You have worked hard to develop relationships and build rapport with your team members and colleagues. That’s a good start. However, the ability to communicate effectively with your supervisor and other members of senior management, in addition to your team members and peers, improves your success as a manager and team leader. Where poor communication has the ability to cripple your leadership capacity, a solid business communication strategy increases productivity and builds stronger professional relationships. Effective communication strengthens the connections with your organization’s senior leadership. Your ability to understand a superior’’s communication style, deliver bad news with grace, communicate group or employee achievements and maintain their attention during a meeting is critical to ensuring mutual understanding and agreement. The Vital Learning Communicating Up™ course is the communication skills training that any supervisor, team leader, or manager needs to understand how to hold more successful meetings with their managers and other members of senior leadership. An effective business communication strategy turns these meetings into positive, productive experiences. Communicating up is not difficult, but it does require employees to empathize with their managers and to understand their managers’’ specific styles and work challenges.

Learn to:

• Open: State your objective in a style and format preferred by your manager
• Clarify: Detail your objective and support it with facts
• Seek/Share: Anticipate your manager’s questions and have answers prepared
• Agree: Provide potential solutions for your manager to consider
• Close: Summarize and confirm the next steps