👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my weekly newsletter on managing up, career growth, and standing out as a high-performer.

This week, I want to share my newest project: my course on executive communication and influence.

If you’re new here, and you are interested in my “regular programming” of communication/management/leadership content, check out these recent posts:

• How to be more concise

• Sales, not logistics

• 15 Principles for managing up

• Managers, be more explicit

• Playing defense: How to control the narrative if your work is being questioned

Read time: 8 minutes

A few weeks ago, I shared a survey in my newsletter asking you to help shape my forthcoming course. I loved reading the responses with your votes on titles I was brainstorming, hearing the #1 thing you most wanted to learn, and more.

Since then, I’ve been busy working behind the scenes outlining the curriculum.

And I’m finally ready to show you the course page for (drumroll): Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers.

We will cover how to:

• Present to your CEO to maximize highly visible moments

• Manage up in day-to-day interactions

• Frame your ideas and give the right amount of context in any situation

• Write more efficiently to achieve your goals

• Delegate while maintaining high standards

• Influence up, down, and sideways to get things done

• Get enthusiastic buy-in and collaboration from colleagues outside your team

I'm really excited about this—it’s a culmination of so much of what I share in this newsletter, with the distinct value-add of being live with Q&A, hands-on exercises, discussion, and the ability to go much deeper into nuances and real-life applications.

Here are the course details:

• Course: Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers

• Dates: Thursday, September 26 and Friday, September 27

• Timing: 12:00 - 3:30pm ET plus an optional 1 hour Q&A afterward on both days

When you enroll, you’ll automatically receive calendar invites. Check your spam/promotions folder if you don’t see it within a few minutes.

The beta cohort will be capped at a smaller group of students. This means more opportunities for me to answer your questions and a more intimate vibe overall, which personally I'm looking forward to.

NOTE: The cohort registration went public yesterday—and more than half the spots are already filled! This cohort includes students from Square, Netflix, Yelp, Clearlink, DailyPay, etc. I’m thrilled to see the positive response. If you’d like to join us, you may want to sign up before the end of the week. See the course details.

Here’s why I’m excited to share this course with you:

1. More accessible than coaching. 

Every week, I get emails from talented mid-career and senior folks who I would love to support, but am not able to because of bandwidth. I have limited spots for 1:1 coaching retainers, and my rates are typically only accessible for directors/VP-level folks at VC-backed or later-stage companies. 

This course is 9 hours of live instruction for the price of less than 1 hour of my private coaching. So it opens up the opportunity for more folks to get some of the benefits of coaching, without the price tag.

This course is my way of scalably working with folks live and discussing concepts to help you commit these learnings into your long-term memory. I love the live format: I love Q&A, hearing what you’re thinking about, reacting in the moment, riffing, and being in dialogue with other smart people.

2. Go deeper into concepts covered in this newsletter. 

I put a tremendous amount of thought into making each newsletter as valuable and standalone as possible. Why? Because I can’t give a director’s commentary or share additional context as you read.

A lot of what I write about is trying to teach tacit knowledge, which is highly context-dependent and situational. So I try to share insights, convince you of those insights, share examples (screenshots, scripts, before-and-afters), point out things to keep in mind, edge cases, etc.

This works pretty well for the most part, based on the positive feedback I hear from readers.

But an essay, like most things that are text-driven, is one-directional and asynchronous. The written medium has limitations.

And sometimes, it feels terribly inadequate for the amount of depth I want to go into. I want to hear what’s resonating for you, what’s confusing, and how you’re trying to apply frameworks to a scenario you’re dealing with right now, so I can tailor my suggestions to you.

The goal of learning isn't simply to know principles, frameworks, and concepts—it's to internalize them. If you follow my writing, the course builds on concepts I’ve written about here. We will discuss important nuances and examples, with the opportunity to put these lessons into practice.

That’s why I’m excited about the dynamic, bi-directional format of the course. I’ll share, and you’ll get to share too. And if you’re not comfortable sharing, you get to hear from other operators who are putting these same concepts into practice.

3. I dislike communication overhead and avoidable friction.

I’m shocked at the amount of communication overhead that happens in daily work.

