Blog post

DIVCO Takes its Negotiation Skills to the Next Level

DIVCO commissioned the John Molson Executive Centre to develop and deliver its first comprehensive development program for senior employees, tackling a topic that is in high demand right now.

March 13, 2019

Source: John Molson Executive Centre

Tailored leadership training and development for employees provides companies with a multitude of benefits. Research shows that employees who receive regular training remain with their companies longer and it improves productivity, profit and employee morale. In recent years, the number of training hours companies provide to employees has continued to increase.

Pre-program communication is key

Adam Turner, President of DIVCO, a Montreal-based construction company, says his team had previously been involved in some in-house, as-needed training, but that it had never been consistent or held in a formal setting. Turner wanted to create a development plan that would provide his team with the tools needed to enhance its performance on a more regular basis. Through in-depth pre-program communication and planning, JMEC developed a program that met DIVCO’s needs without eating up a lot of company time.

To accommodate DIVCO’s busy schedule and to cut back on disruption to the participating leaders’ work, the program was divided into four sessions to be delivered over the course of a year, beginning in August 2018 and ending June 2019. Spreading out the sessions held two major benefits for the company. First, it helped to mitigate the impact on productivity that would occur if leaders were kept in training for an extended period of time. Second, it provided the participants with the opportunity to apply to their work what they had learned so far, then return for more. One of the biggest post-training difficulties companies have is the actual application of the methods and skills learned, especially for big topics that introduce many new concepts that may significantly change the way a leader currently does his or her job. By breaking up the sessions over a longer period of time, DIVCO leaders were able to slowly implement new tactics and skills, then reconvene to discuss their experiences and add another layer.

Negotiation is a highly effective topic for leader development in many sectors because the tactics can be used to improve both internal and external relations.

About 25 senior employees from DIVCO participated in the program, which targeted negotiation skills and tactics, a topic that Turner thought applied to all of the leaders undergoing the training. “Negotiation happens with our clients, with our suppliers and within our company with one another,” Turner says. “I thought it was a broad and recurring theme in most of our activities, and was probably a good place to start.” Negotiation is a highly effective topic for leader development in many sectors because the tactics can be used to improve both internal and external relations, as well as increase output and profit. Moving forward, Turner says he intends to have similar training programs developed on additional topics relevant to his people and his business.

The DIVCO team at JMEC

The four sessions on negotiation were designed to provide DIVCO’s leaders with the skills and tools needed to improve in their current positions. For them it was not necessarily about learning how to negotiate, as this is something most of them already do every day. Instead, the training was targeted towards enhancing their negotiating skills and leveraging the knowledge they already had in order to more effectively serve clients and support the company. The sessions were delivered using a blend of traditional classroom-style instruction and breakout sessions where participants convened in smaller groups to work on case studies in a hands-on environment. To further increase the quality of the learning experience for DIVCO’s leaders, one of the major case studies used was based on a real situation that was specific to DIVCO. This allowed participants to directly apply the skills and tactics they were learning. “I thought that was a great exercise because it was tangible and something that everybody could understand and relate to,” Turner says. “It was very effective.”

Top marks. [JMEC] did a great job of understanding our needs and really tailoring a package to meet the objectives.

In order to develop an efficient program that ticked all the boxes for DIVCO, JMEC spent significant amounts of time communicating with Turner, thus ensuring that the program would run without a hitch, a detail that was greatly appreciated. Turner likened the experience to what he does in his own company. “It’s kind of like in our business: the more time we spend in the pre-construction phase makes the execution phase that much easier.” In building the program, JMEC took Turner’s initial ideas and turned them into a concrete program, which he was then able to provide feedback on through an ongoing conversation until the program was exactly what he wanted for his team. “Top marks. [JMEC] did a great job of understanding our needs and really tailoring a package to meet the objectives,” Turner says. “I think a lot more good will come out of it over the years.”