Developing Effective Business Conversation Skills

Master conversational skills to get attention and gain credibility.

Are your spoken messages organized and coherent or rambling and unfocused? Do you put off business conversations or are you able to work through issues with confidence and empathy? Do you know when to talk, when to listen and when to ask questions? Improve your business conversation skills with this seminar on effective business communication.

Enhancing and expanding your conversation skills can help you create buy-in for your ideas, make better-informed decisions and obtain committed action from others. After assessing your present communication style, you’ll practice shaping engaging, clear and effective business conversations through real-world scenarios. Each interactive exercise is designed to help you build conversational bridges at work, get your point across and steer discussions in the right direction.

How You Will Benefit

• Express your ideas completely and succinctly to build rapport
• Leverage conversational dynamics to get results
• Avoid leaving others in “mind-reader” mode
• Use effective business conversation as a coaching and performance tool
• Come out a winner in any business conversation

Who Should Attend

Managers, supervisors, team leaders and business professionals at all levels who wish to have more effective business conversations.

Focused Conversation Skills

• Creating a focused and results-oriented conversation goal
• Achieving clarity by organizing your ideas and remaining focused
• Redirecting conversations that have gone off-track, exiting those that are dragging
• What to include in your business conversations from the listener's perspective
• How to create complete messages that cover all critical information
• Calibrating language to avoid becoming too specific or too abstract
• Integrating confidence and competence into your conversational behavior

Engaging Others in Conversation

• Building rapport and establishing open communication
• Listening strategies to gain information and create conversational bridges
• Asking and responding to questions as a way to promote effective business conversations
• Communication insights to help you flex your personal style to others’ preferences
• The appropriate role of humor
• Choosing the right verbal and nonverbal language to create consistent, coherent and targeted messages
• Implications of gender and culture on the dynamics of conversations
• How to avoid creating or showing defensiveness in business conversations

Workplace Conversations

• How to successfully approach various types of business conversations
• Tools and strategies to plan and demonstrate a specific conversation type

Conversational Style Preferences and Flexing Strategies

• Assessing conversational style preferences, strengths and weaknesses and flexibility
• Learning to use humor (carefully) in business conversations
• Mastering verbal and nonverbal language skills

Action Plan

• How to Implement new business conversation skills