Welcome to the Relationship Management course in the Engineering Leadership specialization. If you haven't already done so, I'd strongly suggest that you take the self-awareness course first, as we'll be building on the foundations that we laid in that course. In this course, we're going to talk about the soft skills, those things that I consider to be the hardest part of being an effective leader. This course consists of four modules, communications, building power and influence, managing conflict, and conducting effective meetings. We'll also introduce your writing assignment in this course, which will be to conduct the engineer interview. In the self awareness course, I model this interview by talking to two of my colleagues to show how to conduct that interview, and to model the questions that you'll be asking. There'll also be a quiz as part of each of the modules in this course. And lastly, we'll continue the journaling practice that we used in the self-awareness course to help you capture your reflections and insights about leadership. We'll begin with the communications course. Here, we're going to cover the topics mostly related to interpersonal verbal interactions. What we won't talk about here are the presentations and the writing skills that you'll develop more thoroughly in the communications specialization. So let's begin by introducing my leadership observation topic for this module. Bad leaders get people hurt, whether it's physically, emotionally, or spiritually. We'll come back to that observation at the end of the module. The objectives for this module will be largely related to how you give and receive feedback. This will be a practice that you will use every day. It'll become routine in how you go about improving the performance of those who follow you. You'll be doing that in one of two forms, either coaching or counseling. And understanding the difference between those two, and the appropriate tools to use in each one Will largely determine how effective you are in improving the performance of those who follow you. Active listening is one of those critical leadership skills that will enable you to reduce the barriers to communication that you may encounter when you don't communicate very effectively. So understanding those inhibitors and barriers, ways of overcoming them, and preventing them in the first place will largely determine your effectiveness in communicating with those you lead.
