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Get the Best Performance From Every Member of Your Team

People Management Skills Training 2 days

Learn how to get the best performance from other people. This course will show you how to agree goals and plan for a better future. We show you how to prioritise tasks and avoid common time management mistakes. Learn how to handle difficult conversations, poor performance issues and create a positive mental attitude.

Available as an open course at venues across the UK, as live online training via Microsoft Teams, or as bespoke in-house training tailored to your organisation.

★★★★★
"The models and toolkits are practical takeaways which I can clearly see how to implement with my team going forward. The content was all relevant, interesting and engaging. The trainer was personable and made the two days enjoyable." - Lauren Wilson, IR Magazine
Quality Training
Established 1997
12 CPD Hours
Delivery Options Upcoming Dates

Course Overview

What is People Management Skills Training?

People management is not the same as task management. Most managers are promoted because they excel at technical work, yet once in a management role they discover that results depend less on what they do themselves and more on how effectively they motivate, communicate with and influence the people around them. This two-day course addresses precisely that gap, teaching the nine practical people management skills that determine whether a manager gains the willing cooperation of their team or faces constant resistance.

On day one you will explore goal setting and clear, convincing communication, then move into impression management and personality awareness: understanding the optimists, critical thinkers and cynics in your team and knowing how to get the best from each type. The afternoon focuses on handling conflict and difficult behaviour professionally, using facts rather than emotions and protecting working relationships while still maintaining high standards.

Day two covers time management, prioritisation and delegation in the morning, replacing reactive chaos with logical order and planned control. The afternoon develops emotional intelligence: understanding how emotions affect performance, sustaining a positive mental attitude under pressure and using the power of suggestion to inspire every team member to give their best effort willingly.

Unlike a management development programme that concentrates on organisational frameworks and performance systems, this course focuses on the interpersonal dimension of management: how you come across, how you motivate individuals and how you gain cooperation from even the most challenging team members. Delegates who also want to develop inspirational leadership skills will find that the two programmes complement each other directly.

Core Skills

The Key Skills Covered

This course is built around nine evidence-based people management skills, grouped into six practical areas. Developing these transforms how your team responds to you and how consistently every individual gives their best performance.

  1. 1

    Impression Management

    How you come across to others matters as much as what you know. Impression management means taking deliberate control of the signals you send so that your team perceives you as credible, confident and fair. The first step to gaining willing cooperation is making the right impression consistently.

  2. 2

    Clear Goal Setting and Communication

    Set specific, worthwhile goals and communicate them with precision so every team member knows exactly what is expected and why it matters. Vague goals produce vague results; clear goals, communicated well, align effort and build genuine commitment.

  3. 3

    Personality Awareness

    Every team contains optimists, critical thinkers and cynics. Effective people managers recognise which type they are dealing with and adapt their approach accordingly. Understanding personality helps you get the best from each individual rather than applying a one-size-fits-all management style.

  4. 4

    Conflict and Performance Management

    Conflict is inevitable; how you manage it determines whether it damages or strengthens working relationships. You will learn to use objective language, focus on behaviour rather than character and maintain high performance standards without causing unnecessary friction or resentment.

  5. 5

    Time Management, Prioritisation and Delegation

    Every manager must master time. You will learn to prioritise by value and deadline, delegate the right tasks to the right people and protect time for the high-value work that drives real results, rather than being consumed by low-priority busy work.

  6. 6

    Emotional Intelligence and Motivation

    Emotions profoundly affect performance. You will develop the emotional intelligence to manage your own state under pressure and the motivational skills to help others feel stronger, more optimistic and more capable, even during difficult periods.

Who Is This Course For?

Who Should Attend This People Management Skills Training Course?

Designed for managers who need to get the best performance from other people, particularly those who find the interpersonal side of management challenging.

Practising Managers

Develop a reliable people management toolkit that gets consistent results from every member of your team.

Middle Managers

Strengthen the interpersonal skills that determine how effectively you manage across and within the organisation.

Front-Line Team Leaders

Build the people skills that turn technical expertise into genuine management effectiveness.

