Navigating Conflict During Change

Lowering the Temperature: De-Escalation Tools for Teams in Transition

Change creates conflict. When roles shift, workloads move, and people feel uncertain, tension shows up in meetings, in hallways, and with the people you serve. Most staff are never taught what to do with it.

This session gives your team de-escalation tools built for moments of stress and change. It covers how to read rising tension early, how to stay calm when someone else is not, and how to bring the temperature down with your words and body language instead of making it worse.

The tools are drawn from real situations in frontline and care coordination work, with time to practice so the skills hold up under pressure and not only in a classroom.

Your team will walk away able to:

• Catch the early signs that a situation is heating up
• Use tone, word choice, and body language to lower tension instead of raising it
• Stay grounded and professional when someone else is escalating
• Respond to conflict that comes from change without taking it personally
• Know when and how to step back and get help

About the Trainers

Amira Davis is the CEO and Co-Founder of D5 Consulting Group, a workplace safety and leadership development firm based right here in Endicott. She started D5 with her husband Sammy after thirty years in corporate America, with one clear mission: keep frontline workers safe and supported, especially the people doing the hardest, most human-facing work.

Her work lives at the intersection of safety, communication, and workforce wellbeing. She has trained social service teams, healthcare staff, school districts, and nonprofit boards across the Southern Tier on de-escalation, workplace violence prevention, and how to lead teams under sustained pressure. She is an Everything DiSC Authorized Associate and a certified Practitioner, and she brings that lens to every room she walks into.

Amira also knows the nonprofit and social care world from the inside. She started her career in the not-for-profit sector and spent many years there before moving into corporate, and that foundation still shapes how she shows up today.

Through her work at D5, Amira kept noticing the same thing happening after every session. Women would come up to her, share their own stories, and talk about feeling dismissed or overlooked in leadership conversations. She also saw how the pressure women carry at work does not stay at work. It follows them home, and the line between professional and personal is thinner for women than the workplace gives them credit for. That is what led her to start AmiraEvolved, a platform for Gen X women navigating identity, leadership, and the realities of midlife.

Out of that work came the Evolved Impact Speaker Series by D5, a collaboration between D5 Consulting and AmiraEvolved that brings keynotes, workshops, and panel discussions to organizations and conferences across the country. Amira and her team speak on owning your voice, leading authentically, and holding ground in male-dominated spaces. She is direct, she is rooted, and she is committed to giving women language and tools they can actually use.

Sammy Davis is the Master Instructor and Co-Founder of D5 Consulting Group. He spent more than three decades in law enforcement, including service as the Undersheriff of Broome County, and is a graduate of the FBI National Academy. He has been on the other end of the call when things go wrong, and he brings that experience into every training he leads.

Sammy specializes in workplace violence prevention, de-escalation, and crisis response for organizations whose staff regularly work with vulnerable populations. He has trained thousands of social workers, case managers, healthcare staff, school personnel, and community-based providers across the region. His sessions are practical, calm, and built around one question: what are you actually going to do when the situation in front of you escalates?

What sets Sammy apart is his ability to translate decades of high-stakes field experience into language frontline teams can use. He has stood at the door of domestic violence calls, mental health crises, and active threats, and he knows what works when someone is dysregulated and what makes a situation worse. That experience shows up in every session. He does not teach theory. He teaches what to do with your body, your voice, and your team when the moment arrives.

Sammy is a certified DiSC Practitioner and leads a team of trainers at D5 that delivers programs across New York and beyond. He is also a featured keynote speaker through D5, with talks built around leadership under pressure, crisis preparedness, and what real-world safety looks like inside organizations that serve vulnerable people.

Participants describe Sammy as the rare instructor who makes hard material feel manageable. He is calm under pressure, clear in his delivery, and respected by the teams he trains because he treats their work with the seriousness it deserves.