The Swedish Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai held an exciting seminar on how to handle situations where communication breaks down, on Thursday 12 April 2012.
The Chamber invited two talented speakers to share their experiences, Ms. Katarina Billing who is a Certified Psychologist and Journalist, Senior Partner at MiL Institute, which is one of Sweden’s top three management institutes. She is also Executive Member of the MiL Research Foundation and head of the Shanghai Office. Ms. Julia Zhu is an ICF Certified Coach and China Certified Public Accountant. She has over 20 year’s experiences from manufacturing, consulting and supply chain organizations.
Ms. Katarina Billing and Ms. Julia Zhu focused on little things that have a great negative impact on working relationships. They started this interactive seminar with a startling and unexpected illustration of various power techniques where some of the participants got a feel for the impact these power techniques have on well being, energy and motivation.
The techniques they illustrated were for instance ”Making Invisible, Ridicule and Withholding Information”, various techniques where a person with more power makes sure his or her place in hierarchy is not threatened, by belittling other people at the office. This was followed by a discussion of solutions and ways of handling these types of situations. The participants shared their most powerful tools like ”Demand space, Avoid being emotional, Joke back and Refuse to take a decision until you have all the information”.
The value of supporting each other in difficult and often lonely situations was also stressed, for instance by building on what the ”suppressed person” tries to get through, give space to him or her and other ways of reaching out emotionally.
After this seminar the participants should now be able to handle this situation.
