Unfortunately, confrontation can be a regular part of business life. The way in which disputes are usually settled is with a meeting, or negotiation. An individual needs to be aware of all their soft skills training as they prepare for such meetings if they are to ensure success.

The first thing to do when preparing for a potentially contentious meeting is to review your own situation. Examine your own motivations. Has the dispute arisen out of a clash of personalities, for example? Are you sure that you’re right? Would it be better to try and resolve matters in a less formal way? If you do try an informal approach, keep a record of it as it may show the other side’s intransigence if they dismiss your attempts at rapprochement out of hand.

The meeting is upon you. Take some deep breaths and make sure you are relaxed and centred before commencing. Show your openness by adapting a questioning style. Don’t assume you know the whole situation. Keep your questions open and listen to what the other side has to say as well as reading their body language.

Show you understand the argument and all its ramifications by summarising the arguments and proposing a shared solution.

Management training courses are very helpful in providing individuals with the key skills they need in order to be able to recruit effectively. This is an essential part of management as having the right person in the right job makes life so much easier for everyone else in the organisation, not least that person’s manager.

One of the first things to consider is what medium you are going to use to recruit. How is the ideal candidate likely to look for a job? It might be appropriate to advertise in a national newspaper’s pages, or the local free paper. Perhaps it is the sort of job which your local job centre would be best suited for. It may be, particularly in the case of high level positions, that you need a head hunting agency to source the best people and make discrete approaches.

As the manager of the prospective candidate, it is vital that you are involved in the wording of any advertisement or briefing as well as the actual job description. Do not leave these things to your HR department.

Work out the essential qualities or qualifications that the candidate should have and anything that would be advantageous for them to have. Be very clear about which are which and prioritise the essential ones.

One of the things managers seem to find difficult is prioritising. Maybe they should be forced to study it as part of their management training courses?

Many managers have to do lists as long as their arms and are constantly being given new tasks. There is often no point in trying to delegate the task of prioritisation upwards as senior managers or the board will often just tell you they need everything done.

One thing to consider is that objectives set as part of the appraisal process will have a specific time set for achieving the objective.

One very simple process is to take the full list of tasks that need doing and give them a simple high, medium or low priority rating. Obviously this will involve value judgements but it does at least give you a starting point. Remember to review your list of jobs regularly as things will change over time.

Remember that the only person who can ultimately control how you spend your time is you. Do not just work longer and longer days to try to do everything. Do, however, be prepared to justify your choices. You cannot please everyone all the time but you may be able to please yourself by taking control of your workload.

As you sit over your breakfast, or drive into work, it is easy to be disheartened as the news programmes invariably focus on bad news. One of their favourite stories invariably involves a large, usually public funded project that is exceeding the initial estimate of its costs and not going to be completed on time. One recent example of this is the new Wembley Stadium. No doubt stories will soon start to appear about the building projects being undertaken in advance of the London Olympics.

Clearly the people involved in trying to bring huge tasks like these in on time and to budget need to have very full project management training. However, it should be noted that whatever the size of your organisation or the projects you may be tasked with, the principles are the same.

A project can be considered to have been successfully managed if it has been achieved within the originally envisaged costs and to the specified standard. Therefore, a good project manager will need a very wide range of skills and be able to monitor and manage a wide range of people and tasks. They also need to be forward thinking and good at risk analysis.

One of the key parts of management is the ability to solve problems. Whatever their staff, managers, customers or board members throw at them, managers are expected to be able to take the necessary action and come up with a solution that keeps everyone happy.

Managers have to approach problems in a reactive way. They will try to be as methodical and logical as possible. Often this seems the only way to approach things as invariably the problems arise in such a way that part of the situation will be that things are time critical. However, it is often better to make the time to explore alternatives.

One of the methods that receives a lot of attention on management training courses is brainstorming. This is one of the most accessible forms of creative thinking.

Brainstorming is a group technique, the basis of which boils down to the popular adage, “many hand make light work”. The idea is that as a group approaching a problem, they are able to achieve more than the sum of their parts.

It is vital that everyone’s ideas be treated as good so as not to block the process. It is, however, necessary to form judgments as to which ideas are likely to work best.