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You can usually tell within the first ten minutes whether a negotiation workshop is going to be useful or just noisy. Someone leans back, folds their arms, and says the line they believe is wisdom: “Look, it’s simple. They’ve got the advantage. If you don’t get tough, you lose.” A couple of people nod. Someone else smirks like they’ve heard it all before. And the facilitator can feel the room quietly agreeing to a false choice: be hard or be had. Here’s the awkward truth: most workplace negotiation isn’t about price. It’s about priorities, resources, trade-offs, status, and risk. Which means negotiation style shows up everywhere: project meetings, stakeholder reviews, leadership offsites. It’s how decisions get made when interests collide — not just what happens when procurement sends you a spreadsheet.

When a Managers or a Client says, “Communication is poor,” I try not to nod too enthusiastically. Not because it isn’t true. More because it’s usually the organisational equivalent of saying, “The car won’t start.” Helpful as a headline. Useless as a diagnosis. Nine times out of ten, “communication is poor” is a polite way of saying something sharper: → We didn’t have clarity on the goal. → We didn’t make a clear decision. → We didn’t name ownership. → We didn’t identify the specific risks. → We didn’t confirm and align around one message. → And now we’re surprised that the delivery looks like a game of Chinese whispers played by tired adults.

There’s a particular kind of team that makes facilitators relax too early. They turn up on time. They smile. They listen politely. They say things like, “That’s a great point,” and “I can see both sides.” They thank you at the end. They might even clap (which is always unsettling in a meeting room). And then nothing changes. Not because they’re stupid. Not because they don’t care. It is often because they’re nice in the way that British weather is “fine”: technically acceptable, quietly limiting, and absolutely not what you asked for. That’s the Nice Trap. Politeness becomes avoidance, and avoidance becomes culture.

One of your managers or clients emails or calls you “We need some training on …”. Insert one of the most common topics, like ‘communication’. It’s rarely well targeted. It’s just the default setting: something’s not working in the team, so we book a training course. Like buying a new sat nav because the driver keeps ignoring the signs. And here’s the frustrating bit for us in L&D: you know that you can run a brilliant session and still get no change in behaviour. Not because people didn’t enjoy it, or because the facilitator wasn’t good. Usually because we started with content instead of clarity.

If you work in L&D or HR, you’ll recognise the pattern. Someone senior says, “We need the teams collaborating better.” Someone else says, “Let’s do something engaging.” A calendar invite appears. People turn up politely. Everyone has a decent time. Then Monday arrives and the organisation resumes its favourite hobby: behaving exactly as it did before. That’s why the new wave of online simulations is worth paying attention to. Done well, they don’t just entertain. They create a safe, controlled environment where teams can see the impact of their decisions, communication habits, and assumptions in real time - and then do the one thing most training forgets: stop and reflect.

I’ve lost count of the number of teams who tell me they’ve got a “problem-solving issue”, when what they really have is a problem-rushing issue. You’ll recognise the pattern. Something goes wrong. A customer complains. A deadline slips. A system breaks. The team gets in a room (or on Teams), and within ten minutes someone has a solution. Everyone nods. Actions get scribbled down. And then… nothing really changes. The same issue pops up again in a slightly different outfit three weeks later.

I’ve been working with leadership teams for years, and one question comes up regularly: “Which tool should we use – the Leadership Style assessment or the Communication Style one?” It’s a fair question, because they sound similar, and frankly, they are related. But they solve different problems, and picking the wrong one can waste time and miss the real issue your team is facing. Let me walk you through how I think about it, because getting this right makes all the difference.

If you’ve ever facilitated a Senior Management Team with low self-awareness, you’ll know the pattern: everyone is communicating (loudly, confidently, and often at speed), yet somehow the message lands like a paper aeroplane in a hurricane. The tricky bit isn’t intelligence. It’s style. Senior teams don’t usually fall out because they don’t care. They fall out because they’re interpreting each other through their own default lens, then acting as if that interpretation is a fact. The result is predictable: Directs think everyone’s dithering, Systematics think nobody’s thinking, Spiriteds think the room has no energy, and Considerates quietly wonder why we’re all being so sharp with each other.

It started with a Slack message at 6:47pm on a Tuesday. Our Product Manager had sent a two-line decision to the team: “We’re pivoting the roadmap. New priorities attached.” No context. No reasoning. No space for questions. Within minutes, our Head of Design had replied with a terse “Thanks for the heads-up” (which, if you know Design, means I’m furious). Our Operations person had gone quiet. And our most junior engineer had asked me directly, “Is everything okay?” That was the moment I realised something was broken.

I know what you’re thinking! “Please, not another motivational speech, harping back to Covid 19!”. Maybe that’s not what you thought at all. It could be that you were one of those fortunate people who were ahead of the curve and constantly reviewing your offering against the backdrop of where the world of work was heading.