Handling difficult conversations at the Football Foundation
The Challenge
The Football Foundation is the UK’s largest sports charity. Funded by the Premier League, The Football Association and the Government, the Foundation directs £30m every year into grassroots sport. Their mission is to improve facilities, create opportunities and build communities throughout England. The management team needed to ensure that the organisation was running with top class efficiency and to ensure that every pound the charity has is spent with maximum effect.
They approached Dramatic Solutions with a specific experiential training need which would help them achieve their vision. They wanted their managers to be fully equipped to handle difficult conversations; with a real focus on handling conflicting priorities to achieve the best results for the organisation. Having already impressed the Football Foundation’s management team with advanced presentation skills training, we were delighted to be invited to work with the Football Foundation again.
The Approach
We carried out thorough research to establish what kinds of difficult conversations managers experienced in their day-to-day working lives and used this research to create dramatic scenarios that the managers would recognise. The scenarios were used as the basis for the forum theatre exercises used in the training. The participants saw the scenarios played out and were able to try out various tactics for dealing with them more successfully. They were also invited to bring along their own difficult scenarios and had the opportunity to role play them using our actors.
The Results
The training increased the Football Foundation’s manager’s ability to handle difficult conversations allowing them to deal with a range of scenarios to create a better outcome.
