Challenge
Ivy league masters degree students of international public policy and peace building sought to develop communication skills for the global workplace. The working group included participants from around the world seeking to enhance their skills in negotiation, conflict resolution, and managing difficult conversations across cultures.
Consensus Solution
Consensus conducted advance interviews with participants to determine their experience, the challenges they had faced in the past, and the situations they wanted to prepare for in the future. We then designed a series of three customized trainings on the topics of Cross-cultural Negotiation, Skills for Managing Conflict, and Effective Leadership: Communicating in Challenging Situations. Incorporating role-plays based on actual participant experiences in other cultures and contexts, we presented foundational concepts and tools in a dynamic and interactive format. Each participant practiced skills, analyzed several situations from their own experience, and received personalized coaching to develop their capacity to perform more effectively.
Results
- In follow-up interviews several months later, participants reported effectively using the tools to transform communication barriers into bridges to shared understanding and problem-solving while working on international project teams.
