Challenging Conversations for Financial Professionals

Challenging conversations have the potential to strengthen or weaken a relationship and need to be handled with skill and care. However, many professionals avoid such conversations for fear of saying the wrong thing, too much or not enough. Yet the issue is rarely resolved by ignoring or inflaming it.

Who is it for?

This is for brokers, underwriters, claims staff, IFAs and paraplanners who;

• can get easily flustered especially when dealing with people who are angry and behaving aggressively
• can struggle to regain control of the conversation when on the back foot.
• are not sure how to handle it when a prospect withholds their premium
• can struggle to say no
• find it hard to deliver bad news
• find it difficult to talk about fees

What is it?

The highly practical workshop focuses on the process, content and emotion of challenging conversations. The session draws on the highly-regarded research of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Delegates will leave with a framework, tools and phrases to handle tough situations thorny issues and heated moments.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the session participants will be able to;

• start awkward conversations and stop procrastinating
• Avoid common pitfalls
• Deliver difficult messages
• Use an easily-memorable 4 step framework with key phrases
• Manage emotionally-charged situations
• Avoid saying the wrong things
• Apply the ideas to real-life challenging conversations

We won’t cover formal workplace conversations such as dealing with underperformance, redundancies and grievances as these are management developement subjects and need a specific approach.