Alisa Cohn
Executive coach and author of From Start-Up to Grown-Up
Communicating to Transform
All too often, when announcing a new initiative or trying to facilitate change, leaders launch into a series of directives. But people aren’t moved by directives; instead, they seek purpose and rely on stories to connect with it. In this communication class from persuasion expert Nancy Duarte, learners will master the art of storytelling to motivate others.
Constructing Powerful Arguments
Reza Aslan, religious scholar and bestselling author, is an expert in verbal sparring. With a reputation for never backing down from a debate, he wins not by overpowering his opponents with a barrage of facts. Instead, he plays on their field of argument, draws them out with Socratic questioning, and enwraps data in emotion. In Constructing Powerful Arguments, learners uncover each of these tools and more.
The Science of Receiving Feedback
There’s only one good reason to give feedback: to empower someone to grow and do their best possible work. But too often our intentions in giving and receiving feedback become skewed, and a learning opportunity transforms into a contest of wills. In this communication class, Sheila Heen, negotiation professor at Harvard, shares a better way.
Developing effective communication skills in the workforce is crucial for the success of any business. From writing emails to giving presentations, employees need to be able to communicate clearly and concisely in order to be effective in their roles. While some employees may have natural communication skills, others may need help honing their abilities. That’s where communication classes come in.
Feeling comfortable communicating with a boss, one’s peers, and direct reports is key to maintaining a positive and productive work environment. Read on to learn five skills employees should learn to become effective communicators.
Being an active listener means being present in the moment, and not just waiting for the next turn to talk. In communication classes, employees learn ways to give a speaker their full attention, such as making eye contact and avoiding interjections. Employees can also learn how to ask clarifying questions that show they’re engaged in a conversation.
Nonverbal cues such as posture and facial expressions can speak volumes about one’s thoughts and feelings. In communication classes, employees learn how to pay attention to these cues, which helps them better understand how the other person is feeling. They also learn how to use their own body language, for example, showing interest by nodding their head while the other person is speaking.
In today’s business world, it’s easy for leaders to become so focused on facts and figures that they forget the need for storytelling. Stories have the ability to connect the workforce on an emotional level. They can be a useful tool for everything from gaining buy-in for a new organizational vision, to persuading a potential investor.
Delivering feedback can be difficult, but it’s essential for helping others grow in their roles. Employees must learn how to leave others feeling empowered rather than deflated after they give feedback. They should also develop the skills to collaborate on solutions rather than demanding their way. These are all traits that can be practiced in communication classes.
A misinterpreted tone is all too often the source of miscommunications in the office. In communication classes, employees learn how their emotional state can come through in conversations, and when it’s necessary to step away and revisit a message after heightened feelings dissipate. They can also learn how to choose the right medium for their message – such as written or verbal – and be more conscious of their word choice.
By offering training on topics like these, employees can learn the skills needed to be successful communicators. And when this happens, it can lead to a number of benefits for the entire organization. Employees who communicate concisely prevent misunderstandings, which saves time. Effective communicators also tend to be better at collaborating and problem-solving, which further improves productivity. These are just a few of the many benefits of offering communication classes in the workplace.
Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, Gretchen Rubin, and more
The Art of Modern Management / How to lead high-performing teams
Setting the right tone for an entire team is a learned skill. This management course is designed to help learners balance the many demands that come with modern management, including leading remote employees.
Executive Presence / Look, speak, and act the part of a leader
Executive presence is a combination of qualities that the most successful managers exude. This course provides learners with practical strategies for building those qualities, such as confidence and decisiveness.
Sales Management / An approach for the digital age
The complexities of selling in a digital age are compounded by the demands of leading a sales team to success. This course is designed to help sales managers coach their direct reports in the art of selling with insight.
The organization-wide benefits of management courses are convincing, from increased productivity and innovation to greater employee engagement and stronger organizational culture. But research has shown that the vast majority of new managers don’t receive training prior to becoming a manager.
Many new managers don’t feel supported in their roles, and that leads to feelings of ineffectiveness down the road. Even experienced managers admit to feeling uncomfortable doing basic managerial tasks, such as giving feedback to direct reports. Fortunately, these skills can be taught. With training content on the right areas, organizations can empower their managers and give everyone on the team a leg up.
