MBA Lab is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official representative of Virginia Commonwealth University. Sourced from VCU's 2026-27 Graduate Bulletin (preliminary edition) and FMBA course catalog, verified July 28, 2026.
VCU's Executive MBA requires three one-credit courses dedicated specifically to transformative leadership: FMBA 620, 621, and 622. Their official descriptions are unusually specific for one-credit courses, which makes it possible to map the curriculum to observable behavior rather than just a course title. The breakdown below states what VCU's course catalog covers, plus MBA Lab's own read on what each topic looks like in practice - which is analysis, not an official VCU statement of intended outcomes.
FMBA 620: Foundational Concepts of Transformative Leadership
The first course establishes a specific premise: leadership behavior is downstream of attention, identity, values, and emotional state, not a separate skill layered on top of them. Its topics, and what they look like applied:
| Topic | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Self-awareness and reflection | Naming your own triggers, assumptions, and patterns; actively seeking feedback that might disconfirm your self-image |
| Lifelong learning mindset | Treating a setback as information rather than a verdict; asking what needs to be learned, not just what went wrong |
| Mindfulness | Sustaining attention under pressure; noticing your own reactivity; listening before responding |
| Emotional intelligence | Recognizing emotion (your own and others'), regulating how you express it, reading social and situational cues accurately |
| Authenticity, courage, and values | Explaining your principles clearly; acting consistently with them; naming an uncomfortable truth when it needs naming |
| Communication and influence | Adapting your message to the audience; using evidence and narrative responsibly, not manipulatively |
| Building meaningful relationships | Investing real attention; following through on what you said you'd do; repairing a relationship after a breach |
FMBA 621: Applying Concepts of Transformative Leadership
The second course is where the curriculum turns from personal capacity into the actual work of managing people - and where VCU's own materials introduce the model's central guardrail: care is explicitly constrained by accountability, not a substitute for it.
| Topic | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Performance expectations | Defining outcomes, quality bar, and decision rights clearly enough that "done well" isn't a guessing game |
| Feedback that lands | Specific observations plus real impact plus a two-way conversation plus a concrete next commitment - not just praise or correction |
| Coaching | Asking and prompting practice rather than solving the problem yourself; following up afterward |
| Delegation and team dynamics | Matching authority to responsibility; making escalation paths clear |
| Conflict and collaboration | Surfacing the real interests underneath a disagreement; protecting dissent instead of suppressing it for the sake of harmony |
| Care paired with accountability | Holding standards and offering real support for underperformance, conduct issues, or missed commitments |
| Trust and psychological safety | Inviting bad news actively; responding to a disclosed mistake in a way that doesn't punish honesty |
| Ethics and stakeholder impact | Identifying who's affected by a decision, what they're owed, and where the real tradeoffs sit |
| Culture | Connecting stated values to what actually gets rewarded, hired for, and tolerated |
FMBA 622: Transformative Leadership for Organizational Excellence
The third course prevents the whole approach from staying purely interpersonal. It requires engaging with resistance, crisis, strategy, and systems - explicitly extending "human-centered" leadership into organizational terrain that can't be solved through a good one-on-one conversation alone.
| Topic | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Change management and resistance | Mapping who's affected and why they might resist, sequencing adoption, adjusting the plan based on what's actually happening |
| Vision, mission, and strategy | Translating purpose into specific priorities, resource choices, and metrics |
| Crisis and resilience | Stabilizing immediate risk, communicating honestly about uncertainty, adapting as new information arrives |
| Creativity and innovation | Separating idea generation from selection; funding real experiments; stopping the weak ones |
| Belonging and inclusion | Expanding whose voice actually gets heard, not just whose presence is counted |
| Systems thinking | Recognizing that a decision which improves one metric may just be shifting cost or risk somewhere else in the organization |
| Lasting organizational impact | Building routines and governance that outlast any one leader, rather than relying on personal charisma |
Beyond the three courses
VCU's program materials describe the surrounding Executive MBA as reinforcing the same ideas well past these three specific courses: a cohort model that puts people who wouldn't naturally choose each other into sustained collaboration, a real consulting project every semester, executive coaching, simulations and assessments, a capstone strategic dilemma, and a global immersion component. Research on leadership training generally supports this kind of design - practice, feedback, and real application transfer better than a classroom lecture alone - though that supports the design logic, not a specific, measured claim about this program's outcomes. See the evidence and limitations page for the full picture on what is and isn't established.