UVA Darden Executive Education Offers New Online Course on Collaboration and Influence

Business leaders seeking to discover how to build trust, promote positive engagement, gain support for new ideas, and ultimately drive long-term success and growth have a powerful resource to develop their personal influence through the new Darden Executive Education Collaboration and Influence online course.

Delivered online over the course of five weeks, the program is taught by University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Bobby Parmar, whose expertise helps managers and executives better handle ambiguity in their decision-making. The initial offering of Collaboration and Influence will run 3 June to 7 July.

“Positive relationships are an important source of success for every leader and the lifeblood of every organization,” said Parmar. “Yet, relationships can be tricky to manage. This course seeks to help leaders navigate the complexity of stakeholder relationships to create alignment and collaboration.”

The course is divided into five modules:

1. Stakeholder Mapping — Based on the tenets of stakeholder engagement, discover how to better manage key relationships.
2. Influence — Cultivate consensus by honing the ability to influence key players around important objectives.
3. Strategic Engagement — Practice the craft of “telling a story” to be a more persuasive advocate and adopt strategies for handling pushback more effectively.
4. Negotiation — Master the art of negotiation by studying the five stages of the negotiation process, the spectrum of negotiation styles, and a variety of negotiation strategies.
5. Continued Learning and Growth — Develop deeper engagement and negotiation skills through role play, after-action review, partnership reflection, and cultural competence.

The course is intended for organizational leaders who need to communicate a vision and gather support for it, motivate teams to accomplish goals, manage the risks of aligning diverse groups of stakeholders, become more influential inside and outside their organization, an effectively navigate daily interactions with peers.

By the end of the course, learners will be prepared for better engagement with key stakeholders, to address conflicts within groups, to develop more effective solutions by aligning different stakeholder perspectives and to create value through an effective negotiation style.

Darden Executive Education is routinely recognized as among the best in the world. In 2018, Financial Times named Executive Education open enrollment programs No. 5 in the United States and No. 9 globally. Among other accolades, the ranking placed Darden Executive Education as No. 1 in the world in faculty, facilities and course design.