The role of manager has multiple dimensions — from managing oneself and others, to managing projects and problems. Below, we’ll dive into these dimensions and the skill sets necessary to be effective at each. This list is by no means comprehensive, but serves as a starting point for setting a manager up for success.
Managers are role models for the attitudes and behaviors they want to inculcate in their direct reports, such as trust and accountability. Therefore, they must be mindful of what their behaviors convey to their team about their character and competence. Influencing direct reports through demonstrated character and competence is far more effective than managing through formal authority.
In addition to an awareness of their behaviors, management courses can teach team leaders to develop an awareness of their thought patterns. Managers who know whether they’re analytic, procedural, relational, or innovative thinkers can seek support from peers who have different perspectives. This can remove blind spots that hinder effective management and result in a more-well rounded leadership style.
Managers need to be able to navigate the political dynamics that typify organizational life, which requires the ability to build relationships and share knowledge. Having a strong network of peers facilitates better problem-solving and collaboration. But building these relationships doesn’t come naturally to everyone.
In management courses, learners can develop their collaborative intelligence — their ability to work effectively with others who think differently. To build collaborative intelligence, managers must learn how to listen with an open mind, consider the ideas of others, and work with them to achieve common goals.
A lot goes into managing a team, but research has shown that employees have a strong desire to feel their work serves an important purpose and their contribution is valued. Managers should communicate the importance of the mission on a regular basis. Storytelling, a technique that can be learned in management courses, is one way to engage the entire team in working toward a common goal.
Managers must also learn the power of praise for motivating direct reports, and when things aren’t going so well — how to give constructive feedback in a positive way. Creating a culture of psychological safety, where direct reports believe their manager is an ally who wants them to be successful, can lay the foundation for the entire team to thrive.
A common frustration experienced by many employees is being micromanaged by leaders who don’t trust them enough. Autonomy is a key motivator for employees, so it’s particularly important for managers to learn how to give them the space to exercise their own discretion and learn from their mistakes, while remaining accessible to provide guidance when needed.
Autonomy, purpose, appreciation, challenge, and competition are all factors that drive people to do their best. On the other hand, instilling a fear of negative consequences is not a good motivator — at best, it results in coerced compliance. In management courses, learners have the opportunity to assess their own unproductive patterns and replace them with healthier ones.
Managing projects requires the ability to run effective and collaborative meetings. Oftentimes new managers have never learned the appropriate etiquette for leading meetings, such as setting ground rules, enforcing time restrictions, facilitating discussion, and redirecting it, if necessary.
Managers must also learn to keep teams on track by setting aspirational and incremental goals. The SMART framework for goal-setting can be particularly helpful for new managers. It centers around creating specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals. In addition, managers can learn how to best support the planning and strategizing that goes into achieving those goals. Management courses can teach all of these skills, and more.
When performance issues arise, inexperienced managers jump to conclusions and let their emotions take over. These leaders must learn how to manage their stress and tap into their curiosity so that they can uncover the behaviors driving performance issues, and determine what is shaping those behaviors. For example, perhaps a team member didn’t have the necessary resources to reach a goal that was set too high.
Sometimes, problems arise because of unhealthy team dynamics, such as repetitive communication breakdowns or divergence, when people are entrenched in different positions and unwilling to learn from one another. Management courses can teach the skills necessary to identify and address these issues.
A manager can make or break a team, so they shouldn’t be left to fly blind. The management courses at Big Think+ cover all of the above topics and more, for managers of all experience levels. They’re led by world-renowned experts on organizational management and offered in a microlearning format that’s ideal for busy employees. Request a demo today to learn more.
Alisa Cohn
Executive coach and author of From Start-Up to Grown-Up
Mastering the Unnatural Act of Leadership / Lead yourself, your team, and your business
Strong leaders confront their insecurities, work to improve their capabilities, and pass the resulting confidence onto their teams. Mastering the Unnatural Act of Leadership is designed to help learners begin that process.
Emotional Intelligence for Leaders / Influencing others begins with EQ
Influencing others begins with EQ. This leadership course explores the domains of emotional intelligence, starting with awareness of self and others, and ending with how to manage relationships.
