their goals.  Sometimes that means training in communication skills in stressful situations. For others, it involves individual skills training to enhance relationships with others. Often, we design a program to meet the needs of the group.  We may include work with individuals on their own specific challenges, such as strong listening skills, difficult communications or delivering bad news, as well as training in specific skills for the entire group.

The goals of our work with individuals and groups are

• to provide for strong succession planning
• to develop growth strategies for new and seasoned managers
• to support leaders in developing a broad understand of their role in making the organization more effective, and in meeting individual goals to achieve success
• to assist when capabilities fall short of expectations in a particular area but overall performance is high
• to fine tune skills of a variety of types in order for individuals to step up to the next level
• to ensure that the skills to lead up, down and across the organization are in place