The Leader's Voice: Communication Skills for Leading Organizations

Leadership roles can involve a wide range of communication challenges mentoring a struggling colleague, persuading investors to invest in your company, rallying an auditorium of new employees, aligning a team on a new hire, working the room at an industry event, handling tough questions from the media, managing the challenges of cross-functional team projects, convincing your boss to re-prioritize a list of projects, running team meetings in ways that elicit candid conversation and learning. The goal of this class is to broaden your repertoire, to make you a more versatile communicator who can adapt your way of communicating to meet many different challenges. This involves verbal, written, and non-verbal skills. This course involves both self-reflection as well as outward awareness. Self-reflection includes understanding our motivators, our current communication habits, and our leadership aspirations as to how we wish to be perceived. Outward awareness includes one-on-one as well as group/team communications: how to fully understand ones audience, how to listen with all our senses, how to influence and manage both an individual and a team. We aim to develop two kinds of knowledge--conceptual understanding and procedural skill. Each session will involve some class discussion about frameworks and cases and some active participation in exercises. We employ role-play simulations and personalized feedback (from peers and through video) to practice and polish the behavioral skills. This class will draw on your own past work experience to draw examples of management challenges and best practices. There is no final exam for this course but class will run through the last day of the semester. Topics Taught: * Storytelling: Making a point memorable * Public Speaking: Moving a crowd * Managing Teams: Hiring, promoting and motivating * Non-Verbal Communication: How to make an impression * Networking & Building Relationships: Building your personal brand * Troubleshooting Communication: When things go wrong * Other Channels: Using PowerPoint and email effectively * Impactful Business Writing * Coaching & Influencing: Chats that change people * Enabling Sustainable Change.