Course Description

Effective communication is required to be successful in the business world.  This course will provide auditors with important communication skills to efficiently/effectively converse with audit customers/clients to build professional business relationships and accomplish audit objectives.  Skilled communication can be the difference in auditor success or failure.  Closely related to communication and building professional relationships is negotiation.  Auditors find themselves negotiating with audit customers/clients in many different ways (e.g. date to provide/ receive information, findings, response to draft reports, access to key staff, etc.).  Successful auditors that work well with management have strong communication and negotiation skills.  Techniques, approaches, tools and perceptions will be reviewed, discussed and practiced in this training to enable auditors to better meet customer expectations.

In this training, we will discuss the following important issues:

• Different forms of communication & how it is evolving/impacted with the greater use of technology
• Types of people that are difficult to communicate with effectively & approaches/tips to improve communication
• Components of emotional intelligence
• Thinking on your feet (including elevator speeches)
• Negotiation from the auditor perspective
• Interviewing skills
• Persuading/influencing/selling audit findings/recommendations
• Relationships, first impressions & professionalism

Learning Objectives

• Identify the barriers to communication and how to remove them
• Learn how to efficiently/effectively communicate with customers/clients/stakeholders
• Understand the key points involved with the delivery of positive and negative information
• Learn the basics of emotional intelligence and how that can be used to improve your overall performance that translates to greater success in your career
• Practice the steps to turn a negative situation unto a positive experience for the customer and make it look easy
• Learn the basics of negotiation
• Realize how to negotiate with others to promote a win-win result
• Discuss specific auditor negotiation challenges and learn methods/approaches to overcome the challenges
• Identify and learn the preparation and execution for building positive business relationships
• Understand how to deliver audit results that are clear, concise and are improvement/change oriented
• Receive a list of reference materials/resources for use in future development of communication, negotiation and relationship building skills

After completing this training, you will be able to:

• Communicate effectively with audit customer/clients and other stakeholders
• Deal with difficult people and situations
• Strengthen your emotional intelligence awareness
• Perform more effective interviews
• Enhance your presentation and business writing skills
• Use impromptu speaking skills to further your contributions to the organization & career
• Negotiate with ease
• Negotiate to a result that benefits both parties
• Communicate more effectively with management and sell your ideas/findings
• Strengthen relationships with audit customers/clients
• Use reference materials provided for personal and audit team future development

Who Should Attend

• Auditors with five year or less experience (Operational, Performance, Financial, IT) that want to learn more about communication, negotiation and building business relationships. This training will benefit both new and experienced auditors that want to strengthen communication with audit customers.  Interactive exercises will be used to reinforce session learning objectives with real-life examples.  This is the perfect course for technically competent people who want to improve their communication skills.
• More experienced auditors (greater than five years experience) that want a refresher or to identify new ideas/approaches to further develop communication, negotiation and building business relationship skills.

Prerequisites

None - all auditors will benefit from this seminar.

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