Having problems getting on with your boss or doing a deal with a client? Those are just an example of some of issues Insight Partners are helping employees to overcome.

The specialist training, consulting and mediating company is currently running a number of programmes to assist insurance, reinsurance, financial services and other businesses in managing conflict, at the Bermuda Insurance Institute (BII) in the Cedarpark Centre.

The company, which is run by co-founders David Seibel and Patrick McWhinney and based in Boston, America, has been at held at the BII since July 2004, with a total of 21 courses being run and more than 400 students attending the courses.

"We have an organisation which had sent a few people to an open enrolment programme here at the BII in part as recognition of the value to their employees and in part to see if it could be helpful internally and they then decided to enrol around the time they were going to do initial performance reviews," said Mr. Seibel.

"They had prior experience of doing performance reviews in the organisation, but the reviews caused people to have low morale and they felt they were getting nowhere and that the reviews didn't produce the change that they had been hoping for.

"So we came in in advance to do a programme of diagnosis to see why it was not going as well as they had hoped and did some role play situations of performance reviews in advance of the real thing.

"The follow-up on the diagnostic work was that they were very pleased with how the programmes went. As a result we have helped to make people more confident going into the conversations and to get better results in terms of the substance of doing the reviews as well as maintaining better relationships between the reviewer and the people being reviewed."

Mr. Seibel explained the four basic steps to resolving a conflict, for example, when trying to complete a tricky task with a work colleague when you have conflicting ideas on how to do it.

1) Describe a difficult conversation you have had.

2) Focus on the parts of the conversation that were difficult.

3) Analyse what you and the other person were saying.

4) Understand the other person's point of view and look for a different way to resolve the situation.

Mr. Seibel first got into conflict management after taking a negotiations course at Harvard Law School and has been doing the job he loves ever since.

"I loved the material as well as the skills that it focused on," he said. "The concept of optimising both the substance and the relationship in every conversation and fact that there can be good advice out there that has a practical application."

Insight Partners were introduced to Julie Preece, director of education and training at BII, through a client in the reinsurance industry exactly three years ago and the rest, as they say, is history.

"The client suggested that we spoke to Julie Preece about the possibility of having similar programmes offered to the BII's membership and Julie and everyone at the BII was wonderfully responsive and we were quickly able to get programmes that we could run as a pilot - one was in negotiation and one was in effective communication, so the BII provides their contacts and allows Insight Services to come and provide the training service," said Mr. Seibel.

They provide a variety of courses ranging from negotiation, including advanced and effective negotiation to conflict management and even started up a module on power performance, run by Pamela Enders of Winners Coaching Circle.

"For the open enrolments, the one natural progression is to start with the negotiation material and get a foundation in what is essentially a course in how to influence people as well as how to handle very difficult situations," Mr Seibel said.

"The next option is to go directly to advanced negotiation or to take the effective communication course where people can focus on improving how they handle the most difficult conversations in their professional and personal lives.

"It is possible to start with effective communication if things happening in people's personal lives are resonant. That said, you can start with one or another ¿ they complement each other and we understand that in Bermuda people will often end up taking all of those courses, so we have to make sure that they are additive and not duplicative. Because people are coming from different organisations and roles, the courses need to have generalised matter."

Among some of his biggest achievements, Mr. Seibel, who combines his role as company president and conflict management consultant with that of attorney, mediator and professor, has taught negotiation skills to the newly-formed Iraqi Government and advised the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague in The Netherlands.

But regardless of who he is teaching, whether it be high-flying executives in London or New York or Bermudian businessmen, Mr. Seibel always gets a certain degree of job satisfaction out of his work.

"I feel like I am in the very lucky position to be able to say that I am doing what I love and for me it was hard to find that role in the world and secondly my business partner and I felt we needed to create a business where that would be the case and I love the fact I am making a living doing it," he said.

He also believes that his students can get something out of the course which they can apply not only in the workplace, but also outside of work.

"Definitely when we have people on programmes who are resourcing their professional situations we make sure that they make the connection back to their personal life and vice versa," he said.

"Mostly we happen to have a lot of clients in the financial services and insurance and reinsurance industries, but the material really does goes across all sectors.

"The power performance programme is a new offering and we are trying to be responsive to what we have heard from people coming through the courses, so we'll continue to offer follow up programmes and we could in the future to level three programmes."

Insight Partners' next courses in effective communication and negotiation skills are set to be held at the BII on October 11 and 12 with more modules planned in the future.

To enrol yourself or your company on a Insight Partners programme or to simply learn more about conflict management call David Seibel on 617 947 8123, email dseibel@insightpartnersonline.com or visit www.insightpartnersonline.com.