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Professional Communication

6 Rules for Communicating with Management

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

Strategies for getting heard and advancing your career

In this course, you’ll:

  • Understand how to inspire management’s buy-in for your ideas
  • Learn to align your career objectives with your company’s goals
  • Communicate your value in a way that highlights mutual benefits

Every day millions of employees contribute their talents to organizations all over the world, yet many of them don’t earn the recognition they deserve for their accomplishments because they don’t know how to advocate on their own behalf. Instead, they hope that their work will speak for itself and wait for affirmation to come from above. But many supervisors don’t fully realize what their employees do all day, or how well they do it, especially in fast-paced, high-stress work environments. Nor can a manager assess an individual employee’s ambitions if the employee never speaks up.

Join expert Roy Weissman to discover communication strategies that’ll help you get noticed by management and executives in your organization. You’ll pick up six general rules for refining your communication with leadership that you can put into action immediately. You’ll leave the course better equipped to find your voice and use it to accomplish your goals and advance your career.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Consider how management thinks and approaches decision making
  • Know the difference between what to say to management and what to say to peers
  • Understand the strategies that get management’s attention and support for what you want

This live event is for you because...

  • You want to build a reputation with management and senior executives that can help you achieve greater financial rewards and promotions at your company.
  • You want to be viewed as an authority in your organization and industry.
  • You want great jobs to come to you.
  • You're a project manager, product manager, developer, or professional of any kind who wants to become more competitive in a current or future job search.

Prerequisites

  • A list of what you want from management at your organization

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Setting the stage for effective management communication (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Why do you need to communicate with management?; What do you want from management communication?
  • Hands-on exercise: Determine what you want from management and why they should give it to you
  • Q&A

Establishing credibility and respect (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Building your reputation; Are awards and certifications valuable?
  • Break

How to communicate with management (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Who is management?; understanding the personality of your leadership and the organization’s culture
  • Hands-on exercise: Describe your company’s culture in your own words; Do you know what management’s top objectives and concerns are?
  • Q&A

6 rules for communicating with management (20 minutes)

  • Presentation: The 6-second rule (be concise; get to the point); speak management’s language; understand management’s interests, not just their positions; see things from their perspective and focus on benefits to the organization; speak in terms of financial benefit (how much money is this worth?); engage management with open-ended questions to learn what they’re most interested in

Conclusions (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: The value of reputation; what to focus on for your success
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Roy Weissman

    Roy Weissman is a strategic senior leader in business development and sustainable sales growth. Roy teaches courses on negotiation at Northeastern University and consults on business development, sales, and sales enablement for companies in the media and tech industries through his consulting business, Octopus, based in New York City. With more than 15 years of experience driving business expansion and new market penetration for both top-ranking digital media corporations and agile, leading-edge innovative startups, he has a demonstrated track record of realizing significant results in revenue, market, and channel growth by forging lucrative online partnerships and shaping core strategies for ecommerce, branding, and media outreach. As both an employee and entrepreneur, he has worked at companies such as Infoseek.com, Viacom, General Electric, Playboy, and Next New Networks (acquired by Google). In his career in the media and tech industries, Roy has initiated, negotiated, and closed hundreds of deals with companies including Amazon, Comcast, News Corp, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner. However, his toughest negotiation to date continues to be with his 2-year-old daughter, who somehow does not always respond to negotiation best practices.