Building Leadership Communication Skills

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During Part Two you will reinforce the skills you built in Part One, adapt them for MS Teams meetings, and add more advanced skills.

Part Two will be two half-day sessions.

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

Choose material to bring to the program

You need to bring one meeting to practice. During the first half-day, you will use it to reinforce the preparation tools and practice delivering a clear, concise executive summary. During the second half-day, you will use it to role play a meeting, with questions, interruptions, challenges, and other interaction.

We encourage you to practice a real upcoming meeting that is complex or challenging because you will learn more advanced skills and — with feedback from your colleagues and coaches — you will increase your chance of success in the actual meeting. Here are some examples of complex meetings that work well:

• A meeting where you are likely to face skepticism, active resistance, or passive resistance

• A meeting where the other participants do not understand the issue being discussed, they have decided there are different reasons for a problem or solutions to it, or there is not consensus about the importance, urgency or risks involved

• A cross-functional team meeting where you need to influence without authority

• A discussion with an external partner where the relationship has gone off-track

• A performance review

We know that you are often asked to give presentations that are, on the surface, just informational. If that is the kind of meeting you would like to practice, make sure to decide what you want your listeners to do with the information. We will continue to build your ability to not just convey the information clearly, but to persuade people to act on it.

As in Part One, we will ask you to think through your plan for the full meeting because the preparation tools are a key part of the program. You will only practice parts of the meeting due to the time we have available in the session.

At a minimum, you need enough material to open the meeting and cover the key ideas in a three-minute executive summary before transitioning into a discussion. You can decide whether to bring any visual aids or not. 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.

What are your goals for Part Two?

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

First half-day session

Second half-day session

Questions?

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

About us

Visit our main website McAlinden Associates