This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Ask three people in your company what the strategy is. The answers you get are the strategy. Whatever is in the document is a draft of it.

Where it stops being understood

The leadership team spends two days getting to a shared view, and every one of them leaves genuinely aligned. Then it is compressed into a slide, sent as an email, mentioned once at an all-hands, and handed to managers who were not in the room and have to explain it convincingly on Monday. By the time it reaches the person doing the work, it has been through four retellings, none of which were designed. I have written that email and been surprised, months later, at what people believed it said.

What this course actually covers

Six blocks, following the message the whole way down. First, where it is born: preparing and running a strategy session that produces a document and an implementation plan rather than photographs of a whiteboard. Second, communication as a system — auditing how people actually receive information, segmenting the internal audience, building personas, choosing the channel for the message, delivering the parts nobody will like, and measuring whether it arrived. Third, translating strategy into objectives a person can restate in their own words, using the "from X to Y by Z" format, and running the quarterly rhythm that keeps them alive. Fourth, facilitating the room where the strategy is discussed rather than announced, including large sessions and difficult participants. Fifth, resistance: the eight mistakes, Kotter's model, the rider-elephant-path model, early wins and anchoring the change. Sixth, engagement measurement as the honest test of whether any of it landed.

A note on the material

Fourteen of the thirty-six lessons were recorded as internal communications and engagement work. That is the subject rather than a substitute for it: a strategy is communicated to people inside a company, and engagement measurement is the most direct way of checking it reached further than the reporting pack.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 36 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the two-day session agenda, the communications audit, audience personas and the message template, the "from X to Y by Z" format, Kotter's eight steps, Gallup Q12

• Practical work on the strategy you actually have to communicate

Where to start

Ask three people at different levels what the company is trying to achieve this year, and write down the answers word for word. That set of three sentences is your real starting point. Enrol now and start today.