The Leader’s Handbook / Unlocking the secrets of values-based leadership
True leaders aren’t born — they’re made. The Leader’s Handbook serves as a primer for emerging leaders and helps them unlock the power of values-based leadership.
Leadership courses can play a pivotal role in developing the next generation of leaders, but their impact extends far beyond the individual learner. Developing leaders can improve team-wide productivity, collaboration, and innovation. At the organizational level, leadership has a direct impact on employee engagement and corporate culture.
Investments in leadership development send a strong message to employees that they’re valued and that their professional success is important to the organization. This can mean the difference between losing promising talent and gaining a reputation as a great place to work.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), around three to four million employees quit their jobs each month in the U.S. But research shows that the vast majority of today’s workers would remain with their current employer if the employer were to invest in their long-term learning. Offering leadership courses can help increase retention and reduce the costs of recruiting, onboarding, and training new employees.
Leadership development opportunities often come in the form of a one-time training that is over in a matter of hours, with no appreciable reinforcement or follow-up. Such events require a disproportionate time and cost commitment for the amount of growth that occurs. Organizations can see more sustainable growth from ongoing initiatives, such as offering always-on leadership courses that consist of a series of lessons.
The ability to pick and choose courses that meet both individual and organizational needs helps as well. Leadership courses exist on a continuum ranging from the skills a newly minted supervisor needs to know, to the knowledge needed to operate effectively in the highest positions in an organization. Skills such as conducting meetings and project planning, for example, are essential for new managers to develop.
But what sets the best leaders apart is not how well they manage processes. Below are several critical soft skills employees should develop to become highly effective leaders.
The most successful leaders practice radical self-examination on a regular basis. Their self-awareness contributes to a high level of emotional intelligence, and they have the humility to listen, learn, and improve. In doing so, they earn the respect of others for their authenticity and willingness to acknowledge their mistakes.
Emotionally intelligent leaders can pick up on how others think and use that information to adapt their communication style for mutually beneficial interactions. That doesn’t happen because they’re naturally intuitive people, but because they’ve learned to listen actively, with purpose and patience, and to recognize the needs behind others’ words.
Effective leaders can cast a vision and inspire others to work toward it, but it takes trust. Team members desire to follow leaders they trust and respect — leaders who model character and competence. These qualities are essential to building collaborative and innovative organizations.
Additionally, when leaders are effective storytellers, they can inspire employees to rise to tough challenges. They can persuade them, if necessary, to stand behind a new organizational direction. Both storytelling techniques and trust-building can be learned in leadership courses.
The ability to bounce back from adversity is a mindset. In leadership courses, employees can establish this mindset by learning how to fail constructively, grow from their mistakes, and manage failure. Rather than adding stress to their teams, they can learn to model positive thinking.
Highly effective leaders can also take practical steps to build resilience into their strategy, with strong financial planning and talent acquisition focused on future staffing needs. Learning how to perform ongoing SWOT analyses (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) helps reduce the chances of being caught flat-footed in the face of unexpected adversity.
Cultivating an environment of psychological safety empowers team members to experiment without fear of negative repercussions if things don’t work out as expected. They feel free to ask for help and discuss obstacles, and they feel valued for their contributions and input.
This requires leaders to set a climate of respect on their teams. Additionally, leaders must learn how to intentionally express empathy for their direct reports’ well-being, instead of focusing all of their time and energy strictly on the bottom line.
The best leaders possess the humility and confidence to acknowledge that they don’t have a monopoly on good ideas. In leadership courses, they can learn to appreciate diversity of thought, encourage alternate voices, and recognize potential.
Learning how to lead an organization in times of economic uncertainty and a changing competitive landscape is a necessity. This kind of strategic leadership requires a data-receptive, evidence-based mindset. It means anticipating and recognizing market shifts, as well as managing risk.
Some might argue that these abilities are character traits, innate aspects of one’s personality. Many effective leaders, however, have developed these skills through leadership courses, training, and coaching. Effective leadership is all about a mindset that is evinced in behaviors. Mindsets can be developed and behaviors can be learned.
Building a leadership pipeline begins with identifying high-potential individuals and creating a development pathway for them. Often, leadership development initiatives target employees already occupying positions with some degree of management responsibilities. However, a leadership pipeline should provide an entry point for individual contributors. Leaders can emerge at any level of an organization. The question is whether their potential is recognized, nurtured, and developed for the value it can add now and in the future.