Newly Promoted Managers

Learn the people skills your new role demands and gain the confidence to use them from day one.

Also highly valuable for technical specialists newly promoted into management, supervisors managing difficult or unmotivated team members, and experienced managers who want to refresh and sharpen their people skills.

Course Agenda

People Management Skills Training Course Details

1

Day 1 • Morning • People management foundations, communication and personality awareness

Establish the nine people management skills, assess your own strengths and development areas, and master the communication and impression management skills that gain willing cooperation from your team.

We introduce the nine core people management skills and explain why each one matters. Rather than treating management as a vague collection of good intentions, this framework gives you a clear and structured picture of the competencies that determine whether a manager gains the willing cooperation of their team or faces constant resistance. You will use this framework to assess yourself honestly throughout the course.
You complete an honest self-assessment across the nine skills, identifying where you are already strong, where you have room to grow and what you most want to achieve from the two days. This ensures the course is immediately relevant to your specific situation and that your personal action plan addresses your real development priorities rather than generic management theory.
Impression management means taking conscious control of the signals you send to your team. Your posture, tone, language and behaviour all shape how others perceive you, and that perception determines how willingly they follow your lead. We explore how to project confidence, fairness and credibility consistently, and how to recover quickly when first impressions have not gone as planned.
Effective people management begins with clear goals. If your team does not know precisely what they are working towards, their effort will be diffuse and results will be inconsistent. We cover how to set specific, motivating goals and communicate them in a way that gains genuine commitment rather than reluctant compliance, including the use of measurable targets and written records.
Most management problems have their root in imprecise communication. We show you how to define your exact meaning, eliminate ambiguity and structure your message so that team members understand not just what you want but why it matters and how you will measure success. Specific, clear communication is the foundation of every other people management skill.
Managers frequently use language that is far less precise than they realise. Words like 'soon', 'better' and 'more professional' mean different things to different people. We practise replacing vague language with specific, quantitative terms that leave no room for misinterpretation and that give team members a clear and achievable target to aim for.
Every team contains these three personality types, and each requires a different management approach. Optimists need channelling towards realistic targets; critical thinkers need engaging constructively so their analysis improves decisions rather than blocking progress; cynics need managing before their negativity spreads to the rest of the team. We give you a clear strategy for each type.
A positive mental attitude is not wishful thinking; it is a deliberate mental discipline that affects your decisions, your communication and your team's morale. We explore the psychology behind positive thinking and introduce practical techniques for cultivating it as a consistent management habit, particularly when circumstances are difficult.
How a conversation or meeting ends has a disproportionate effect on how it is remembered and on the motivation of the people involved. We cover the principle of ending interactions on a constructive, forward-looking note and why this simple habit significantly improves team morale and engagement over time.
The morning closes with a structured review of the people management framework and communication principles covered. Delegates note their key takeaways and begin drafting the morning component of their personal action plan, identifying the specific changes they will make in how they set goals and communicate with their team.
1

Day 1 • Afternoon • Conflict management, difficult people and performance conversations

Learn to handle conflict, poor performance and difficult team members rationally rather than emotionally, using language and techniques that resolve issues without damaging working relationships.

