Internal Consultancy Skills

Course Overview

Within organisations more and more practitioners, including technical experts are being asked to act as ‘internal consultants’.
The role of the internal consultant requires a unique blend of practical and incisive skills and the confidence to use them.
This course has been specifically designed to enable the internal consultant to understand the processes involved in consulting and enhance the necessary skills in an experiential learning environment.
The emphasis of this training course is on the interpersonal skills required to be a successful internal consultant. The balance of the course is therefore two-thirds interpersonal skills and one-third internal consultancy tools and techniques.

• Establish personal objectives for the course
• The role and competencies of an internal consultant
• The consultancy cycle
• Consultant intervention styles
• Initial contact with the client and gaining entry
• Face-to-face communication
• Communication models
• Effective listening
• Constructive and unconstructive questioning
• The client system
• Stakeholder mapping and commitment
• Contracting issues
• Negotiating behaviours
• State A and state B logic tree
• Types of organisational change
• Organisational and personal sources of resistance to change
• Three step model of change
• Force field analysis
• Overcoming resistance to change
• Stakeholder influencing
• Sources of power and their relationship to influencing
• Influencing strategies
• Handling conflict
• Facilitating change
• Client project review
• Disengagement and follow up
• Completion of a personal action plan.

Course Objectives

DELEGATES WILL LEARN HOW TO

• recognise the stages in the consultancy cycle
• use the consultancy cycle as a framework for using key consultancy tools and techniques
• identify your own consulting style and develop a flexible approach to consulting
• identify and manage the political stakeholder system to maximise the success of the project.
• state the ethics around consulting
• review the different types of change and their impact on the way people work
• identify people’s responses to change and understand why people often resist change
• help people work constructively through change
• manage conflict to achieve an appropriate outcome for all sides
• identify manipulative and non-manipulative influencing behaviours
• review how they influence and are influenced by others, and be able to use a range of negotiating skills and behaviours
• state the importance of creating a shared vision for the future and develop the skills to build the vision
• control the project through informed decision making and action