Cooperative communication

Why should you be interested in leading Win-Win conversations?

You learn to communicate with other people more constructively and successfully.
You are more confident in difficult conversational situations.
You will gain confidence and can deal with differences of opinion better.
You feel more independent thanks to better communication with other people.
You experience more enriching situations in your professional and private life.
You improve your interaction with your fellow human beings in stressful situations.
You get to the point better in conversations.
You are more successful in not letting conflicts arise in the first place.
You get through difficult situations more confidently and powerfully and achieve better results.
You accept other opinions with more ease.

For companies and organisations:

Better communication means more effective team work and better customer relationships – and much more!

A new business world is emerging: companies are increasingly detaching themselves from traditional hierarchy structures and are thus expecting increasing levels of self responsibility, team skills and communication skills from their employees. But how? The ability to communicate clearly, transparently, and on equal footing must also be learned. In this respect, our corporate seminars on leading win-win conversations are the tool of choice. More…

Why leading Win-Win conversations makes everyone a winner

With leading win-win conversations (kokomm® for short) you have the opportunity to improve communication in all areas of your life, and sustainably achieve better results in your professional and private life – in such a way that everyone comes out of each situation enriched!

Often it is extremely difficult to assert yourself and prevail in daily discussions and running differences. How many times have you felt like you had to “row against” other opinions and points of view in the office or at home? It takes a great deal of strength and energy.

Figuratively speaking, kokomm® helps you to “offer your arguments and opinions to your interlocutor like a warm, comfortable coat, and not smack them round the ears with it like a wet towel” (loosely based on Max Frisch). In doing so, you use tried and tested tools, which help you on the one hand to better understand and appreciate the point of view of your interlocutor, and on the other hand to communicate more effectively yourself. This means that you are no longer arduously rowing against the current but instead setting sail and getting to your destination with significantly less effort.

Make everyone involved a winner

Our lives are sustained by a permanent idea of competition through which possibilities for mutual enrichment are usually lost. Because winning usually means that one person wins and the others lose. This means that as a society, in our private lives and at work, we remain way below our capabilities. Even neural research is now showing that our brain is not programmed for competition but rather cooperation. The brain is a social organ, which functions at its highest level when it can work together with other brains and look for joint solutions – and not when it must wear itself out in competition. Permanent confrontation leads to exactly the opposite: the brain reverts back to an emergency programme, which only provides the options of fight, flight or in extreme cases complete numbness.

“There is no question that conflict and competition are real facts of human action and have a biological basis. Yet, the theory that conflict, selfishness and aggression are the leading principles of human action has turned out to be wrong. Modern neural research proves that it is not conflict and aggression but rather the desire for cooperation and social acceptance that are the most important basic human motivations.”

Prof. Dr. Joachim Bauer, Neurobiologist

So, the path to win-win opens up new potential to you and the possibility that all participants can experience a situation as winners. Even if in many situations, you cannot yet imagine, or do not know, how everyone could be a winner, this does not mean that this solution is not possible. It only means that you cannot yet see the possibility of a win-win situation from your current point of view! Therefore, one of the first steps to winning communication is changing and extending your own point of view.

Each communication leaves traces

Often, skilled manipulation with rhetoric tricks or well thought out argument techniques are sold to us as successful communication. The aim of this is to convince the interlocutor of your opinion, or if necessary, simply kill their argument. We have observed that this type of communication – even if it sometimes leads to the destination in the short term – can bring significant collateral damage in the long term. The boss for example, who puts his employees down and puts them under pressure, may reach his goal quickly: his team completes the project on the agreed, actually impossible deadline, with much gnashing of teeth. However, in the long term, you are left with frustrated, anxious and discouraged employees, with a fatal result for everyone involved. The same applies in relationships: even those who come out of an argument as the supposed winner will become the loser in the long term if the loss of confidence in the relationship is too high.

Doesn’t it make sense to find ways that consider the interests of everyone involved, and lead to long-term and sustainable results?

What do you need to use leading Win-Win conversations for yourself?

Primarily, you need the willingness to change, and invest in yourself. It also requires your willingness to accept new inner attitudes and try out new ways of acting. We have developed pillars and tools for kokomm^®, which can help you to become an expert in communication, where everyone is a winner.

„Die Welt ist nicht größer als das Fenster, dass du ihr öffnest.“

Henry Ford