561A - Professional Communications

This course equips you to maximize your impact on senior leaders and/or clients. Whether it is presenting results, recommendations, and complex ideas to senior leaders or requesting and receiving constructive feedback, this course will equip you with the essential communication skills MBAs must possess. You will learn the precise methods, tactics and strategies critical to communicating to key decision-makers in ways that maximize understanding and facilitate action. We will explore what senior leaders need/want to hear, how to most efficiently utilize their time, and the most effective structures to present critical messages. You will apply these skills in a range of formats including formal meeting-style presentations as well as strategic written business documents. In addition, this course is designed as an integration course and will require you to pull on multiple disciplines (i.e. finance, marketing, management, strategy, etc...) in order to be effective.

Learning Objectives:

• Explain in your own words the principles of structure, content and style
• Distinguish between "finished" and "unfinished" thinking
• Organize presentations and documents logically and persuasively
• Design and deliver presentations that contain persuasive supporting data
• Compare and contrast types of communication preferences and styles
• Create and customize presentations based on communication preferences and styles
• Evaluate and provide feedback on your peers' presentation content, organization, and delivery
• Answer questions with persuasive evidence and examples
• Deliver presentations and business documents that demonstrate your command of strategy, content, organization, and style
• Synthesize your communication style with your leadership style
• Integrate the elements of structure, content and style to form a clear communication strategy
• Apply the communication strategy principles to a variety of communication situations