Intercultural Communication & negotiation Skills And Processes

This three-day workshop promotes age-old concepts of consensus building that Indian tribes and other traditional societies utilized for thousands of years to support what is today called “win-win” decision-making.

It trains people how to: talk and listen respectfully; persuade, convince and influence others; define a negotiation process which is safe and predictable; identify interests, issues and proposals; defuse anger and disruptive behavior; identify common ground; deal effectively with inter-cultural differences (gender, age, ethnic, religious, etc…); break impasse; identify power resources and create leverage; advance and exchange proposals; and formulate agreements that are fair, lasting and enforceable.

The workshop is for everyone at all levels of the community and organization. The skills learned will improve communication and decision-making in the family, in the workplace, in an organization and in government. It also trains people how to deal more powerfully with outside agencies, political jurisdictions, constituent groups and other private concerns. This workshop is a prerequisite to the Mediation and Peacemaking Workshop and the Advanced Negotiation Workshop.

Mediation /Peacemaking Skills & Processes

This intensive three-day workshop is designed to build on the lessons learned in the Communication and Negotiation workshop. The training focuses on how, as an impartial third party, to minimize, manage and resolve differences among other people. The training offers new perspectives and skills on how to enlist and engage people in collaborative problem-solving; take ownership of the problem, process and solutions; break down complex problems into manageable parts; get parties to identify their interests in ways that can be satisfied; separate substantive from emotional issues; create settings that lend themselves to open and respectful discussion; generate options; and formulate agreements which are explicit, fair, legal, enforceable and lasting.

This workshop is intended to train mediators. However, it is also designed to teach people mediating skills. It is particularly useful to people who work in intermediary roles (e.g. directors, department and program managers, personnel specialists or committee or Board Chairs), who must balance differences among competing interests and get people to work effectively together. Reconciling the differences between staff members, departments, Management, Boards and the community is but one example. The skills and techniques taught in the workshop are also useful to department managers and line supervisors who must manage and resolve employee grievances and disputes in the workplace. Completing this workshop is a prerequisite to taking the Advanced Mediation Workshop.

Advanced Mediator & Certification Training

This three-day workshop is for people who have completed the first two workshops and have decided that they would like to become certified and placed by IDRS on its Panel of Professional Mediators.

This workshop builds on the negotiation and mediation principles and concepts that are learned in the preceding workshops. Primary emphasis is on obtaining more practice with more complex and challenging role-plays and direct feedback from experienced mediators who serve as trainers and coaches during the training. A segment of the advanced training deals with “ethics of a mediator” and provides up-dates on state laws that address disclosure, confidentiality and other issues pertaining to mediation.

Advanced negotiation Training

This workshop is designed to address the needs of Indian and other leaders who are involved in or preparing for actual negotiations with outside agencies, institutions, political jurisdictions, constituent groups, or other private concerns. This workshop trains participants how to prepare for, engage in and reach “closure” in actual substantive negotiations. This workshop combines generic skills training with hands-on assistance from the trainers in preparing for their particular procedural and substantive negotiations.

More specifically, participants are trained and coached how to: form and prepare a well-balanced and high functioning “negotiating team”; conduct and assemble needed research and expertise to prepare initial and subsequent proposals/positions; develop and implement a plan for managing and orchestrating a lengthy and multi-faceted negotiation process; define and negotiate a process and procedural agreements that will be followed during the negotiations, exchange and advance proposals; effectively use the caucus to stay prepared and flexible during the negotiations; develop options that can help avoid “impasses” and can be ultimately the basis for agreements that are fair lasting and enforceable; and establish and maintain a system for keeping one’s hierarchy informed and prepared to ratify agreements that are recommended by the negotiation team. The Communication and Negotiation Workshop is a prerequisite to the Advanced Negotiation Workshop.

Inter-Cultural Effectiveness

This two-day workshop, through a series of interactive and experiential processes, is designed to expose participants to perspectives and techniques that are useful in understanding their own culture, the cultures of others and how to better honor and bridge the differences between them.

Participants will learn: what culture is how to describe it; how culture affects our attitudes, beliefs and behaviors; what forces are driving cultural conflict; the advantages of “plurality” and “diversity” in the workplace; a new awareness of their own personal and cultural biases; how it feels to be “different”, how to minimize “stereotyping” and maximize cross-cultural perception, understanding and analysis; how to increase sensitivity to culturally-different non-verbal behavior; four basic rules of inter-cultural communication, and; models and techniques for enhancing cultural awareness within an organization. This workshop is extremely useful in the workplace, organization and community in which many different cultures are represented.