Influence and Persuasion

Former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca once noted, "You can have brilliant ideas; but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere." This course builds on Iacocca's insight, helping students develop the ability to win support for their perspectives, proposals, and projects from key people in the workplace. Everyone needs to know how to sell ideas. Sales people obviously need this skill and so do managers of all kinds. Even CEOs need it to gain buy-in for a vision. Influence and persuasion help you work with and through others--customers, teammates, colleagues, direct reports, and stakeholders--who have different professional backgrounds, roles, opinions, and agendas. In highly interactive discussions and exercises, students will learn about practical field-tested frameworks that draw on current insights from psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics. When the course is completed, students will have mastered the latest thinking about: 1) Persuasion styles and how they can adapt them to achieve desired outcomes. 2) The five barriers to communication and collaboration and methods for overcoming the barriers. 3) The systematic steps in the process of selling ideas and negotiating when you need to. 4) The similarities and differences among influencing, persuading, and negotiating. 5) Ways to build momentum for ideas. 6) Techniques for motivating others to take action. 7) Winning support for culture change. These insights will enable students to work across the boundaries that create warring workplace tribes. Nearly every organization contends with this tribal warfare and leaders need to know how to counter-act the natural human tendency to square off against co-workers who have different professional backgrounds or roles. Prerequisites: Course permits for non-DYNM students: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/lps/graduate/dynamics/course-permit