NYNP blog post 1-30-09

Free Training on Interpersonal Skills
The Mulvaney Group's 30-minute Courageous Coffee Conversations

How many of us could use help with interpersonal skills at work, especially around difficult conversations?

In the nonprofit field, many of us have strong personalities and care deeply about our work. We work hard, we sacrifice our personal time to work more hours or think about our work, and we believe that our work matters. We try to do the right thing, based on both our professional and personal opinions.

We're also stressed about the economic climate right now and what it will mean for our clients, our organizations, and ourselves.

This means that conflicts at work have the potential to be intense. After all, if we believe that we are good people who have our clients' best interests at heart, what does that make the person who disagrees with us?

So, I'm happy to let you know about a wonderful free resource offered by The Mulvaney Group, whose tag line is "To fix the unfixable."

Approximately every three weeks, their founder and president Tim Mulvaney leads free 30-minute trainings based on role plays of real-life difficult workplace scenarios drawn from The Mulvaney Group's 15 years of experience. (Full disclosure: I learned about these because Tim and I are both members of the American Society for Training and Development; he is a past president of the NY Metro chapter.)

These "Coffee Conversations" are done by phone, which makes them easy to attend, and the times alternate between morning, lunchtime, and evening, which makes them fit anyone's schedule.

They are also recorded, edited, and posted as podcasts along with a downloadable pdf of the lessons learned, which makes them useful tools anytime.

I have attended several of these mini-trainings, including one today, so I can vouch for their great quality. Tim makes good use of everyone's time by keeping the 30 minutes brisk and by staying focused on learning. He keeps the role play on track, and he conducts an excellent debrief to extract lessons that we can use.

He also chooses topics that are interesting, relevant, and useful. Examples of recent topics include asking a supervisor about the possibility of layoffs, expressing discomfort with how close a supervisor habitually stands, talking with a coworker about the appropriateness of religious messages at work, and asking a colleague not to talk so much about personal issues at work.

For all the details, for downloads, and to sign up for the email list, you can go to http://www.themulvaneygroup.com/coffee_conversations/