When you need someone to come to you, come to us
You need deeper training than a conference can provide. You need to get your whole team on one page. You need individual speaker coaching for busy executives.
Sometimes, you need someone to come to youโin person, or virtually. Someone good. Someone proven. Someone now.
But whom?
We suggest, someone from the Professional Speechwriters Associationโs Professional Development Academy.
The Professional Speechwriters Association works with the best trainers in speechwriting, speaker coaching, executive communication strategy and thought leadership. We know so many so well, that we can provide precisely the right person for your training needs, your industry, your organizationโs culture and your executivesโ leadership style.
We can:
- Get your whole communications staff up to speed on evolving leadership communications practices, with an in-house PSA Master Class on speechwriting โฆ storytelling โฆ thought leadership โฆ writing โฆ or presentation skills.
- Deliver 1:1 online video communication coaching to get your leader as comfortable and compelling onscreen as in person.
- Raise the level of speechwriting throughout your communication groupโ(and thus, the thinking, too)โwith a critique/teaching/coaching package.
- Evaluate and improve your leadership communication vehicles, by identifying their weaknesses and building on your staffโs natural strengths.
- Get your staff aimed in a more strategic direction, with a facilitated exec comms strategy session.
For any professional development need related to leadership communication, the PSAโs Professional Development Academy can find you the right trainer to create the perfect custom course.
If youโd like to explore ways in which PSA trainers can solve your immediate problems or raise your game, write to PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected], and weโll be in touch right away.
STRATEGIC SPEECHWRITING
Could your communication team use some speechwriting/scriptwriting bench strength?
A common collegial understanding of what makes excellent leadership communication?
A collective shot of new techniques and fresh thinking?
You canโt afford to send everyone to PSA resident writing coach Mike Longโs intensive, interactive and vastly entertaining seminar, Strategic Speechwriting. But now you can bring Mike to your place, to teach the seminar virtually.
He will teach the five elements, in the most incredibly practical termsโweโre talking samples, procedures and checklists:
Think Before You Write: A Speechwriterโs Guide to Planning and Prep: You wouldnโt set sail without a map for getting to the islandโand to create a professional speech that finds its mark, you need a map, too, and a structure that works every time.
Persuasion: Proven Techniques to Open Minds and Change Them: Facts and figures engage the intellect, but persuasion must also speak to the heart. Hereโs how to use psychology, classical rhetoric, and the best ideas from marketing to get people to open their minds to your ideas.
Vital Elements of a Vital Speech: Openings That Demand Attention and Closes That Demand Action: For a speech to connect with an audience and keep them engaged, the opening must make them want to hear more, and the closing must send them away inspired to take action. Professional speechwriters donโt guess at how to do that.
How to Make Numbers Fascinating Even If Youโre No Good at Math: Learn easy-to-master skills to make statistics memorable and persuasive. Using simple fractions and percentages to explain almost anything, no matter how complicated. Humanizing figures so audiences remember moreโand feel it in their hearts, not just know it in their heads.
Realpolitik for Leadership Communicators. A great speech draft that doesnโt make it through the approval process doesnโt make a sound. How to get good work approved and escape the corporate Jenga game. And many other practical lessons to bring your best ideas to fruition.
Through one fun virtual event, Mike Long will leave you and your communication colleagues a shared understanding of great leadership communicationโand new know-how to make it happen.
This is a popular seminar and Mike is only one who can teach it. For scheduling and pricing, write to PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected].
Meet Mike Long
Based in Washington, DC, Mike Long is a speechwriter and an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. He is a former director of the White House Writers Group and a lecturer at Georgetown University, where he served most recently as the director of writing for the graduate program in PR. He is also co-author of The Molecule of More, on how the brain chemical dopamine explains why we do what we do. Mike is the resident writing coach at the Professional Speechwriters Association.
