Communication Strategies for Women in Leadership

There is tremendous complexity of communication across genders. When it comes to the high-stakes games of senior management, women's communication strategies must be both sophisticated and flexible. This practical and incisive course, based on research and the experiences of working women, describes the fundamental differences in the ways women and men think. It also explores how these differences influence the ways men and women communicate job commitment, managerial expertise, leadership, and many other promotion-related competencies.

The expectations regarding communication at work, traditionally developed by men for men, can cast women as displaying either too much or too little of a male-preferred form of behavior. These conclusions can interfere with the recognition of the value of women's ways of thinking and communicating and inhibit their contributions to organizational problem-solving and innovation. A linguistic approach to the topic helps participants learn to understand and appropriately respond to invisible conversational styles influenced by ethnic backgrounds, geographical origin, age, class, and gender. The result is a plan that focuses on approaches that work personally and professionally and develops communications flexibility for success in a variety of situations.

Topics

• Gendered patterns of verbal and nonverbal communication styles
• The language of exclusion
• The subtle stuff
• Stereotypes vs. worthy differences
• Identifying and changing dysfunctional communication patterns
• Speaking at meetings and getting heard
• The language of leadership
• Gendered rituals: power plays and displays
• Collaborative advantage: usefulness of women's style to organizational problems and possibilities

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending this program, participants will:

• Identify inadequate and dysfunctional communication patterns between women and men and the stereotypes that accompany them
• Understand how race impacts our understanding of gender communication
• Learn how to respond to the hidden subtext of professional interactions to advance careers
• Learn and experiment with new ways of communicating, expanding communication skills to facilitate their advancement