Business today is more competitive than ever. Getting ahead and staying ahead requires you to make tough calls, face hard choices, and work through conflict. But no matter how much you invest in conflict workshops and training, productive conflict is still rare. Why? Because productive conflict is about more than the right skillset — it requires the right mindset and the right processes, neither of which come naturally.

In this keynote, Liane Davey walks audiences through the process for creating productive conflict that will improve results and enhance engagement. Audiences will learn how to:

• Identify the costs (in lost productivity, reduced engagement, and heightened stress) of avoiding the difficult issues.
• Reframe people’s perception about conflict so that their natural conflict aversion doesn’t turn into conflict avoidance or worse, passive-aggressiveness.
• Systematize conflict to neutralize and normalize even the most difficult issues in your business.

Organizations of all sizes depend on teams for productivity, growth, and innovation. Unfortunately, even with the most talented teams, dysfunction is the norm, not the exception. To make things worse, most teams are doing little to make it better, either because they aren’t aware of the problem or because they’re waiting for “someone else to fix it.”

The good news is that you don’t have to wait. You don’t need the jerk to get fired, your boss to move on, or a pricey consultant to turn your team around. In this keynote, you’ll learn how you can change your team from any seat at the table and take steps to help your team get along and get stuff done.

Audiences will learn how to:

• Proactively identify toxic behavior before it results in lost revenue or customers.
• Discover how your attitudes, choices, and behaviors are affecting the dynamic of your team.
• Learn the five things you can do immediately to help your team be happier, healthier, and more productive.

As a leader, managing change is nothing new. So, why does it feel so much harder now? Because change has changed. It’s no longer an event to prepare for, but a constant reality to cope with. With this unrelenting pace and intensity, your employees don’t have a chance to recover from the last initiative before moving on to the next one. Over time, even the best employees will either stop caring and check out, or try so hard they eventually burn out. While you can’t stop the tsunami of change, as a leader, you have more power than you think to create calm within the storm.

In this session, you will learn how to inspire high performance even in the midst of significant change and competing priorities. You’ll learn the mindset and the language that will allow you to surface and move your team through resistance and drama rather than getting stuck in it. Most importantly, you’ll receive practical strategies you can use to develop your own resilience, so you have the energy, patience, and endurance to be there for your employees over the long haul.

Leaders have always been expected to manage change. But this is different. Change has changed. Reality is shifting daily, if not hourly, and there are no orderly phases or playbooks to get us through. In these unprecedented times, even the best employees will struggle to stay productive. While we can’t stop the current tsunami, we do have the power to create calm within the storm.

In this virtual session, Liane Davey equips teams with the tools needed to deliver, even in the midst of chaos. With the right mindset and language, leaders will be able to surface and move through resistance and drama rather than getting stuck in it. Most importantly, Davey will share strategies you need right now, so you have the energy, patience, and endurance to be there for your employees throughout this ordeal.

(45-90 minutes)

Organizations struggle with conflict in the best of times. In the current environment, it’s even more of a challenge to surface and work through issues because many of us our working remotely. But the lack of routine doesn’t change the fact that your team needs to be able to make difficult trade-offs, address interpersonal friction, and provide one another with feedback. If anything, these are even more urgent.

In this virtual session, Liane Davey identifies the costs of avoiding the difficult issues, i.e. lost productivity, reduced engagement, and heightened stress. She also shows how to systematize conflict in order to work through issues more efficiently and with less drama, and, most importantly, how to keep difficult conversations productive, even when they’re done remotely.

(45-90 minutes)

Liane Davey developed this four-part webinar series to support people leading and working through significant, disruptive change. She provides applicable insights and techniques that are immediately implementable in today’s work environment. Content can be tailored to fit a client’s needs.

Session 1: Change Has Changed
This one-hour webinar introduces the notion that today’s brand of perpetual change is different. In the past, change used to be an event that you could prepare for, implement, and then recover from. Today’s change is constant.

Employee performance is optimized when their anxiety is in a certain healthy zone. Too much anxiety leads to fear and employees who are “too anxious to act.” Too little anxiety leads to complacency and employees who are “too comfy to care.” This session outlines the model of optimal performance.

Audiences will learn:

• How the human brain reacts to perpetual change and how to use neuropsychology to their advantage.
• How to focus so that employees know what to pay attention to and what to ignore as noise.
• The optimal level of anxiety to support behaviour change and how to assess the current levels of anxiety on a team.

Session 2: Optimizing Performance
This one-hour webinar helps managers motivate employees with different techniques depending on their individual reactions to change. Davey will share the different ways employees react to stress and how to spot them in the workplace, while providing practical techniques for increasing accountability or decreasing pressure depending on the employee.

This session will outline a process for fostering the optimal mindset for performance, including:

• A quick refresh on the impact of perpetual change on the brain and the importance of managing employees’ attention and anxiety.
• Developing a personalized approach for “turning up” or “turning down” the heat to get targeted results from each team member.
• Anticipating and responding to resistance.

Session 3: Managing Troublesome Behaviour
This one-hour webinar provides targeted assistance to managers who are coping with behavioural reactions to disruptive change. Davey will prepare managers for encounters with unpleasant behaviour, including an unwillingness to change, emotional outbursts, and passive aggressiveness. She will share strategies to help leaders stay in a constructive mindset and provide the right language to disarm negative behaviour before it does more damage to the individual, the team, or the business.

This session will cover common behaviours such as:

• Resistance: Surfacing and addressing resistance to change.
• Gossip and passive-aggressiveness: Exposing and working through concerns that are being raised in unconstructive ways.
• Emotional outbursts: Responding to public displays of anger, frustration, or sadness.

Session 4: Managing Your Own Resilience
The final session focuses on the leaders themselves. Davey will help leaders learn how to manage the stress of trying to lead others while processing the high volume and complexity of change themselves. This one-hour webinar is centered on leaders’ personal reactions to change with the goal of helping them to take care of themselves so that they can take care of their employees and customers.

The session focuses on:

• Reflection: Understanding individual reactions to organizational changes.
• Reframing: Thinking about change through the lens of your values.
• Resilience: Releasing the pressure and tapping into sustainable sources of energy.