STORYTELLING
We all know that narrative is the most powerful form of communication, and thus a critical leadership tool. But do we all share the same idea of what compelling narrative isโand the same ability to translate it into effective leadership communication?
Former White House speechwriter and GE exec comms chief Eric Schnure will take your communication team where he has taken so many communicators before: from intention to execution.
In this highly interactive virtual workshop, you will learn by doing, together:
- Exactly why stories resonate with audiencesโand how to convince reluctant leaders that not using story isnโt only unwise, itโs management malpractice.
- What makes a good leadership story? Weโre not just spinning yarns here, weโre communicating for a purpose. Learn what kinds of stories executives and organizations should tellโand in what style. (And, how to turn an interesting personal anecdote into an inspiring leadership story.)
- How to capture stories that will not only humanize your leaders, but help them lead more effectively.
- Journalistic and narrative storytelling: Whatโs the difference, and why it matters.
- Hollywood storytelling techniques that work for organizations and sales storytelling techniques that work in speeches.
- The difference between manipulating and motivating: How to rebut speakers and other colleagues who argue against using story in speeches.
- Different strategies demand different stories: Youโll learn how to use stories to sell ideas, to set strategic context, to build community and to inspire people to action.
- The structure and elements of stories. Youโll emerge from this workshop not just knowing how to build compelling stories, but having done it with your own hands.
Storytelling for leaders is easier said than done. Your team will learn how to do itโwith even the most reluctant leaders of even the most resistant organizationsโduring this one great virtual event.
Write to PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected] to discuss pricing and scheduling.
Meet Eric Schnure
For 25 years, former White House speechwriter Eric Schnure has counseled leading executives and organizations like Google, UPS, HP, Hearst and Airbus, helping make their messages more memorable, their words more effective and their delivery more powerful. Prior to opening his own firm in 2013, Eric served as Director of Executive Communications at GE. Co-founder of the communications consulting firm the Humor Cabinet, Eric has written countless one-liners and roasts for celebrities and politicians and is known as one of Washingtonโs โgo-to guysโ for political humor. Eric also teaches speechwriting at Johns Hopkins University and American University.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: Will Your Organization Shape the Futureโor Be Shaped by It?
The future of your organizationโand your industryโare changing, and leadership is up for grabs.
COVID-19, racial injustice, economic disruption, political division (and more) all demand an end to โbusiness as usual.โ
But what will tomorrow look like โฆ and who will shape it? Employees, shareowners, stakeholders and consumers all want to know.
Most companies are stuck reacting and responding. Theyโre caught bobbing in the shifting waves of public opinion and government policy.
But a few sharp CEOs will drive the change and shape the future. They are thought leaders โฆ the visionaries who are reinventing their missions and powerfully articulating their vision. As thought leaders, their words carry more weight, their ideas have more impact, and their visions shape the future.
Learn what thought-leading executives in corporations, nonprofits, government agencies and universitiesโand their communication teamsโdo differently by bringing this celebrated one-day program to your team. You and your team will learn how to elevate your leaders and organization for greater impact, influence and results.
Thought leadership expert Pete Weissman will teach you the mindset, skillset and toolset to help your leaders and organization speak up, stand out and set the agenda. Pete has analyzed thought leaders from business, politics, non-profits and academia. He discovered they all share a common playbook. Itโs the playbook he uses with his Fortune 500 clients, and heโll teach it to you.
Once you see the strategy behind the stagecraft, youโll never think of communications the same way again.
You will learn:
- How to frame your ideas and vision so they earn keynote slots at elite conferences.
- How to pick alliesโand enemiesโto transform what your clients demand from you and your competition.
- How to use journalistsโ need for objectivity to become the leading voice for your idea.
- How to Flip Demand: Stop pitching to skeptical reporters and editors. Have them come to you.
- How to use a Savvy Sacrifice to instantly transform an old reputation.
- How to create โWalk the Talkโ actions that launch your thought leadership campaign.
