Beyond platitudes for leadership communication

Julia Williams, President of the Professional Communication Society (and one of my favorite colleagues) has negotiated a deal to offer a free eLearning course on leadership communication to IEEE members. Details are available in Julia’s Monthly eNotice. IEEE offers 3 CEUs (or professional development hours) for successful completion of the course.

I created the content for the course, which was professionally produced by IEEE, based on a portion of my 2006 book,  Thinking and Interacting Like a Leader. In short, the course teaches students to analyze the rhetorical context before communicating with those they want to lead. The analysis is based, NOT on platitudes, but on established psychosocial and sociolinguistic theory:

• Quinn’s competing values framework to understand organizational purposes and manager actions
• Graen & Cashman’s leader-member exchange theory to understand dyadic relationship quality
• Brown & Levinson’s politeness theory to understand threats to member ego and autonomy needs

I’ve had success using this material to build rhetorical skills among both novice and experienced professionals within university and workshop settings.

Check out the free IEEE course and let me know what you think!