Within the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, my courses explore persuasion, conflict resolution, and the impact of new media on organizational and interpersonal communication. When leading executive programs, I try to provide concrete skills and strategies for delivering information and messages as well as specific tools for managing difficult conversations. The following courses describe areas that my students and I explore together:
Leadership Communication
Influence has never been more challenging. We are bombarded by messages. Executives must be able to develop a clear message that is relevant and audience focused. This development requires the ability to listen, understand your audience, craft a message, and deliver it through a channel that will resonate. During this course we will explore listening to understand, conflict styles, persuasion strategies, and argument development for use via interpersonal, group, and written channels. This class will help you make the most of your opportunities to frame and communicate your message to a range of audiences that include contexts that are supportive, difficult, or indifferent.
Navigating Difficult Conversations
Effective dialogue is one of the single most important activities of leaders today. Whether you are confronting a team member who is not keeping commitments, critiquing a colleague’s work, disagreeing with a spouse about financial decisions, or telling someone no, critical conversations are often avoided or handled in clumsy ways. The elementary and high school context provides many challenges to conversations because of the pace of the day, the intensity of the emotion involved, and the lack of transparency within different audience segments. This course will provide the theory underpinning these conversations, diagram their structure, and provide specific strategies for approaching them successfully.