- How to tie thought leadership to your organizationโs core mission.
- The five tools in your arsenal to reach the right audiences at the right time.
- Your MoonShot Vision: the five key ingredients.
- How to coach your executives to think and speak like thought leaders.
- How to apply Peteโs Three Pillars for conceivingโand executingโa thought leadership program on any budget.
- 9 Mistakes to Avoidโmistakes that can doom your thought leadership effort from the start.
- How to make the business case for a thought leadership program inside your organization.
Practical Take-Home Tools, and a Collegial Common Understanding
Pete will leave you with practical tools and templates available nowhere else, including:
- A checklist of questions to spur new ideas and sharpen your vision.
- Five creative exercises and tools to develop your thought-leading perspective.
- Keys to creating a communications calendar that โLadders Upโ to higher-level publications and events.
Most importantly, you and your team will have a common understanding of thought leadershipโand the know-how to build a thought leadership platform for your executives.
Contact PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected], to discuss pricing and scheduling.
Meet Pete Weissman
Pete Weissman creates thought leadership programs for executives in the spotlight. Pete has worked in the West Wing, the U.S. Senate and for Fortune 100 CEOs. He is the founder of Thought Leader Communications (www.ThoughtLeaderCommunications.com). Based in Atlanta, the firm provides strategy, speechwriting, presentation coaching and training. Follow Pete @PeteWeissman.
HOW TO WRITE EVERYTHING
If you thought you could make all the copy that comes out of your organization more arresting, focused, clear, interesting, consistent, strategic, persuasive, sophisticated, imaginative and freshโyou would, wouldnโt you?
Then DO. How? By inviting Jeff Herrington to help your communicators learn โHow to Write EVERYTHING: Strong, Seductive, Strategic Writing for Professional Communicators.โ
In a virtual workshop from the PSAโs Professional Development Academy, this writerโs writer and teacherโs teacher will bring into your organization a lifetime of experience and a broad view of the current landscape as he gives your communication staff a common set of rules and an uncommon collection of wisdom.
What Your Team Will Learn
At the end of the day, everyone on your staff will know (and see, through dozens and dozens of instructive and cautionary examples from corporate communication):
- How to get the significance of the story across to the reader in the very first sentence.
- The scientific reason why modern sentences should be no longer than tweets and paragraphs should be no longer than three short sentences. (No exceptions.)
- Why passive voice, in corporate prose, is like โclothes hangers in a closet. It seems to populate in the dark.โ
- Why you shouldnโt call it the โapproval processโโand what you should call it instead.
- Three surefire techniques for convincing reticent executives to share their humanity so corporate stories come to life.
- How to write social media posts that get shared, op-eds that appeal to editors and news releases that make news.
- How to make all your work better by using interesting vocabulary and rhetorical techniques, worthwhile quotations and the active voiceโand by always, always, always focusing on human beings, rather than inanimate objects, programs or processes.
โJeff was fantastic!โ said the last communication director who hosted this seminar. โMy colleagues who attended raved about him, and Iโm already hearing our team reference and repeat the mantras he taught us. Thank you so much for recommending him โฆ It was truly exactly what our team needed!โ
The Process and the Perks
Your communication staff wonโt merely learn these techniques as individuals. Through Herringtonโs collaborative curriculum, participants will practice as a team, thus embarking on a journey from individual staffers with varying skill sets to a supportive, proud community of writers.
BONUS: At the end of the session, Herrington will provide each of your participants with a resource guide he has created for organizational communicators, so that your people will not only be better writers, theyโll be more consistent, as well.
This is a popular seminar and Jeff Herrington is only one man. Contact PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected], to discuss pricing and scheduling.
