The Operations team of a mid-sized professional service organization felt they had trouble negotiating and pushing back on the Sales team, who they described as ‘pushy’ and not always setting realistic expectations with clients. We did a needs assessment and realized that in addition to what they described, many team members were remote, communication was strained and almost always done via email, guidelines were not in place for service level expectations and above all, because of a recent merger, trust issues were impacting the way they worked together.
We designed a day-long team building program that included some self awareness on communication style using the DiSC tool, then collective awareness of the overall styles of the teams. It was eye-opening as they recognized how much style and body language impact our interpretation. We facilitated role plays with the different styles to learn how to communicate more effectively and begin to break down the barriers of trust. This also included interactive training on negotiation skills using the styles they learned about. To cement the learnings, they built service level commitments/agreements to take back to the office. We also organized fun team-building activities.
