Strategic and Clear Communication

Strategic and clear communication is critical to advancing your goals, ideas, and career. Contrary to popular belief, effective communication is a learned behavior one can improve at any point in life. Skilled communicators are highly strategic and organized in their approach. They keep their desired outcomes in mind, use situation-appropriate communication styles, understand their audiences, and develop targeted messages.

For this assignment, you will identify a topic that you would like to elicit buy-in from leadership, colleagues, clients, or other professional entities. You will then develop a strategic communication plan to assess and to guide your communication approach. Lastly, you will utilize your communication plan to draft a persuasive email that informs and requests attendance to a formal presentation on your topic. Keep in mind, assignment 1 and 2 are linked. You will deliver a professional presentation in week 7 based on this assignment and your strategic communication plan.

Part 1: Identify your topic If you have a professional persuasive presentation pending, if you have delivered one you would like to improve, or if you have a presentation topic you want to deliver please consider using it for the course assignment. Historically, students have delivered their course presentations with great success. Below are topic suggestions:

• Do you deserve a raise? • Would you be a great fit for the new position that just opened?  • Do you see an amazing growth opportunity that you would like to investigate and/or lead a team in pursuing? • Does your project require additional funding or staff?   Part 2: Strategic Communication Plan: 1-3 pages (may be formally written, or in outline, or chart form) Next, assess your audience and your communication approach to develop a targeted communication strategy to achieve your communication objective. Consider the following questions to guide the development of your strategic communication plan, persuasive email, and professional presentation: • Define your desired outcome(s). • Assess your audience.  o Who will you be addressing? Who are the “key influencers”? o What do they know and expect? o What do they feel? o What will persuade them? (Apply both Munter and Cialdini) o Consider their possible DiSC styles and the impact of these styles. o What, if any, opposition do you expect and how will you address it? • Identify an appropriate communication style to use.

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