Leadership courses can also benefit line-level managers who are making the transition from managing their own work to managing others, as well as mid-level managers who desire to move from a tactical to a more strategic focus. Even for senior leaders, learning should be an ongoing pursuit. A study by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) found that 50 to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of assuming their role.
There will never be a shortage of employees who could benefit from participating in leadership development. However, finding the right leadership training can be a challenge. The best leadership courses promulgate the wisdom of the best leaders — wisdom acquired through personal successes, failures, and observations.
Leadership courses taught by experienced and credible leaders engender trust. Their expertise and ideas motivate learners to reflect on and strengthen their own leadership skills. At Big Think+, we bring together the world’s most influential experts across a variety of fields to offer premium leadership content. Request a demo today to learn more.
Barbara Corcoran, Daniel Pink, Aaron Ross, and more
Selling with Insight / An approach for the digital age
Constant demands on consumers’ time and attention make selling in the digital age complex. This sales course serves as a guide for selling with insight — an understanding of the critical information prospects desire to learn.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution / Strategies for navigating high-stakes conversations
When viewed through the right lens, negotiations can offer opportunities for collaboration and personal growth. Negotiation and Conflict Resolution helps learners reframe win/lose scenarios into situations with a variety of winning outcomes — for both sides.
Sales Management / An approach for the digital age
The complexities of selling in a digital age are compounded by the demands of leading a sales team to success. This course is designed to help leaders coach their team in the art of selling with insight.
Research shows that the demand for salespeople is growing fast, and with that growth comes an increasing demand for sales courses. As organizations bulk up their sales teams, many are searching high and low for the sort of training that can truly drive results. To get the biggest return on investment from sales training, it’s important to consider the training topics that have proven to be impactful for a variety of organizations.
Below, we’ll dive into several skills and techniques employees can sharpen to become better salespeople. Although this list isn’t comprehensive, it can serve as a starting point for learning and development leaders looking to level-up their sales teams.
The traditional sales model includes lead generation, prospecting, qualifying prospects, exploring their needs, presenting features and benefits, handling objections, closing the sale, and ideally, building long-term relationships. But being effective at sales in the digital age requires a rethinking of traditional approaches in order to deliver greater value to customers.
Organizations are beginning to take a more holistic approach to targeting potential customers and moving them up the engagement ladder. Sales is no longer all about solving problems that potential customers are already aware of, because finding a solution is something they can do on their own. Rather, sales today is a matter of proactively detecting problems that have not been recognized. Teams must now be able to gather, analyze, and use data to uncover unrecognized problems throughout the buyer’s journey. Sales courses can help them learn how.
Sales management is faced with the challenge of enabling new hires to work effectively with customers who are more experienced than they are. And customers today have very little tolerance for open questions about their pain points. They know what keeps them up at night, but they want to know how other organizations are solving these problems.
Salespeople can bring valuable insights to busy executives who don’t have time to do their own research. They can also provide clarity to customers who do conduct their own research but are drowning in information. Making sense of market data for customers, curating it, distilling it to its essence, and separating out the signal from the noise can reveal hidden insights.
Clearly, there is more to selling in today’s environment than simply explaining product features and benefits. In sales courses, staff can learn how to identify and articulate game-changing insights that bring the market perspective to customers and link those insights to what is going on in the customer’s world.
Influencing behavior is a process rooted in emotion. People prefer to say “yes” to those they like, and they’re more apt to like those they have something in common with. In sales courses, employees can learn to communicate in such a way to find common ground and use that to build a relationship in which the other party wants to engage.
Another one of the universal principles of influence is that people want to give back to those who have given to them. This concept supports the previously discussed skill of learning to provide valuable insights to buyers, rather than simply explaining product features and benefits.
Many mistakenly believe that influence and persuasion are the same thing. To influence someone is to motivate or inspire them to take a specific action. Influence grows out of trust and is grounded in a relationship between the influencer and the influenced. The goal of persuasion, on the other hand, is to make an effective argument in favor of a certain action. It requires no former trust or relationship. The other person simply makes a decision based on the strength and credibility of the argument.
