Communication Skills
The text emphasises the importance of communication and influencing skills for making an impact on international decision-makers. Diplomacy requires mastering not only language and tone but also emotional intelligence, cultural fluency, and persuasive rhetoric. This course focuses on developing these essential skills by:
- Adapting Communication Styles: Understanding and adjusting your personal communication style to connect effectively with diverse audiences.
- Building and Managing Networks: Strengthening long-term relationships and leveraging stakeholder influence mapping to target key actors.
Objectives
You have the knowledge and the resources that you need. But how do you personally make an impact on decision-makers in the international arena?
Communication and influencing are at the heart of what diplomats do. But they’re skills that each of us must learn, develop and hone. PR campaigns and social media go so far. But when you’re dealing with governments and institutions, particularly in the international context, the art of persuasion is above all a human skill drawing not just on language and tone but also on emotional intelligence, fluency with cultural diversity and intercultural communication as well as rhetoric. This course will develop your dexterity with these essential soft skills. Each of us has a different communication style. None is better than another. However, our personal instinctive communication style affects how we relate and come across to other people. It’s therefore a smart idea for those engaged in influencing to have an awareness of how they come across and to know how to vary their style so as to maximise the effectiveness of their communication. Our training shows you how to do this. Your network is your most precious diplomatic asset. It’s a long-term investment, requiring you to build strong relationships when you don’t need them so that they are there for you when you do need them. And as in any relationship, there’s give and take on both sides. This course teaches you techniques you need to build and manage your network of contacts. It shows you how to use stakeholder influence mapping to identify the actors you should be targeting on any particular issue. When it comes to influencing, we aim to develop your ability to communicate to someone else your perspective and its justification with a view to their better understanding your position and, ideally, taking a positive view and acting on it. It’s equally about your eliciting their reaction to your points. This can often take the form of your needing to brief a busy politician or executive face-to-face. We guide you through the essential skills of oral briefing. In a separate module, we show you how to write political speeches and other platform interventions using rhetorical techniques and structural devices that resonate with and persuade an international audience. If these are for your own use, we work with you to sharpen your delivery and to help you engage your audience.
Learning outcomes
Participants will have acquired the confidence to use a range of effective communication styles in different cross-cultural contexts, mindful in each case of how they themselves come across to their interlocutors. They will appreciate the gap between what is said and what an audience hears. They will know how to build and develop a network of effective contacts and how to assess the importance of stakeholders on the basis of interest and influence. Drawing these skills together, they will also have the capacity to exploit a range of techniques and devices to influence busy decision-makers in the international arena (notably in an EU context) so as to achieve favourable outcomes.
The speech writing and delivery module will have given them the skills and confidence to draft and deliver political speeches and other platform interventions that engage and persuade an international audience. They will recognise their own strengths and relative weaknesses in spoken interventions and know how the latter can be addressed.
Methodology
Communication skills can be delivered face-to-face in one day or online over two half days (see FAQs). PowerPoint presentations will animate workshop-style discussion.
Speech writing and delivery is only delivered as a face-to-face training over one full working day, ideally with a one or two shorter follow-up sessions later. Participants, who should normally have an element of speech writing in their job descriptions, will analyse videos of speeches to understand what makes them effective or not.
Our experience
Keeping academic theory to a minimum, our trainers bring the practical experience of senior diplomats representing their governments in the EU and in a multitude of bilateral contexts. They are also experienced trainers, with the ability to illustrate the techniques they share with personal examples from their own professional lives. Uniquely, they are well versed in offering candid and constructive feedback to individual course participants in a way that encourages personal development. These courses have been delivered to participants in the European External Action Service and to officials from Georgia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Lithuania and Catalunya.
