Online Courses
Communication Foundations (1 hour, 16 minutes)
Learn how to communicate more effectively. Your communication skills affect your career prospects, the value you bring to your company, and the likelihood of your promotion. This course helps you communicate better in a variety of professional situations, including meetings, email messages, pitches, and presentations. Instructors Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes introduce the four building blocks of communication—people, message, context, and listening—and show how they apply in different circumstances. Through the use of vignettes and applied tools, the course shows how to build this core competency and communicate in a way that effectively and professionally conveys your message.
Interpersonal Communication (42 minutes)
Communicating effectively isn't an innate talent that some people have and others don't—it's something that anyone can learn and practice. In this course, learn strategies that can help you hone and master your interpersonal communication skills. Join personal branding and career expert Dorie Clark as she shares techniques for getting your message across effectively in the workplace, and explains how to tackle potential communication challenges with your colleagues and supervisor. She also discusses how to grapple with tricky situations, taking you through how to handle interruptions, and respond to critical feedback.
Speaking Confidently and Effectively (22 minutes)
The ability to present yourself and communicate well is crucial in any work environment. In this course, adapted from the podcast How to Be Awesome at Your Job, learn how to build on your presentation skills to gain a competitive advantage in your career. Professional speaker Diane DiResta shares tips and tricks for leveling up your presentations and boosting your executive presence. Learn how to craft your presentations around what’s important to the audience to ensure that you're only sharing the most impactful information.
Confident Communication for Introverts (1 hour, 16 minutes)
Introverts face some unique challenges when it comes to communication and socializing. In this course, communication coach TJ Guttormsen offers insights and practical strategies designed to help introverts develop the ability to communicate with confidence in any situation of their personal or professional lives. Learn how to overcome social fears and worries, build confidence from within, and recharge and maximize your energy for social life. TJ shows you what it takes to project confidence through voice, tone, and body language and become more comfortable speaking, regardless of what’s at stake. By the end of this course, you’ll be prepared to speak up in groups, address common challenges such as interruption, and start and sustain meaningful conversations with just about anyone.
Communication Tips (1 hour, 34 minutes)
Strong communication skills are essential for your career and can be a great help in other facets of life, as well. In this course, Kelley School of Business faculty member Tatiana Kolovou and expert communication and teams educator Brenda Bailey-Hughes team up to offer you key tips that can help you communicate with confidence, present effectively, communicate effectively on a team, and build and maintain interpersonal relationships. Learn how to promote yourself with humility and style, communicate with authenticity and compassion, craft a story with impact, and much more. Find out how to present a memorable message and keep team communications focused, effective, well-crafted, and diplomatic. Plus, fine-tune your interpersonal communication skills and get started putting everything you’ve learned to use.
Books
The NOW Hello: What to Say | What to Do in the World of Work
Author: Tracy Hooper
Summary: In her wildly successful confidence playbook, The NEW Hello, Tracy Hooper taught people around the world what to say and what to do in the new world of work during a global pandemic. Now Tracy’s back, answering the big question: How do you carry yourself with confidence now? Welcome to The NOW Hello: What to Say | What to Do in the World of Work. If you are ready to:
Speak with influence and impact online or in person
Lead your remote or hybrid team confidently
Promote your accomplishments when you work from home
Communicate with coworkers, prospects, and clients with ease
Network with confidence in any setting
…The NOW Hello is for you.
In each chapter, Tracy will teach you new skills and techniques to support your remote, hybrid, or return-to-office work. Topics include camera confidence, words to lose and words to use, the NOW networking, confident conversations, the hybrid highway, and much more.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition
Authors: Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory
Summary: This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation―especially difficult ones―leads to the results you want. It teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to:
Respond when someone initiates a Crucial Conversation with you
Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it
Communicate more effectively across digital mediums
When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results.
Author: Leil Lowndes
Summary: What is that magic quality that makes some people instantly loved and respected? Everyone wants to be their friend (or, if single, their lover). In business, they rise swiftly to the top of the corporate ladder. What is their “Midas touch?” What it boils down to is a more skillful way of dealing with people. The author has spent her career teaching people how to communicate for success. In her book How to Talk to Anyone, Lowndes offers 92 easy and effective sure-fire success techniques - she takes the listener from first meeting all the way up to sophisticated techniques used by the big winners in life. In this information-packed audiobook you’ll find:
9 ways to make a dynamite first impression
14 ways to master small talk, “big talk,” and body language
14 ways to walk and talk like a VIP or celebrity
6 ways to sound like an insider in any crowd
7 ways to establish deep subliminal rapport with anyone
9 ways to feed someone’s ego (and know when NOT to!)
11 ways to make your phone a powerful communications tool
15 ways to work a party like a politician works a room
7 ways to talk with tigers and not get eaten alive
Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results
Author: Judith E Glaser
Summary: The key to success in life and business is to become a master at Conversational Intelligence. It's not about how smart you are, but how open you are to learn new and effective powerful conversational rituals that prime the brain for trust, partnership, and mutual success. Conversational Intelligence translates the wealth of new insights coming out of neuroscience from across the globe, and brings the science down to earth so people can understand and apply it in their everyday lives. Author Judith Glaser presents a framework for knowing what kind of conversations trigger the lower, more primitive brain; and what activates higher-level intelligences such as trust, integrity, empathy, and good judgment.
How Highly Effective People Speak: How High Performers Use Psychology to Influence With Ease
Author: Peter Andrei
Summary: What are the communication habits of highly effective people? It comes down to one secret: Highly effective people speak how the human mind evolved to interpret information. The result? They easily persuade and instantly influence, turning communication from an obstacle into an opportunity. They enrich their careers, get more done, and advance with stunning speed. They impact and inspire others, rising to positions of leadership. They quickly succeed, excel with ease, and shape the world. They attract support, feel confident, and smash goal after goal. Who are they? Presidents and CEOs; top-performers and respected professionals; leaders and visionaries. In How Highly Effective People Speak, you'll discover 194 communication habits of highly effective people (proven by 57 scientific studies)
Quick Guides & One-Pagers
(One-Page Document): Guidelines to jump-start conversations with your team about how you'll use different types of communication tools.
(One-Page Document): Strategies to ensure all team members can speak up with confidence.
(HBR Article): Mastering the ABCs of innovation at scale. A mixture of skills that spark innovation within an organization and across external organizations and ecosystems.
Please contact learning@nextcenturi.com with questions, suggestions or anything else related to the Manager Toolkit.