In the past month alone, how many times have you:

• Drafted a doc or memo, and thought, “Ugh why did this take so long?”

• Needed to follow up on a confusing or half-baked DM from a coworker, which slowed down both of your ability to move forward?

• Tried convincing a colleague outside your team and wondered if there was a better way to do it?

• Felt caught off guard when you were questioned by senior leadership in a meeting?

Communication overhead is like tech debt. It adds up quickly, compounds, and gets unwieldy—until you’re spending more time than you should on deciphering what people mean, following up, etc.

Even folks who are pretty good communicators deal with this, but I believe it doesn’t have to be this way.

If you become a stronger communicator, it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats—the “boats” here being all the other things you do. You can advocate for your ideas without thinking so hard from scratch every time, have the right words come to you more easily, and have people be more excited to do what you want them to do.

Words are a free lever, but so many operators don’t fully take advantage of this. I coach clients on this all the time, and I’m excited to coach you on it via the course as well. 

4. Focus on building intuition and applying principles in your own work.

Real-world scenarios are often messy, with conflicting data points, complications, and sensitivities. Some frameworks are even at odds with one another. If a straightforward answer existed, you’d already have done it. 

So how do you decide what to say or do? How do you practice using your judgment? How do you even know if you’re showing good or poor judgment?

I’m looking forward to diving into these applications and nuances in the course. If you misdiagnose a situation, you could spin your wheels wondering why X solution isn’t working… when X was never the problem to begin with. 

I try to foresee obvious ways you might misapply a concept, but it’s extremely hard (if not impossible) to guess ALL the ways a reader might execute suboptimally.

With the live and interactive format of the course, I’ll get to see your thinking in action. You and the other students in your cohort will be actively thinking and participating the whole time.

If you execute in a way that’s subpar, I’ll lovingly point it out so we can all talk about it and learn from it.

Who is this for?

Folks who will get the most from this course tend to be the following:

You care about quality, rigor, and setting a high bar for yourself and others. I have high standards for myself and the people around me. I like working with people who push themselves to be better, not for any particular reason other than it being a point of personal pride to do your best work. Also, being great at your job adds a lot of value to your organization and creates the ultimate optionality for you, too.

You are ambitious and want to sharpen your ability to execute. There’s no upper boundary to how good you can be at the topics we’re going to cover re: how to persuade, write well, express ideas with more clarity, etc. We only have 2 days in the course, but I believe if you put effort in, you will make a major leap ahead. You’ll come away with new ideas to apply immediately and you can continue to apply these principles going forward.

You are self-aware, open-minded, and intellectually honest. I believe intellectual honesty is one of the most attractive traits in teammates. This course will likely be full of people who are quite thoughtful. I’m basing this on the emails I get from folks after each newsletter, and from the calls I did with a few course survey respondents who shared feedback to shape the course.

After the calls, my first thought was, “These are the people I want to support and build up. I want to help good people like this to win at whatever they do.” My goal is to help you win.

You are on a lean team punching above your weight class. You are a hands-on leader who is delegating to a cross-functional growing team, and realizing that you need to influence, inspire, and get an increasingly larger group of people to run in the same direction.

To grow your impact, you need to get people to do what you want them to do—enthusiastically and collaboratively. The more senior you become, the more you’ll need to drive alignment, buy-in, and lead in all directions. This is what we’ll cover in the course.

***

So there you have it re: a bit more about how I’m thinking about this course. There’s a lot more detail on the course page, so take a look at the curriculum, what’ll be covered, etc. See the course page here.

I love working with ambitious, thoughtful people, and I want to make this course as valuable as possible for you.

If there are any situations you're dealing with or want me to cover, feel free to hit “reply” or email me anytime between now and when the course starts.

Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next Wednesday at 8am ET.

Wes

PS Here are more ways to connect:

1. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn for insights during the week (free).

2. Check my availability to do a keynote for your team.

3. Work with me for 1:1 executive coaching. I find it extremely rewarding to give personalized guidance to ambitious operators. My current clients include leaders at startups funded by Sequoia, Accel, Bessemer, SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins, etc.

4. Enroll in my new cohort-based course which starts next month: Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers