Leadership Communication Skills

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For almost twenty years, Allianz has partnered with McAlinden Associates to develop its leaders, across the LOBs and around the world.

This program will help you build leadership communication skills — skills that are essential to being seen as a trusted advisor, to building long-term productive internal and external relationships, and ultimately to career progression.

These skills are also useful in your day-to-day meetings, from convincing an executive to approve your proposal, to conducting a performance review or difficult conversation, to inspiring a team to accept change and commit to action.

We understand there is a lot of change happening at AZ UK, both internally and externally, including:

• The TUPE transfer of 3,500 LV employees onto the AZ contract

• The merger of LV and AZ teams in areas as diverse as claims, pricing, and data

• The introduction of a new bonus structure

• The rollout of a new HR system

• The rebranding of LV policies as Allianz and related elevation of the Allianz brand in the marketplace

This program will help you navigate the challenging array of communications that are necessary to make these five change programs successful. Renate Wagner recently said that getting communication right was the number one priority for HR leadership. This program will give you many of the skills and frameworks you need to achieve that goal.

You will strengthen your ability to:

• Prepare clear, concise, and compelling communications

• Use presence and tailored messages to engage and influence listeners

• Respond to questions with convincing and confident answers

It will help you prepare and deliver effective communications for a broad range of situations:

• Town halls, webinars, the internal talk show, and other public speaking opportunities

• In-person and remote meetings and presentations

• Calls, one-to-ones, and difficult conversations

You will build your skills in highly interactive and practice-intensive sessions.

• Small working groups will ensure you have a very personalized experience. You will practice with two colleagues and an experienced coach from McAlinden

• We don’t think there is one right way for everyone to communicate to all listeners. Instead, we will help you strengthen your skills while remaining true to your own personality

• You will have several one-to-one coaching sessions, during which you will watch recordings of your practice, so you get a clear picture of your strengths and areas for work, as well as concrete suggestions for how to improve.

The rest of this page explains how to prepare for the program and provides an overview of the sessions.

Choose material to bring to the program

You will practice with your own real communication situations. Pick two meetings or presentations that will happen in the future — whether they are scheduled or on the horizon — and bring any slides or notes you may have.

The situations you practice should be important to you because you will improve the content as well as your skills.

Do not script yourself or over-prepare. You can bring work-in-progress. You will use your laptop to prepare content during the program and adjust it based on feedback.

The first situation you practice should be a town hall or presentation to a group.

• Here are a couple of situations that could work well:

  • Talking about one or more of the current change programs and making it relevant for a specific audience

  • Presenting a proposal to the People Committee to get executive team approval

• Ideally the piece you practice should get across a point of view or a recommendation, rather than simply inform.

• You will present up to ten-minutes of content. If the actual material is longer, you can condense it before the program or during the preparation period.

• You have the option to use four or five slides. You can bring draft slides / work-in-progress.

• You will be asked to try different approaches to the messages and structure of the content.

At first, you will not practice taking questions or challenges, even if the real meeting will be interactive. Later in the program, you will practice responding to questions / challenges about your presentation.

When you practice the second situation, you will bring together many of the skills you have built through the program.

• You can choose almost any kind of verbal communication, but here are some situations to consider:

  • Whichever of the two situations listed above you didn’t practice yet

  • Taking the “hot seat” on the internal talk show

  • A one-to-one or group meeting where the participants hold very different points of view or are difficult to manage — for instance, people who interrupt, are overly direct or rude, resist, or challenge you or their colleagues

  • A meeting where you need to read the room and pivot in a different direction if your message is not landing properly

  • A webinar

• You will learn more if you pick a situation that is difficult for you.

• You will need 3-10 minutes of content. If you want to practice more interaction, you will not get through as much content.

• You have the option to use a few slides.

Tell us who you are and what your goals are

If you would like to use a self-evaluation to think about your skills before answering these questions, click here.  Many people also seek input from a few colleagues whose opinions they value.

Overview of the sessions

Day 1 morning

Day 1 afternoon

Day 2 morning

Day 2 afternoon

Questions?

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

About us

Visit our main website McAlinden Associates