Motivating People to Think and Act Differently

a program for the senior leadership team

Objectives

Accelerate change and growth — and avoid alienating people — by communicating a vision for Convergint that is:

• Consistent

  • Demonstrate alignment across the leadership team

  • Help people see how individual initiatives fit into a cohesive plan

• Personalized

  • Engage listeners with examples and data that are relevant to them

  • Explain the rationale in a listener-oriented way: Why is a change an improvement? How will it affect them? What are their specific actions?

• Motivating

  • Back up the bold sales and profit goals with a persuasive story. How do we get there?

  • Avoid potentially divisive language and finger pointing by using a culturally sensitive approach that recognizes legacy colleagues and the fact that the company became the industry leader using a decentralized, entrepreneurial approach

  • Emphasize how colleagues, customers, and culture remain at the heart of the company as it transforms

Come together as a cohesive senior leadership team.

Skills

The program starts by strengthening 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

Then it adds skills to build long-term productive relationships with internal and external stakeholders:

• Gain commitment to action and accelerate transformations

• Handle challenge, controversy, and resistance

• Listen, lead teams, collaborate, and build culture

Approach

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 from Convergint 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 program is in two parts — Part One is three days and Part Two is two days. The rest of this page explains how to prepare for Part One and provides an overview of those sessions.

Choose material

You will practice your own real communication situations. Pick three meetings or presentations that will happen after Part One and bring any slides or notes you may have.

All three 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.

• 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.

The second situation you practice should be a town hall or meeting about a change initiative.

• We will use this for two exercises:

  • confirming alignment of leadership team messaging on the future vision for Convergint

  • personalizing messaging for specific audiences

• You do not need any specific amount of content or slides.

• Work-in-progress is encouraged. We will provide a series of tools and feedback to improve the piece, so pick an initiative that you are still figuring out how to communicate, or one that you anticipate will generate skepticism or resistance.

The third situation you practice should be an interactive meeting or difficult one-to-one discussion.

• 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.

You can use the third situation to practice responding to challenges, interruptions, and difficult personalities, if any of those dynamics might be part of your real meeting, or you want to build those skills.

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.

Part One

Day One — engaging, compelling storytelling

Day Two — communicating the Convergint vision

Day Three — interacting effectively

Part Two

After several months of workplace application, Part Two will reinforce the skills you gain in Part One and add new skills to further enhance your working relationships.

Questions?

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

About us

Visit our main website McAlinden Associates