Lately I’ve been doing a fair bit of training for corporate supervisors in team building, conflict resolution, communication skills, and so on. On the one hand, corporate folks are refreshingly open to new ideas from psychology and sociology. Generally they have no knowledge of the ideas and approaches that underlie much of the other work that I do, and in a sense they possess that elusive Zen quotient known as the beginner’s mind. On the other hand, corporate environments are more formal than my usual haunts: social service agencies, arts groups, the worlds of post-secondary education. Corporate denizens are more cautious about speaking up, more tentative about their ideas and questions, less confident in the discourse of ideas.

I’m enjoying myself, and part of this enjoyment involves creating new resource guides for people who have no background in psychology whatsoever. At two workshops this week, I’m using a new guide called "Improving Supervisory Skills." Note the title: simple, pragmatic, unadorned by the metaphors and stylistic flourishes I typically employ. Just the straight goods, for those who want a direct and unvarnished approach to working with people.

An excerpt:

Supervisors spend a great deal of time interacting with employees to build trust and collaboration, to deal with conflicts, to develop healthy and effective working relationships. The most powerfulkills that such people can bring to the workplace do not involve technical ability or knowledge but rather the interpersonal resources that allow them to enhance their relationships with people in various situations. The best managers and supervisors are those with the finest people skills.

And yet, most supervisors have no direct training in interpersonal skills, in mentoring, in strategies and techniques that can be used to improve their own working life and the experiences of those around them. This is a significant oversight, as most career professionals spend more time with their colleagues than with their own families. Collegial relationships are profoundly important.

This one day workshop offers supervisors the opportunity to further develop a range of interpersonal skills: mentoring, building trust, resolving conflicts, recovering from mistakes, promoting collaboration, containing and working through challenges, and undersanding the primary role of self-awareness. This will be a practical workshop, with emphasis on approaches that can be applied quickly and effectively.

As always, the guide is provided here under a Creative Commons attribution license. Feel free to download and share (pdf attached at end of this post)