Leadership Communication Skills

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This program will strengthen your leadership communication skills — skills that are essential to being seen as a trusted advisor, to building long-term productive relationships with internal and external stakeholders, 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.

You will strengthen your ability to:

  • Create clear, concise, and compelling communications

  • Use presence and tailored messages to engage and influence listeners

  • Respond to questions with convincing and confident answers

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 from JTI 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 in-person or remote meetings or presentations that will happen after the program to work with 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 presentation to a group or individual.

  • Ideally it 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 situation, John Fraser suggested practicing your material for the strategy meeting the week after the program.

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

Opening

Discuss the challenging communication situations you face and link the agenda to them.

 

Set goals

You set personal goals within our intellectual, emotional, and physical communication skills framework.

 

Increase presence

You practice telling a brief story — expanding your use of eye contact, voice and body language — to increase your presence, confidence and impact. We record your story. Together, we begin the process of giving and receiving feedback.

 

One-to-one coaching

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

 

Create compelling messages

You use our preparation tools to work on the first meeting or presentation you plan to practice. You analyze your listeners and then create an outline with a clear opening, compelling messages, and an action-oriented close.

 

Day 1 Afternoon

Discuss visuals

Visual aids can be powerful tools to support your messages, but they also can draw you into low-level details and make some listeners disengage. We discuss some simple techniques to design and use them well.

 

Deliver engaging presentations

You present a ten-minute version of the material you prepared in Session 1. You practice and receive feedback on your ability to be persuasive and engaging. We record your presentation.

 

One-to-one coaching

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

 

Day 2 Morning

Concise executive summaries

You practice delivering the same material as a 2-3 minute executive summary, without visuals, to strengthen your ability to be concise and get across a memorable message. We record your executive summary.

 

Answer questions confidently

You practice answering questions and responding to challenges on your executive summary — with credibility, confidence and empathy. We record your Q&A practice.

 

One-to-one coaching

You review the recording of your executive summary and responses privately with the coach.

 

Day 2 Afternoon

Lead productive meetings

You role-play a second situation, usually an interactive meeting that will happen soon. You continue to build your skills, adapt them to a different environment, and walk away with specific ideas that will contribute to the success of that situation. We record your role play.

 

One-to-one coaching

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

 

Plan actions

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

About us

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