Meet Jeff Herrington
Jeff Herrington has traveled to more than 45 countries on five continents as a writer for the internal and external publications of IBM, AT&T, Whirlpool, Baxter Healthcare and John Deere, among many other companies. He has written and overhauled websites, directed social media activities, crafted communication campaigns and created award-winning content for many of the largest organizations in the world. In raved-about sessions at industry conferences and intimate workshops around the world, Jeff has taught thousands of communicators how to write for every corporate medium. Communication managers who have brought Jeff into their organizations have thanked him for the โrave reviewsโ of their colleagues, praised his workshops as โphenomenalโ and โfun and informativeโ and called them โthe inspiration for our success.โ
PRESENTATION SCHOOL
Many CEOs are polished, compelling speakers on behalf of their organizations. But why leave this responsibility in the hands of just one person?
Itโs time to get everyone else up to speedโquickly and efficiently.
This virtual seminar is perfect for C-suite lieutenants and VPs who want to be more confident in external presentations, director-level people who represent the organization at conferences, and mid-career professionals making the difficult transition from doing the work to managing people. Former Pentagon speechwriter and star speaking coach Rosemary King will use an interactive approach to teach participants how to:
- Refine and deliver the organizationโs elevator pitch, stump speech, or stock presentation.
- Capitalize on โvoice,โ the most underappreciated tool we have in our speaking arsenal.
- Channel passion for the subject in a way that will move audiences to action.
- Avoid the โbig threeโโthe most common public speaking errors in the workplace.
- Cope with public speaking anxiety and transform nervous energy into dynamic, lively presentations.
- Create slides that underscore your most important message rather than distracting from it.
Ideal for groups of 10-15, this half day of training from one of Americaโs most brilliant and beloved speaking coaches will help your organizationโs leaders become more compelling, persuasive communicators.
“Working with Rose has been a game changer!” said a recent client. “Her communication tools and techniques completely changed the trajectory of a client-relationship I’d been struggling with. The result? Increased engagement and buy-in throughout the remainder of the project.”
So think about who on your team would benefit from this trainingโand how much your organization would benefit from their improved leadership communication.
Contact PSA PDA Director David Murray, at [email protected], to discuss pricing and scheduling.
Meet Rosemary King
Rosemary King, PhD, is a sought-after leadership communication consultant, speechwriter and speaking coach. She served as speechwriter for Defense Secretary Robert Gates and two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers and General Peter Pace. Her clients have included Toyota, ABC News, American University, MercyCorps and Feeding America. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
VIDEO COACHING
Itโs not that the camera doesnโt love every leader; itโs that lots of leaders loathe the camera.
But the coronavirus crisis has put all your stakeholders on the other side of a camera at a moment that calls for great leadership communication.
Leaders must use videoโand to learn to use it wellโnow.
One of the worldโs great leadership communication coaches can help you make that happen.
In a half-day, personalized online training session, you will learn:
- Camera distortion is real: How to use it to your personal advantageโand how to eliminate ways in which it works to your disadvantage.
- Script versus bullet points, paper versus teleprompter: How to control the content without stifling the style.
- The arms move and the communication follows: biomechanical consequences of upper body-language.
- Physical fluidity: How to seem neither rigid and stiff, nor frantic and frenzied.
- Voice control: Natural methods to connect a speaker emotionally with the words youโre saying.
For a leader who wants to communicate at this crucial moment, thereโs nothing more important right now than getting better at videoโand no one better to teach you how.
Fred Garcia will give you the tools to make yourself as strong a leader on video as you are in person.
$5,000.
Contact Executive Communication Council executive director David Murray for details: [email protected]
Meet Fred Garcia
For more than 40 years Helio Fred Garcia has helped leaders build trust, inspire loyalty, and lead effectively. He is the author, most recently, of The Agony of Decision: Mental Readiness and Leadership in a Crisis. Fred has coached more than 400 CEOs of major corporations, plus thousands of other high-profile people in other complex fields, including doctors, scientists, lawyers, financial executives, military officers, and government officials. Fred is a highly sought keynote and motivational speaker, and teaches about management and leadership at New York University and at Columbia University.