No team is conflict-free; the question is whether you manage conflict well or badly. We introduce a rational framework for addressing disagreements that keeps conversations productive and professional rather than personal and damaging. The goal is to resolve the issue without creating lasting resentment, while still maintaining the standards your team needs to meet.
One of the most important principles in people management is directing feedback at observable behaviour rather than personality. Criticising character puts people on the defensive and produces hostility; commenting on specific behaviour is factual, fair and much more likely to produce the change you need. This distinction determines whether a difficult conversation resolves a problem or creates a new one.
Opinions inflame conflict; facts resolve it. We show you how to move a difficult conversation from subjective impressions to objective evidence, so that the discussion is grounded in what actually happened rather than in competing interpretations. This approach protects working relationships while still addressing the underlying performance or behaviour issue directly.
A core people management skill is knowing when an explanation is a genuine reason that requires a practical solution and when it is an excuse that needs to be challenged directly. We give you a clear framework for making that distinction without being dismissive or confrontational, so you can be both fair and firm in the same conversation.
Non-verbal signals carry significant weight in difficult management conversations. Your posture, eye contact, pace of speech and tone all affect how your message lands and whether the other person feels challenged fairly or attacked personally. We cover how to align your non-verbal communication with the outcome you want and how to read the signals the other person is sending.
Recognition and appreciation are among the most powerful and cost-effective people management tools available, yet they are consistently under-used. We examine how to give specific, genuine praise that motivates team members without feeling hollow or manipulative, and how to use social motivators systematically to build a positive team culture over time.
Structured practice exercises give delegates the opportunity to apply the conflict management and performance conversation techniques covered in the afternoon. Working through realistic scenarios builds the confidence to handle difficult situations calmly and consistently back in the workplace, rather than relying on improvised responses that rarely produce the best outcome.
Day one closes with a full review of the afternoon content and a structured action planning session. Each delegate identifies the specific people management behaviours they will implement immediately on returning to work, with measurable targets and a realistic timescale for each commitment.
2

Day 2 • Morning • Time management, prioritisation and delegation

Move from reactive chaos to planned control by mastering prioritisation, delegation and the habits that allow managers to focus their energy on the work that generates real results.

Some managers resist planning, believing it takes time they do not have. We challenge that assumption directly, demonstrating that time spent planning consistently saves more time than it costs. Planning is not a luxury for managers with spare capacity; it is the foundation of controlled, effective people management and the single most reliable way to reduce the reactive firefighting that consumes so many management days.
Procrastination affects managers at all levels and is one of the primary causes of missed deadlines and accumulating backlogs. We explore the psychological roots of procrastination and introduce practical techniques for starting tasks decisively, maintaining momentum and completing work on schedule, even when tasks feel uncomfortable or difficult.
Not all tasks deserve equal attention. Effective people managers prioritise according to two criteria: the value the task will generate and the urgency of its deadline. We introduce a practical prioritisation framework that helps you make fast, defensible decisions about where to focus your energy, what to defer and what to delegate to a team member.
Busy work is activity that feels productive but generates little real value. It is one of the most common traps for managers and one of the most significant causes of underperformance. We help you identify the busy work patterns in your own workload and replace them with focused, high-value activity that moves your team forward.
A structured, prioritised task list replaces the disorganised and demoralising to-do list that most managers rely on. We cover how to build and maintain a P-List that reflects your real priorities, keeps you focused under pressure and gives you a clear sense of daily progress, even when demands are constantly competing for your attention.
Time is lost to three categories of wasters: self-generated (procrastination, poor planning, perfectionism), people-generated (unnecessary interruptions, unclear requests, unproductive meetings) and systems-generated (duplicated effort, inefficient processes). We diagnose which category costs you most and address each with targeted strategies that produce immediate results.
Effective delegation is one of the highest-leverage activities available to a people manager. It frees your time for higher-value work, develops your team members and builds their confidence and capability. We cover the principles of sound delegation: choosing the right task, selecting the right person and specifying the outcome clearly so that expectations are unambiguous from the start.
Knowing you should delegate and knowing how to delegate are different things. We give you a practical delegation process that covers briefing, agreement on standards and timescales, check-in points and follow-up without micromanaging, so that the delegated work comes back to the standard you need and the team member grows in confidence and capability through the experience.
Interruptions are one of the most significant productivity drains for managers. We cover techniques for protecting focused work time, managing an open-door culture without sacrificing your own output and training your team to solve problems independently before coming to you. The aim is to remain accessible without being permanently distracted from your most important work.
People managers are frequently called upon to make decisions and resolve problems quickly. We cover a structured approach to problem solving that moves from defining the issue clearly to generating options and selecting the best course of action, reducing the likelihood of poor decisions made under pressure and helping you to involve your team constructively in finding solutions.
The Pareto principle holds that roughly 80 per cent of your results come from 20 per cent of your activities. Applied to people management, this means identifying and protecting the interactions, conversations and decisions that have the greatest impact on team performance, and reducing time spent on activities that add little value to the overall output of your team.
The morning concludes with a structured review and action planning session. Delegates identify the time management and delegation changes they will implement immediately and set measurable targets for each commitment, ensuring the morning's learning translates directly into changed behaviour on their return to work.
2

Day 2 • Afternoon • Emotional intelligence, positive mental attitude and inspiring your team

Develop the emotional intelligence to manage your own state under pressure and the motivational skills to inspire every member of your team to give their best performance willingly.

