Communicating Leadership

​Course Structure Highlights

Management vs Leadership 

• What are the differences and overlaps between management and leadership?
• What’s in it for leadership beyond the technicalities of managing teams and systems towards their target?
• Are all managers supposed to be leaders?
• Can ordinary people, who are not in management roles, be considered leaders as well?

Perception is (almost) communication

• Our perception is our reality. But why should I, an established professional, trained in fact-based, practical thinking, care about that?
• What difference do I make if I refocus from communicating facts to managing relationships?
• To what extent are we all influenced by our perception maps, built by factors depending on how we feel in a situation?
• What emotions do we have towards a person, how do we respond to the space we’re in?
• When, why and how are businesses trying to influence my perception?

​Leader perception, organizational perception

• What is the relationship between perception, language, and behavior?
• How do these influence each other and shape our reality?
• Why do leaders create worldviews?
• Why do organizations protect and manage their image, identity and reputation?

​Leadership presence

• What is leadership presence?
• How does it relate to charisma, authenticity and gravitas?
• Are these learnable?
• What is a persona and what does it disclose about how I’m perceived by others?

​Showing leadership is communication

• How can I rewire my followers’ perception by showing leadership?
• What are the hints and tips for reframing situations, changing attitudes and influencing behaviors?
• What can I achieve by stopping the use of corporate-speak and finding my own voice as well as making sure my values come through in my communication?

After the training you’ll be able to

• Use your leadership persona to influence thoughts, feelings and behaviors
• Express leadership by symbols, rituals, personality and culture
• Build a worldview for your followers
• Find your inner resources to achieve credibility and authenticity

Communicating Difficult Messages

​Course Structure Highlights

​Honesty

• Honesty is crucial. Our goal should never be to tell half-truths; this misleads, undermines trust and adds complication for everyone involved. Instead, we need to be transparent.
• We should not understate the severity of the situation, instead, we should empathize with the reality of people’s experiences in light of our message and we should be honest with the details that are available.

​Allowing time & space for emotions

• When communicating tough messages to individuals or a group, we must give time and space for a response.
• Whether that involves questions from the group about the next step, requests for feedback or even the ability to ask for reassurance – we need to give our team adequate opportunity to respond and for you to respond in turn.

​Structure

• It’s crucial we structure and deliver our speech appropriately, otherwise, it will likely be met with resistance.
• Acknowledge the other person’s feelings
• Share facts: be clear and precise, avoid mixed messages and room for false hope
• Share your opinion

​Sharing your own feelings

• Sharing your own feelings can be a powerful way to show empathy and build trust although you need to be careful here.
• Never blame others, like more senior leaders, or the mythical ‘them’ for the bad news – distancing yourself in this way is unfair and unprofessional.

​Language

• Avoid expressions that create resistance.

​Active listening

• Show empathy, ask questions, use mirroring technique.

After the training you’ll be able to

• Identify the most relevant, constructive and helpful messages for your speech
• Use expressions that focus on facts rather than judgements about the behavior or personality of your listener(s)
• Use the active listening technique in a way that creates trust in the listener

Influencing

​Course Structure Highlights

​Forget the click-whirr response

• Why should you burst the bubble of easy-as-pie, one-page-length solutions advertised by popular-press advice?
• There is no one-size-fits-all method to know what somebody is thinking or feeling. What you realistically have at your disposal is training yourself to listen to and systematically analyze what people are revealing about who they really are what they really want (their unmasked selves) and use that information to increase your chances of changing their minds.

​The power of listening

• How and why understanding another person’s perspective will radically increase your communication success?
• What are the ways to glean an understanding of how a person puts his or her experience together to be excellent, mediocre, or awful at the things he or she does, by observing and listening carefully to how s/he behaves and communicates?
• Are there ways to predict someone’s behavior based simply on what was said?

Reality and experience

• Do we actually live in reality?
• How do we inhabit our perceptions and interpretations of reality by deleting, distorting and generalizing?
• How and why do we transform our actual experience, our opinions and so on in ways that correspond to our own particular ‘model of the world’?
• What’s your take on the dilemma that people who use the same language patterns in their speech have the same behavior?

Mapping needs

• What are the connections between needs, motivations, behavior and language?
• Why should you absolutely understand your prospective partners or customer’s underlying motivations – their needs and their driving reasons to get excited about something?
• How can you set up a ‘hierarchy of needs’?
• How you can use that information to plan ‘change interventions’?

(Re)Framing reality

• How do we put our frame of reference around situations?
• How do we use personal labels to describe what is good, bad, awful, wrong, right, and so on?
• How are these labels related to our values?
• How can we change feelings or opinions towards a situation by modifying the frame through which they are perceived?

Planning change interventions

• What are the traits you should observe to map out how people process information, environments or their response to stress and how can they be convinced?
• How can you use these categories to maintain or change someone’s motivation?
• How can you use communication patterns to tailor your language so that it has maximum impact on a person?
• How can you identify the words that will incite a physical and emotional response?

Influencing behavior

• How can you put your Influencing Language into action in a way that the meaning makes its way in without effort?
• How can you connect language and physicality?
• How can you build up behavior and create environments that foster attitude or opinion change?

After the training you’ll be able to

• Establish a deep level of rapport and communicate effectively with anyone
• Increase self-knowledge and self-esteem
• Improve results in negotiation and litigation

Speech to Employees

​Course Structure Highlights

​A powerful start

• How can you get buy-in from the audience from the moment you take the floor?
• How can you involve employees in your presentation rather than just talk at them?
• What ways are there to show an appreciation of their work?

​Facts into messages

• What makes many presentations and regular business updates boring is that speakers tend to list just the facts and progress made but often without a storyline, i.e. why it is important, what it has an impact on, how it affects all listeners, what’s in it for them
• We will work on how we can turn facts into powerful messages that resonate with the audience.

​Context

• Another aspect of giving a powerful update or progress presentation is to always put them in context.
• Show the audience where this is coming from, where it’s going and displaying trends. Never just cite the facts.

​Engagement, credibility

• In order to sell our messages, we need to be 100% credible. Our audience needs to believe what we believe in.
• How can we energize ourselves and be enthusiastic about our messages?
• What can we do in case we don’t agree 100% with all the messages that we have to convey?

​Structure of presentation

• What is the most effective way to structure a strategy presentation?
• What is an effective information hierarchy?
• What are your key messages?

​Sharing your own feelings

• Sharing your own feelings can be a powerful way to show empathy and build trust although you need to be careful here.
• Never blame others, like more senior leaders, or the mythical ‘them’ for the bad news – distancing yourself in this way is unfair and unprofessional.

After the training you’ll be able to

• Give a (regular) business update in an engaging and inspiring way
• Identify your key messages and emphasize them effectively
• Structure your presentation with the right balance of high-level information and detail
• Find your inner resources to achieve credibility and authenticity to engage the audience