Leaders have the challenge of dealing effectively with employees, colleagues and stakeholders who have very different communication filters and motivations. Success requires an ability to construct messages that resonate with the below conscious motivational drivers of their audience. In this program participants learn to use a set of tools (LAB Profile®) for decoding how people think, are motivated and are likely to behave in a variety of situations. A guiding principle is that “if you want people to get on the bus with you, you need to meet them at their bus stop.”

This class provides an introduction to the LAB methodology. Participants learn to ask simple questions that reveal cues to what motivates them and others in any situation. They then adapt their messages using the correct language to establish deep rapport and open others to their messages while also preventing or defusing conflict.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to listen for and to elicit values and motivational patterns in individuals and groups, in any context, and use the patterns to build rapport in everyday conversation and formal presentations.
• Understand ways that using the wrong language patterns can unintentionally create resistance to a person’s message and impair trust. Detect when this occurs and shift the message to one that is motivational.
• Understand and practice the application of motivation patterns to a variety of common communication and motivation challenges.
• Use motivational language tailored to individual employees for better performance management.
• Achieve better collaboration with individual colleagues, functional groups and customers.
• Manage up effectively—better understand and communicate with supervisors.
• Build more effective communications to drive change and avoid common pitfalls that actually increase resistance.
• Understand and synergize the differing motivations of team members while helping resolve team communication breakdowns.
• Prepare communications that appeal to audiences with different and/or unknown motivational patterns.
• Prepare communications for audiences who are likely to be resistant to, or skeptical of, the message.
• Deliver “bad news” in ways that maintain positive motivation.