Leadership and Communication (corporate communicatie)

In this course you will master the skills you need to excel as a general manager working in corporate communication.

How people see a problem, opportunity or decision depends on their background and experiences. The perspectives of people who spent years in finance dealing with cash flows and budgeting are different than those of someone with experience in corporate communication who deals with media relations, employee communications and investor relations. This implies two things:

• each person has a limited view of the whole story, and may be driven to define a problem as a ‘finance’ or ‘marketing’ problem because this is what their experience tells them
• each person may be correct, but only partially.

This calls for developing a general management perspective. With this perspective you can integrate multiple functional perspectives to arrive at a complete understanding of a problem or opportunity.

The value of the general management perspective in communications becomes particularly clear when you run a function (like media relations) or department (like corporate communication). That’s where you see the interplay of different functional imperatives with their often conflicting views. In this course, you will focus on the challenge of effectively combining the requirements of each functional area with the overall needs of your enterprise.

The general manager’s job

General managers are responsible for the main day-to-day business activities a company or department – whether it is for- or not-for-profit, local or international, small or large. General managers include CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders of business units in larger companies, executive directors of charitable organisations, presidents and prime ministers of countries, and in this case, heads of corporate communication departments or functions. You function as a leader who can set the organisational purpose and can create an environment where success happens.

In such a general manager role, you need proficiency in three distinct areas:

• critical thinking about various strategies and business models
• innovation and creativity by exploring opportunities, understanding discontinuities and crafting strategy
• intuition.

So while we rely on frameworks to guide our thinking wherever possible, there is a certain ‘messiness’ in the general manager’s job that cannot be ignored. This course will lay a foundation about the general manager’s job that you can build on throughout the rest of your career.

Learning objectives

Build, enhance, and perfect the skills you need to excel as a general manager working in corporate communication. You will:

• explore key areas of general management through in-depth analysis of a range of cases that focus on various functional areas of management
• learn how to introduce the concept of general management to communicators
• develop analytical skills needed for effective problem and opportunity identification.

In this course you will learn how best to define problems or opportunities in your organisation so you understand what the real critical issues are. An important part of the learning here will be in the process of figuring out what the right questions are, and what the right problems and opportunities should be.