Even Our Trainings Save You Money
We talk quite a bit here about the time and money wasted to conflict. In fact, our CEO and Founder’s LinkedIn page says “Saving bold leaders time and money with conflict consulting & mediation” - because that’s what we do here.
The costs associated with conflict are relatively straightforward, and services like conflict consulting, mediation, and facilitation are also fairly straightforward:
We consult directly on the conflict to create recommendations for resolution;
We mediate the conflict directly;
We facilitate conflict-focused conversations to help people figure out their own resolution.
What’s less obvious is the ways that even our trainings can uncover conflicts and jump-start affected projects.
In August, we served a local government with our proprietary training, Conflict, Curiosity, Communication. (Sometimes internally we lovingly call it C-cubed or the CCC training.) The whole point of the training is to help people better understand that disagreements don’t have to equate to high stress! Our trainers teach people simple to use tools that intentionally shift mindsets and open up our brains (and emotions) to create connections and curiosity, calming down conflicts through better communication.
This time, during a conversation about what types of conflicts people typically experience, we uncovered a project that had been stalled for six months. Six months of nothing happening instead of moving forward. So much can and should happen in six months. We’ve created entire strategic plans in highly collaborative ways in six months! Yet, for this particular group, what happened in six months was… nothing.
Nada.
Zilch.
Unexplained delays.
A pipeline of work piling up that needs attention.
How did we discover the issue? Simply by asking - in a low-stakes learning environment, where we had already demonstrated our commitment to help via nonjudgmental interventions. This is a unique role that trainers can take on, and it’s part of why CM&F is committed to offering specialized trainings. We’ll never be “a training company,” but we recognize the vital role good training plays when it comes to conflict and managing people - and let’s face it, most of work for most people really is about managing people!
Great adult learning - or on-the-job training engagements - happens when the subject matter is real for the participants. An easy way we do that is to ask about what types of conflicts people deal with, typically, at work. In this case, someone spoke up about a colleague not completing their portion of a process. As we asked more questions, we realized that this process had been running smoothly until the colleague had stopped doing their part - and the participant in the training had no idea what had changed.
Through a dialogue with our trainer, the participant felt newly able to open up the conversation about the stalled project. She walked away from our training with a set of next steps, specific to this colleague and this process, to get the work jumpstarted.
So how is this a money saving story?
While we don’t have an estimate of what the stalled project cost our client, it’s simple enough to consider a mid-level employee’s time - and the build-up of time it would take to go through a six-month backlog. The backlog would easily have kept growing had this conversation not happened.
If you’ve got a training budget and want to do something that could potentially be a gamechanger for your employees, talk to us - we may be able to help.