How your team members feel emotionally has a direct and measurable impact on their performance. Negative emotions generate negative results; positive emotions produce positive results. Effective people managers understand this dynamic and take deliberate steps to influence the emotional climate of their team, recognising that their own emotional state has an outsized effect on everyone around them.
Maintaining a positive mental attitude is not about ignoring problems; it is about responding to them in a way that preserves energy and sustains performance. We cover the habits and thought patterns that keep managers and their teams constructive under sustained pressure, and how to model the attitude you want to see without dismissing the genuine difficulties your team faces.
Fear of failure, fear of confrontation and fear of looking incompetent are common barriers to effective people management. We introduce practical cognitive techniques for challenging fearful thinking, building genuine confidence and maintaining realistic optimism even when circumstances are difficult. Confidence is a habit, not a personality trait, and it can be developed deliberately.
The specific language you use when speaking to or about your team members has a measurable effect on their motivation and self-belief. We cover the language patterns that build confidence and the contrasting patterns that undermine it, so you can communicate in a way that consistently brings out the best in people and creates a positive, self-reinforcing cycle of performance.
Inspiration is a skill, not a personality trait. We break down the specific language, framing and storytelling techniques that effective people managers use to shift their team from a passive or resistant mindset to one of genuine engagement and willing effort. You will practise these techniques and develop an approach that feels authentic to your own style.
The ability to extract learning from setbacks rather than being demoralised by them is one of the defining qualities of highly effective people managers. We cover reframing techniques that convert failure from a judgement on ability into information that improves the next attempt, and how to create a team culture in which setbacks are discussed openly and used constructively.
The final module introduces the continuous improvement mindset: the habit of reviewing what happened, identifying what could be done better and committing to a specific change before the next attempt. Applied consistently across your team, this approach produces steady, compounding improvements in both individual and collective performance over time.
Day two closes with a comprehensive review of all four modules and an extended action planning session. Each delegate leaves with a written plan specifying what they will do differently, by when, and how they will measure success. The post-course portal and three months of free telephone coaching support implementation back in the workplace and ensure the skills become lasting habits rather than good intentions.

Availability and Pricing

Delivery Options

Choose the delivery format that best fits your schedule and team.

All options deliver the same high-quality content.

Online Live Training

£700 +VAT

per delegate

Interactive live sessions delivered via Teams using our superior green-screen technology.

  • Same content as face-to-face
  • Learn from home or office
  • Delivered via MS Teams
  • Laptop or tablet with webcam
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Open Course

£900 +VAT

per delegate

Early bird offers available

Join scheduled courses at venues across the UK including London, Birmingham, Manchester & more.

  • Venues across the UK
  • 9:00 am to 4:30 pm
  • Tea and coffee from 8:45 am
  • Network with peers
Book Open Course

Bespoke In-House

£2250+VAT

per training day

We come to you. Training delivered at your premises, tailored to your team's specific needs.

  • Your premises or online
  • Tailored to your organisation
  • Dates to suit your schedule
  • We can train in your timezone
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All Our Training Includes

Full 2 days of expert training delivered by an experienced trainer
CPD-endorsed course: 12 CPD training hours (plus 2-3 additional hours via post-course online learning)
Full digital interactive course notes
Official training certificate
Access to free additional training material via our post-course portal
3 months of free telephone coaching while you implement your learning

Questions? Call 020 3856 3037 or 01452 856091

Upcoming Dates

Next Available Course Dates

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No upcoming dates are currently listed.
Please get in touch to enquire about availability.

