Communicating Persuasively and Building Trust

Focus Your Learning Preparatory Activity

WORKBOOK
 Focus Your Learning
INSTRUCTIONS
To set yourself up for success with persuasive communication, a first step is to identify opportunities in which those skills will be most helpful in your current
context. As you work through Communicating Persuasively and Building Trust, you will prepare to use persuasion to gain support for the idea or position
you’ll present. You will learn to apply a set of persuasion techniques in both the planning and delivery of a persuasive communication (verbal or written)
advancing your idea. The goal is to build trust and develop credibility as a leader, and to inspire advocacy for your initiative. This Preparatory Activity will help
you narrow your focus and prioritize one upcoming opportunity, define your desired outcome, and identify specific people (your target audience) whose
support you’re looking to earn. You should save your work in these slides and keep them handy as you complete your Action Plan.

As you focus your learning, this workbook will walk you through the following:

1. Brainstorm Opportunities for Persuasive Leadership: Identify at least three near-term opportunities where persuasion will be critical to achieving your
business objectives. These opportunities may involve formal situations, where you’re presenting to a group, or they may be more informal, interpersonal
situations where you need to address a difference of opinion between you and a peer. These should be situations in which agreement is not guaranteed and
you expect some pushback. You will then choose one idea (based on provided criteria for prioritization) to focus on in your Action Plan.

2. Select Your Opportunity: Choose one of your proposed opportunities to focus on over the course of the Experience. Determine which of these situations, if
successfully handled, will:
1. Have the greatest impact on your ability to make progress on workstreams or initiatives that are critical to achieving your business goals.
2. Involve a communication you can craft and deliver over the coming week. In other words, you should not choose an opportunity that would involve
significant amounts of research and formal preparation.

Then, describe what success would look like. Keep in mind that this outcome doesn’t always mean achieving the end goal. It could be something more
preliminary like introducing an innovative idea to a strategic audience, soliciting someone’s participation in a project, or developing a key relationship.
1. Brainstorm Opportunities for Persuasive Leadership
Use the table below to describe at least three situations where persuading others will be critical.

Near-Term Opportunities: The Audience: The Challenge:

When and where will you need to “get Whom do you need to persuade? What kind of resistance might you encounter?
someone on your side”? Why?

1.

2.

3.

4.
 2. Select Your Opportunity
Choose one opportunity to focus on over the course of the experience and describe the desired outcome.

Your Persuasion Opportunity:

Why is this opportunity important to achieving your business goals? What would success look like?
 Finished!
Congratulations! You have completed the Focus Your Learning Preparatory Activity. You are now well positioned as you begin the module
and work through the material.

As you move through this Experience, you will prepare to complete and submit your Action Plan workbook. Between lecture segments
you will encounter several Action Plan Tips intended to help you apply the lecture content to your Action Plan. Your plan will involve an
analysis of one target audience and the selection of strategic persuasion techniques most likely to be effective for that audience. You will
create a persuasive communication (verbal or written) and frame the message using your selected persuasion techniques. Finally, you will
deliver your communication to an audience (preferably your target audience, or a practice audience for now), reflect on the audience
response, and consider how you will address additional persuasive communication opportunities in the future.