Persuasive
CommunicationCornell

Certificate Program

To be an effective leader, you must be able to articulate your thoughts and positions in a clear and concise manner.

Professor Angela Noble-Grange of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management draws on her own extensive experience as a speaker and communicator to guide students through the preparation and delivery process. She discusses how to identify the communication purpose and analyze your expected audience. She then shares how to formulate and rehearse your message, including how to pay attention to nonverbal communication.

To fine-tune these skills, this course includes interacting with fellow students. Students will participate in discussion forums and will record and share a video of a short presentation that serves as the course project. This provides rich opportunities for students to hone their communication and presentation skills in a practical way, and to learn from the efforts of others.

Regardless of your industry, you have probably used PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote to report significant data or ideas to others within your organization or beyond. Communicating this way is effective only if the presentation clearly articulates your points. The main points of the presentation, the visual aspects, and structure of your slides have to work in concert to convey your message. If the visuals are distracting, they run the risk of obscuring your insights. The pre-made templates provided by PowerPoint or other presentation tools may, in fact, be extremely visually distracting and inappropriate for many business contexts.

Creating your own template allows you to customize a briefing deck that specifically targets your audience and embodies visual integrity. And creating reading reports, or summaries, to send out to key stakeholders afterward or in place of a presentation, that adhere to the same design principles and best practices, allows you to present a visually appealing summary of your briefing deck.

So how do you create a professional briefing deck presentation as well as a standalone reading report that embodies visual integrity while integrating your key points and visual evidence? In this course from Andrew Quagliata, Senior Lecturer at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, you will discover the visual design principles and content guidelines necessary to curate a professional briefing deck and reading deck report. You will develop your own briefing deck template using the visual standards that specifically target your audience and contexts. You will have the opportunity to develop two supporting briefing deck slides with appropriate message titles and visual evidence such as charts, graphs, photographs, or artistic elements. You will employ the structural components used in briefing decks to create a sound structure that guides your audience through your points seamlessly. Finally, you will convert your two briefing deck slides into a compelling and professional one-page report.

Mediation is widely used to settle disputes ranging from conflict between neighbors to conflict between nations. Though personal disagreements and international commerce don't share the same substance or consequences, the key procedural elements of the mediation process are the same for both, so workplace conflicts tend to take the same shape regardless of the industry or the size of the conflict.

In this course you will focus on the use of mediation in resolving organizational conflict where the manager or supervisor serves in the role of mediator. Even if you are not a trained mediator, you can draw on proven mediation techniques to help resolve workplace conflict in productive ways. During this course, you will closely examine a workplace scenario and practice properly setting expectations for mediation of that conflict. In each module, new information will be revealed that will ask you to adapt to the various needs of the disputing parties. Additionally, you will practice handling unforeseen emotional outbursts in a productive way and ultimately propose solutions that consider everyone's interests. Through creative work in examining the scenario and reflecting on how the lessons might apply to your own workplace conflicts, you will learn how to expertly prevent inevitable workplace conflicts from escalating.

From the moment you wake up to the time you go to sleep, you are engaging in impromptu communication that involves presenting ideas that need buy-in from your audience, whether it's seeking an extension on a work assignment or something as seemingly simple as deciding which parent should drive the kids to school. These are typical aspects of everyday life, but the reality is that the better prepared and adaptable you are for these situations, the more impactful you can be in your areas of communication, especially the workplace. You should obviously be rehearsed, but the more effortless and self-assured you come across while speaking, the more convincing you will be. This preparedness will give you the skills and confidence to succeed in various circumstances where effective communication is crucial.

In this course, you will be provided with a foundation in how improving your everyday communication can make your speaking skills more impactful. You will examine how to set up your message while considering its purpose, its context, and its audience. Keep in mind that this is not about speech writing but about crafting an unscripted message. You will then practice these skills in front of real people to test your ability to deliver your message in applicable environments. You'll explore what it's like to adapt that message to different surroundings and challenges. You will also develop emotional intelligence skills as you navigate how to better gauge your audience's reaction. You'll understand how applying these concepts will make your messages resonate, from a routine low-stakes situation to a formal pitch that affects your career goals.

Effectively using humor to win or gain influence can make you a more effective leader. In this course, you will identify situations and environments where utilizing humor may help you gain influence, and you will identify situations where you should avoid attempting humor. You will develop skills in constructing jokes that suit specific scenarios or audiences and deciding which medium is most effective for the joke. This course also provides strategies to course-correct when a joke doesn't land well so you can safely defuse any incidental tension a joke might cause if the delivery was inappropriate or ineffective. You will review examples and stories translated from ancient Roman philosophy on using humor for influence, and you will be guided to draw parallels between ancient and modern scenarios where humor can be applied.

You will be required to purchase a copy of "How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor" by course author Mike Fontaine.

Humor can be utilized in many different situations and scenarios, but when it comes to professional settings or in the workplace, the rules and strategies for applying humor can vary. Using humor effectively requires a developed sense of both confidence and empathy to relate to others, enabling an individual to successfully manage and navigate everyday work relations and social dynamics. With these two pillars of confidence and empathy guiding your use of humor, you can empower both yourself and the people with whom you work.

In this course, you will analyze humor as applied specifically to the workplace, focusing on the social dynamics of your work peers, superiors, and subordinates. By utilizing these multiple lenses, you will strengthen your empathy and understanding of varying perspectives, gaining insight into how or why humor can help or hinder the attitudes of a team.

Negotiations occur in large and small ways across all industries and in our personal lives. So often, though, we lack the skills necessary to reach productive resolutions: Many negotiators focus on getting exactly what they want, but the negotiation usually ends with both parties feeling unsatisfied. What if both parties strove to create value for each other and find solutions that meet both of their needs?

In this course, you will discover the art of integrative negotiation, where the focus is on creating value and finding solutions that satisfy the needs of all parties involved. Using policy case studies, you will break past the surface-level statements of the other party and examine their true motivations and interests in order to build trust and foster long-term, productive relationships. You will distinguish between several different negotiation types so that you can customize an appropriate integrative approach based on the context and goals of each negotiation. Utilizing a strategic framework, you will position yourself to understand the impact of the objectives, biases, and external factors involved in your negotiation. Applying the tools from this course will enable professionals from all walks of life, including those making policy decisions in governments and business decisions in organizations, to gain value. By the end of this course, you will have new skills and strategies to apply to reach productive resolutions in your negotiations.