Building Leadership Communication Skills

Part Three

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Part Three will continue to strengthen your ability to:

  • Create concise and compelling communications that convey a clear point of view

  • Use presence and tailored messages to engage and influence listeners

  • Respond to questions with convincing and confident answers

It will add new tools and skills to:

  • Prepare for meetings where the content is complex

  • Lead meetings, including ones where people hold quite different points of view, interrupt, and challenge

  • Respond effectively in the moment when there isn’t time to prepare

This page asks you to tell us how your skills have been working and what you will bring to practice. At the bottom of this page is an overview of the sessions.

Choose material

Bring two upcoming meetings, presentations, or conversations to practice:

  • The first one should be complex in some way — for instance:

    • the content is very detailed / dense

    • the listener(s) are unfamiliar with the terminology / approach

    • the concept is not particularly easy to grasp / intuitive

  • The second situation should involve people with different points of view — perhaps they:

    • will be skeptical because of their personality, a previous experience, or conflicting data

    • will resist because they see the importance, urgency, or risks involved differently

    • will agree but then not really support the idea because they have different priorities

Due to the time we have available in the session, you may only practice parts of the meeting. At a minimum, you need enough material to open the meeting and cover the key ideas in a two-to-three-minute executive summary before transitioning into a discussion. The maximum amount of content you will practice is 10 minutes. If your material is longer, you can choose to condense it or practice one section. If you are going to practice one section, pick the most difficult one.

Bring slides to support your first meeting — the complex content — as you will get feedback on them as well as your verbal communication. You do not need slides for the second situation, but you can bring some if you would like to use them.

You can sit down for all the practice sessions in Part Three. However, if you are one of the people who will be presenting to the Board the week after Part Three, we will encourage you to stand to practice that material.

If you would like to practice a difficult one-to-one conversation, such as a performance review, that can work just as well for the second piece as a group meeting.

Tell us who you are and what your goals are

Here’s a quick reminder of the skills framework we introduced in Part One, to help you set goals now and share them with your practice group at the start of your session.

Intellectual dimension

Deliver messages that are clear, relevant, and convincing

Emotional impression

Create a connection, earn trust, and convey conviction

Physical skills

Engage with presence, body language, and focused energy

Overview of the sessions

Part Three

Day 1 morning

Opening

Discuss your experiences since Parts One and Two, current challenges, and goals for Part Three.

 

Prepare complex content

We reinforce the preparation tools provided in Part One and add a few more, including a way to lay out the storyline to ensure it is compelling and to see the separation of key messages from details.

 

Visualize your storyline

You prepare your first communication using the new tools.

 

Exchange feedback to improve storylines

You refine your storyline based on feedback from the group.

 

Day 1 afternoon

Lead persuasive meetings

You role play the meeting you prepared in the morning, get feedback, and try different approaches on-the-spot. We make your first video.

 

One-to-one coaching

You review the recording of your meeting privately with the coach.

 

Day 2 morning

Motivate people to think and act differently

We introduce a framework for approaching difficult meetings and conversations in a productive way.

 

Manage active & passive resistance

You role-play a second meeting where you expect to face skepticism or resistance. We make your second video.

 

One-to-one coaching

You review the recording of your second meeting privately with the coach.

 

Day 2 afternoon

Communicate on short notice

You practice communicating about two or three different work-related subjects, with very little preparation time. Then you practice a completely spontaneous situation.

 

Commit to a plan

You identify a few meetings over the next couple of weeks and plan the skills you will apply in each one to increase your chances of success.

 

Questions?

Email us goals@mcalinden.com or call us +1 212 986 4950

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