Neil Godin is one of Canada’s leading business and professional development trainers, speakers and writers. He has served a wide variety of clients in business, government and non-profit organizations for more than 35 years. While most of his clients are smaller companies and organizations, his corporate client list includes RBC Royal Bank (‘Relationship Banking,’ an approach to leadership and customer service now adopted by financial institutions around the world), McDonald’s (community relations), Telus telecommunications (leadership), Subway (staff attraction and retention), Shell (sales, service and leadership), and many others across Canada and the U.S.

Neil is a former journalist who began his private practice as a media relations consultant. Over the years his work evolved and expanded, first into marketing strategy, then sales and service, and finally into leadership, team building and personal development. Today, he provides clients with an array of fully integrated training and development services, with very special emphasis on ‘people’ skills – his burning passion in both business and life.

Neil began studying and teaching people skills early in his career, “when the light came on,” and he saw a universal disconnect – a huge gap between the language employers use – in slogans like, ‘Our people are our greatest asset’ – and how their people are actually treated. Since then his mission has been to help clients achieve their goals by closing that gap – by providing coaching in the skills of self-management; interpersonal communication; collaborative problem solving; conflict management, and (more important) conflict prevention.

While in training at the Center for Conflict Resolution in Vancouver, Canada, he had another ‘Aha’ moment. He learned how difficult it is to resolve conflict after it has broken out – and began to think about how much easier it could be to anticipate and pre-empt conflict – to “catch snowflakes” before things snowball into hostilities.

That led to an examination of the causes of conflict at work, and his conclusion that much of the conflict that destroys performance is actually sparked by supervisors and managers themselves. For example, when a manager mindlessly reacts with fault-finding, blame and criticism when a mistake is made – instead of deliberately attacking the problem – and protecting the person – they can provoke defensive excuse-making, which readily leads to conflict.

His solution: training in self-awareness, self-monitoring and self-management – combined with conflict prevention. These insights and skills are introduced at the start of the course, and are reinforced throughout.