Successful persuasion depends on the persuader’s ability to see the world from someone else’s viewpoint and “get into their head” to understand their interests. They can then find common ground to leverage. For that to happen, inquiry — understanding another person’s reasoning, values, and concerns — must take precedence over advocacy — asserting one’s own reasoning, values, and concerns.
Some sales courses also address pre-suasion, the process of arranging for the recipient of a persuasive message to be receptive to it before they even hear it. This can be achieved by appealing to a known need or something else that can be concluded about the person.
Sales courses can help employees become more aware of their unique negotiation style, which can be either assertive, analytical, or accommodating. An assertive negotiator is direct, hard, and honest to the point of uncomfortable bluntness. An accommodating negotiator is relationship-oriented, finds it easy to establish rapport, and is pleasant to deal with. And an analytical negotiator needs facts, figures, and time to think through all of the options, which can make them seem cold or aloof.
The best salespeople tend to have elements of all three styles. They have the confidence and drive that comes from being assertive, as well as the pragmatic, longer-term analytical style, and they’re kind. They also have the social awareness to be able to switch styles according to the situation and their understanding of their counterpart’s communication style.
For many, active listening is the most difficult aspect of communication. It involves asking questions and making statements aimed at increasing one’s understanding of another person’s reasoning. This can be questions like, “What concerns you about that?” or simply, “Please, tell me more.”
Sales courses may also teach employees about intuitive listening, which involves using visual and other cues to help interpret another’s words. Reading body language and noting the tone and pitch of their voice can help with forming tentative conclusions about what a person may be thinking or feeling.
But intuition is not infallible, so such conclusions need to be confirmed using statements like: “I’m sensing that …” or “Is that why …?” Summarizing or paraphrasing the gist of the speaker’s words is key to ensuring understanding before moving forward with the conversation. Lacking that clarity and proceeding on the basis of inaccurate information is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Especially in business-to-business operations, sales are often complex, involving multiple decision-makers and layers of approval on the buyer’s side. This is where collaboration comes into play. When sales teams work together rather than individually, they bring together different perspectives and areas of expertise that enable a smoother experience for the buyer. Sales can also collaborate with the marketing team to keep leads warm over longer sales cycles.
The smartest companies are beginning to more consciously integrate their sales and marketing functions. Sales courses, particularly for team leaders, are increasingly emphasizing collaboration between the two. They’re also addressing the challenges of bringing together vast amounts of external and internal data to support this collaboration.
A person’s authentic self is their most natural self, without pretense or artifice. Authenticity helps salespeople build genuine, trust-based relationships that lead to sales. Quite simply, people are more likely to buy from someone they feel they can trust to tell them the truth.
Sales courses can’t ensure that learners will always act in accordance with their values, but they can help employees learn the importance of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. They can also help salespeople recognize how they’re presenting themselves and how they’re being received.
A high level of emotional intelligence is a key characteristic of people who are successful at sales. Self-awareness can help a salesperson understand how they’re either helping or hindering their own ability to influence others. Social awareness can help them recognize how the emotional needs of others shape their behaviors. Both can be utilized in interactions with buyers to establish rapport, provide the kind of experience they’re seeking, and increase their receptivity to proposed solutions. These are all skills that can be learned in sales courses that include lessons on emotional intelligence.
Empathy is the ability to place oneself in someone else’s position and figuratively walk a mile in their shoes. It’s essential to understanding what others care about and meeting them where they are. That makes it an extremely important skill for anyone involved in sales. Not everyone is naturally attuned to the feelings of others, but they can get better at it by taking sales courses that provide training in empathy.
To strengthen empathy, employees can learn to identify emotions in others and respond appropriately. For example, simulations of realistic scenarios can depict what empathy looks like in sales interactions. This can help learners practice interpreting facial expressions, vocal tones, and paraphrasing what someone else said to check for understanding in a conversation.
Good salespeople aren’t born; they’re made. Traditionally, sales has been a field in which the inexperienced view the most successful as role models. They look to them for advice and best practices to hone their skills and increase their success rate. But oftentimes, top salespeople have little time to adequately instruct new employees.
Sales courses taught by credible and experienced thought leaders, with wisdom acquired through their own personal successes and failures, can serve much the same purpose. At Big Think+, we bring together today’s leading experts on the art and science of selling to offer premium training content. Request a demo today to learn more.
