The recommended prerequisite and companion seminar for this session is Planning
Communications to Support Organizational Objectives.
Ready
or not, organizational communicators have been thrust into the counsel
and advice arena. Today, staff communicators are expected to provide operating managers with communication process counsel.
The
challenge in that expectation comes to communicators from skeptical operating
managers (now known as internal clients) who have not historically respected staff communicators' advice and counsel about business strategies. Staff communication professionals often have been viewed as not "operations literate" enough to recommend to operating managers what ought to be communicated and why it should be communicated. Staff internal communication consulting is further complicated because it usually is done from an unequal power, staff position.
The
good news is that consulting from a staff position offers communicators
great opportunities to add organizational value. The other news is that
staff communication consulting requires strategic communication skills that many communication professionals can acquire to complement their tactical expertise.
This seminar can be experienced as a standalone course or as the companion course (which we highly recommend) to Planning Communications to Support Organizational Objectives, a strategic communication thinking, planning seminar.
"The
course material forced me
to
look at my own behavior
in
terms of what I need
to
do to be taken seriously
as
an internal consultant."
Alumni
Said?
The
opening minutes of Internal Communication Consulting for Bottom-Line Impact allow participants to role-play a dilemma. A
volunteer participant takes the role of "a hypothetical, powerful executive who declares the need for
a communication solution to his operating problem." A second volunteer takes the role of the staff communicator manager in the bullseye of the powerful, demanding executive. Throughout the day, Roland Draughon leads all seminar participants through learning and applying a fixed set of internal communication consulting skills to this hypothetical (but not uncommon) communication consulting challenge.
In addition to role-plays, the seminar includes lectures, broad participant discussions as well as hands-on experiences using the analytical tools and processes presented. Participants receive a three-ring binder that contains the analytical tools and processes presented as well as pre-printed summary notes on the topics discussed during the day.
The learning in this seminar includes:
-How to respond to a heated request from a 'higher power' source
-How to recognize 'unrequested' communication process counsel
-How to perform a consulting success analysis
-How to make yourself available to clients
-How to contract with clients
-How to feed back data that a client doesn't expect
-How to decide what results to measure
-How to use frameworks, force field analysis and a task cycle
Who should attend
-Experienced practitioners of employee communication, public relations, human resource communication and marketing communications. The expectation is that participants already are well-grounded in strategic communication development.
Agenda (highlights)
8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m.
• The unrequested consultation, part 1
• Consulting and managing: obligations, differences, issues
• Assessing personal and clients' functioning
• Consulting issues: entry, contracting, data collection, data feedback, communication action decisions, communication action implementation and measurement
• Using management process tolls: a task cycle, a framework and force field analysis
• The unrequested consultation, part 2
Your Seminar Leader
Roland L. Draughon is a Principal of Gavin-Hodges Associates, a Philadelphia-area employee communication management consulting firm. He also is a winner of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Gold Quill Award of Excellence for communication training. Convention attenders ranked Draughon #1 among presenters at the Chicago convention of the International Association of Business Communicators. For more information, click Roland L. Draughon
Seminar Fee: US$449. Fees.
This seminar is available for in-house presentation. More information on the next public presentation of this session can be found at the Registration
Form.
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©1998-2009
Gavin-Hodges
Associates
(215)287-0383
Fax (215)247-5403
Contact:
Ms. S.N. Jones, Marketing Associate
snjones@gavinhodges.com
Foxcroft Square Station Box 704
Jenkintown, Pennsylvania 19046-7104