Contact Us

Frequently Asked Questions

Course FAQs

You can book directly online via our course dates page, call us on 020 3856 3037, or make an enquiry and we will call you back. We accept payment by BACS, cheque or credit card. Once booked, you will receive a confirmation email with full joining instructions.
Yes. We can deliver this course exclusively for your team at your premises or online, on dates to suit you. Bespoke in-house training is priced per day rather than per delegate, making it cost-effective for groups of four or more. We can also tailor the content to address your organisation's specific challenges.
People management skills are developed through a combination of structured knowledge, practical exercises and personal reflection. This course provides a clear framework of the nine key skills, teaches the underlying principles of each, and gives delegates structured practice so the skills become habits rather than simply good intentions. The personal action plan and three months of free telephone coaching ensure the learning continues after the course ends.
Successful people management rests on four foundations: communicating clearly so that people know exactly what is expected of them; managing conflict and difficult behaviour rationally rather than emotionally; motivating individuals according to what genuinely drives each person; and maintaining a positive, purposeful team culture even under pressure. This course develops practical skills in all four areas and gives you a framework to apply them consistently.
The five most critical people management skills are: (1) clear communication and goal setting, so your team knows exactly what is required and why; (2) the ability to handle conflict and difficult conversations professionally, using facts rather than emotions; (3) the skill of motivating individuals, not just the team as a whole, by adapting your approach to each person's personality; (4) effective delegation and time management, so you focus your energy where it creates the most value; and (5) emotional intelligence, the ability to manage your own emotions under pressure and positively influence those of the people around you.
Yes, the training is highly interactive. Sessions include group discussions, exercises, case studies and individual action planning. The trainer actively teaches expert content rather than simply facilitating discussion, so delegates leave with structured knowledge they can apply immediately. The style is engaging and practical throughout.
The course attracts managers at all levels who want to improve the interpersonal dimension of their management role. Delegates include newly promoted team leaders building their people skills for the first time, experienced managers who have never had formal training in managing people, technical specialists who have moved into management roles, and senior managers wanting to refresh and sharpen their approach. They come from a wide range of sectors including finance, healthcare, engineering, education, retail and the public sector.
Open courses run from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm. Delegates are welcome to arrive from 8:45 am; tea and coffee are available from that time. The course includes mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks plus a lunch break.

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On This Page

  1. 1 Course Overview
  2. 2 Key Skills
  3. 3 Who Should Attend
  4. 4 Course Agenda
  5. 5 Delivery Options
  6. 6 Upcoming Dates
  7. 7 FAQs

Book This Course

Online Live Training £700 +VAT
Open Course £900 +VAT
Bespoke In-House £2250 +VAT/day
Book Open Course Enquire About In-House

Questions? Call us on

020 3856 3037
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Customer Reviews

What Delegates Say About This Course

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Read Our Customer Reviews
★★★★★

"I'm impressed by quality of materials. They were not vague, but very specific, not boring, not what you usually hear on typical training. I really appreciated referral SMART model and structure how to keep positive attitude at tough times. Chris (trainer) is passionate, positive and very respectful individual. I felt engaged from first second of the course. I really appreciated the guidance on written notes. 100! /100"

Klaudia Zogala-Harcik

Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA)

★★★★★

"I have found the course inspiring; it has re-enforced / energised me to what I can / need to do. It has given me the knowledge and tools to go forward and improve. Chris was an excellent presenter, a great mixture of visuals and us practising what we’ve learnt "

Chloe Ward

Whitmar Publications Ltd

★★★★★

"The models and toolkits are practical takeaways, which I can clearly see how to implement my team going forward. The content was all relevant. Interesting and engaging delivery, personable and made the two days enjoyable. Made me feel relaxed and able to give my feedback and comments within the group."

Lauren Wilson

IR Magazine

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Ready to Get the Best From Your Team?

Enrol on our next open course, book a live online training session, or speak to us about tailored in-house delivery for your management team.

Book Open Course Enquire about In-House

Or speak to a member of our team directly:

020 3856 3037 01452 856091