“At the end of the day it saved us money.”

KELLY FOX, CEO, LUMBER TRADERS

“They [use] an active, and a proactive, participatory approach to taking teams from where they are right now and elevating [the team]… their bonding and effectiveness at engaging with each other on a range of issues. On whatever needs to be engaged on.”

JOE MCSWINEY, CEO, SOG KNIVES

“It’s like you’ve given us a culture-operating-system for everything we do. It’s how we collaborate and operate. It’s in the language we speak together. Our culture got us through COVID.”

JOE LEROY, CEO, HOPESPARKS

“That’s been one of the biggest areas of change… A lot of times, what our clients are asking for is not necessarily represented by what they [seem to] ask… We learned how to navigate these conversations. I was really impressed and really surprised.”

RODNEY ROBINSON, DIRECTOR, MDC

Ready to make real change?    Take Initiative Today 

You might be ready for Communication and Collaboration training if…

Are you and your team human? Are you and your team psychic?

If you answered, “Yes, no,” then communication and collaboration training is for you.

 

Communication Gaps to look out for:
  • Conflict
  • People working at cross purposes
  • Accidentally doubling up on work
  • The meeting after the meeting (where people later deliberately sabotage what they said they’d support)
  • Misunderstandings
  • Lost sales
  • Too low or declining customer satisfaction scores
  • Customer attrition
  • Team member / employee turnover
  • Confused facial expressions in meetings
  • Saying or hearing, “Why didn’t I know about this sooner?”

If you want to get farther faster, in growth, in profit, in momentum, in innovation…

It may well be high-time to get your team into some communication and collaboration training.

Results communication and collaboration training can deliver:

One of our clients, Sage, recently sent us 150 newly hired people with hard-to-find technical skills. They hired us to train these folks in communication skills because a high percentage of new-hires typically quits within 90 days because, while technically skilled, many of these folks didn’t want to keep facing the strain of difficult conversations with customers.

A gap in communication skills was creating painful and costly employee turnover.

Six months after training 150 new hires in a few critical communication skills fit for the scenarios they most commonly find challenging, not one of these new hires has quit. Not one.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s 100% new-hire retention after 6 months where typically many quit within 90 days.

You can also look forward to:

  • Frictionless change initiatives
  • Greater visibility for you into every corner of your org
  • Less destructive conflict between people (and more productive conflict between ideas)
  • Greater clarity and less wasted time
  • Fewer resources wasted on misunderstandings
  • Meetings that get more done in less time
  • Greater overall productivity
  • Greater efficiency and (more importantly) effectiveness
  • Better learning from failures and errors
  • Less fire fighting thanks to more early intervention

How does that future differ from your present?

 

Communication & Collaboration Training FAQ

Well spotted. Collaboration is communication. Improve communication – improve collaboration.

Collaboration is about bringing what you’ve got to the party and discovering together how, where, if what you’ve got fits into the shared objective.

It’s a communication process. 

When we build out the communication and collaboration training program to meet your needs and objectives, we’ll bring in all the collaboration-specific tools and skills you may need.

Nope. Wherever you are, we’d be happy to come to you. 

Sometimes that means we hop on a train, car, boat, or plane.

More often, it means we come to you through the wonders of online video conferencing. And we’ve been training teams of up to 40 people at a time remotely.

Even in that large a group, the training is experiential, interactive, and heavily participatory.

And we can mix it up, as we often do. Work with your team in person for part of the program, and remotely for the rest.

When we talk about what you’re looking for, we’ll co-create a solution that fits you just right. Looking good, Goldilocks!

Good! Then this will be very productive.

You’ve likely heard of (or even read) Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t. One of the often-overlooked but key messages of that book is that great companies are transparent companies. Information flows like water. Silos are dissolved. People share information and resources rather than hoarding them. Information generosity is encouraged and rewarded. 

In other words, in great companies, communication isn’t just good. It’s great!

Think of some of the people you most admire in all the world – especially those you don’t know intimately. One thing most of them probably have in common… They’re world-class communicators.

The Yes Works serves leaders who aren’t looking for good communication on their teams. They’re looking for world-class!

In a word… Results.

Clear, articulate, concise, conveying the intended meaning… These are minimum standards for good communication.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Communication is in what the listener does.” So the communicator’s job is to have the listener receive the very same thing they intended. So… Arguably every miscommunication is on the communicator.

Steve Sims is a world-class communicator, and he says, “I don’t communicate so I can be understood. I communicate so I can’t be misunderstood.” That’s the ticket to effectiveness every time.

Good communicators communicate with well-chosen words. World-class communicators take everything into account… Context, body language, tone, etc. – not just their own, but others’ as well. They tailor their message and everything surrounding it to the audience of the moment. They communicate subtly, consistently, on a whole-nother plane.

What would be possible for you, your team, and your company if you were all top-level communicators, picking up on every signal, and sending no mixed signals?

Bye-bye misunderstanding and confusion. Hello rocket-fuel! (Bet you’ve seen Wyatt, our rocket powered snail-friend.)



Yikes… How much do you find you and your team doing that doesn’t need doing because someone already handled it?

How often do you find you can’t use X – which you were counting on – because someone else has already used it?

How often do you find that your most productive team members throw up their hands and go work somewhere else because, “They offered a higher salary.” Here’s the secret they didn’t tell you. It wasn’t for a higher salary that they left.

Ok. Let’s take your premise for a moment. You need to communicate less. I’ll take that to mean you need to spend less time communicating and more time producing.

We can get behind that. People are tired of yak-yak meetings that seem to be more sizzle than steak – and rightly so.

If you want to spend less time communicating so you can spend more time producing, then you need that communication time to count – and count big!

What makes communication time punch above its weight-class?

World-class communication skill.



World-class communication training.

We do!

Who do?

We do!

Sorry. This has devolved into a weird cheer-leading call and response.

We’re upleveling professional communicators every day. Every professional must communicate for a living. Ipso-facto… Every professional is a professional communicator.

Unfortunately, not everyone is communicating at a professional level. And still fewer are world-class.

What does world class communication get you?  RESULTS.

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