Got a group of senior people, difficult to coordinate diary-wise, time-poor, clever but in need of high level influencing skills? Need to ensure this will be time well spent for demanding delegates with quick brains and sharp tongues?  

In all our sectors we work with such groups week in, week out: people who come into the room with too much to do and too little time. We love the love we eventually get from these delegates when they realise they have learned a ton of stuff they can use to make their lives easier and they have not looked at their mobile phones all day***.

When delegates are senior enough to choose to be elsewhere the quality of what we do shines through. We keep everyone in the room.

*** well okay, since lunchtime.

GIB wanted to put up to a dozen of their folk at a time in a room with us for a day.  We would be working with some senior people who had been handpicked from a variety of corporate, professional services and financial institution backgrounds.  We would have investment bankers, lawyers, ex Big Four senior consultants and the like – all with impressive CVs and degrees coming out of their ears.  Our facilitator would have to be on his/her game from the off to have any chance of engaging them and the content would have to be top notch to get them to stay for the day.

We designed an interactive one day programme with the right mix of content:

• Deconstructing the underlying communication skills, behaviours and emotional intelligence competencies of the best influencers and persuaders
• A tour through the most common mistakes we observe professionals like these delegates making in the process
• A discussion around the role of relationship bulding in all of this
• A look at how they might utilise some of the six recognised factors of influence in practice
• A dash of negotiation skills – looking at the dangers of a positional approach, the benefit of an interests-based approach, a framework for preparing for any negotiation and considering what power could be gained by always having a BATNA*
• And finally we set out a simple but powerful model for preparing for and conducting a business meeting at which the delegates might be required to influence or persuade.

[*BATNA in case you didn’t know stands for Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement and is a term coined by Harvard Professor, William Ury, author of the best-selling and brilliant book “Getting to Yes”]

They came, they stayed, they engaged, they went away happy and with a nice bag of practical tools and techniques that they could draw on and they gave great feedback. Word spread within Green Investment Bank and we were asked back to deliver another programme and now we’re about to help some more of their senior talent develop their presenting skills.