Leadership Communication Skills

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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 a senior executive or committee to approve your proposal, to conducting a performance review or difficult conversation, to inspiring a team to accept change and commit to action.

You will strengthen your ability to:

• Prepare clear, concise, and compelling communications

• Use presence and tailored messages to engage listeners

• Respond to questions with convincing and confident answers

• Lead persuasive meetings that generate action

• Introduce change initiatives and bring people along the journey to enact it

• Handle skepticism, controversy, and resistance

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

• Town halls 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 one or two colleagues and a coach from McAlinden. Each coach has at least 25 years of experience working around the world with business leaders from a wide variety of organizations

• 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 six 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 four presentations and meetings 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.

• 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.

For the second, third and fourth situations, you can choose almost any kind of verbal communication — from a large meeting to a difficult one-to-one conversation, with internal or external stakeholders. We encourage you to practice a variety of different situations, particularly ones that you find challenge you in some way — maybe you feel uncomfortable doing them or you would like to try different approaches to hopefully get a better outcome than you have in the past.

• The second situation you practice should focus on communicating about a change initiative or transformation. It can be the initial introduction of a new initiative or it can be a follow-up meeting to work through implementation or to persuade a key person or team to accept a new approach and change the way they work.

• The third situation you practice needs to include people with different points of view and/or difficult personalities — for instance, people who interrupt, are overly direct or rude, actively or passively resist, or challenge you or their colleagues. If you would like to practice tough challenge in both groups and one-to-ones, you can bring challenge into the change communication (second situation) and then practice a performance conversation or other tough 1:1 for your third situation.

• The fourth situation you practice should be a collaborative meeting where you would like the participants to contribute their perspectives on a problem and/or brainstorm potential solutions to it. You can have your own opinion on the solution, but your role will be to facilitate the discussion, draw out your colleagues’ comments, and manage it towards action.

If you are focused on one or two major initiatives, it is okay to practice two or more meetings on the same topic, but make sure they are different types of meetings with different stakeholders — for instance, gaining agreement from a senior committee could be one situation and then meeting with the implementation team about the same topic could be a second situation.

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

Day 3 morning

Motivate people to think and act differently

Day 3 afternoon

Collaborative meetings

Questions?

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

About us

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