Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems

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Negotiation and Leadership:

Dealing with Difficult People and Problems

March 19-21, 2012 — April 16-18, 2012 — June 18-20, 2012

The Charles Hotel
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Executive,

It’s often said that great leaders are great negotiators. But how does one become an effective negotiator? On-the-job experience certainly plays a role, but for most executives, taking their negotiation skills to the next level requires outside training.

Widely recognized as the preeminent leader in the field of negotiation and negotiation research, the Program on Negotiation is an interdisciplinary, multi-university research center based at Harvard Law School. Our flagship program – newly renamed Negotiation and Leadership – has a long legacy of effectiveness, with more than 25,000 international participants over the past 30 years.

Designed to accelerate your negotiation capabilities, Negotiation and Leadership (formerly called Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives) examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, and provides a range of competitive and cooperative negotiation strategies. It’s held at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts – next door to Harvard’s Kennedy School and just steps away from Harvard Yard.

Whether you’re an experienced executive or an up-and-coming manager—working in the private or public sector—this program will help you shape important deals, negotiate in uncertain environments, improve working relationships, claim (and create) more value, and resolve seemingly intractable disputes.

In short, this three-day executive education program will prepare you to achieve better outcomes at the bargaining table, every single time.

At the end of these three days in Cambridge, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of different negotiation and decision-making strategies
  • Evaluate your personal tendencies in the face of conflict and learn to manage your strengths and weaknesses to become a more effective negotiator.
  • Learn to recognize the most common manipulative tactics used by difficult people along with strategies for neutralizing their effects.
  • Discover how to win, not by defeating the other side, but by winning them over.
  • Be better prepared to acquire support from your organization as you lead future negotiations.
  • Examine ways to structure the bargaining process to accommodate joint problem solving, brainstorming, and collaborative fact-finding.
  • Learn how to evaluate a best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), create a zone of possible agreement (ZoPA), and implement the mutual gains approach to negotiation.
  • Be enabled to determine which approach is most appropriate in a given situation.
  • Be able to think more clearly, make smarter moves, and set the stage for more productive negotiations.

Thirty Years of Groundbreaking Research, Compressed into Three Thought-Provoking Days

Our 3-day Negotiation and Leadership program is held in Cambridge, Massachusetts just three times this spring, on the following dates:

  • March 19-21
  • April 16-18
  • June 18-20

Day 1: Discover a framework for thinking about negotiation success. What does it look like, how does it work, and how can you leverage your strengths (and mitigate your weaknesses) to obtain better results?

  • Morning: Managing the Tension Between Creating and Claiming Value
  • Afternoon: Building Successful Relationships

Day 2: Examine and develop effective techniques for addressing a variety of negotiation challenges—among them, working within a relatively small bargaining zone, obtaining good results when you are up against oppressive deadlines, and dealing with difficult people and situations.

  • Morning: Managing the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness
  • Afternoon: Difficult Tactics and How to Deal with Them

Day 3: Put it all together. You will apply your newfound negotiation skills by taking part in dynamic, interactive exercises. Not only will you start to systematically prepare for a number of complex, multiparty negotiation scenarios, you will also gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to create value. As a result, you will emerge well equipped to negotiate more skillfully, confidently, and effectively.

  • Morning: Organizational Obstacles and other Complicating Factors
  • Afternoon: Putting it all Together

Augmenting our spring programs are additional in-depth, one-day sessions that address tough negotiation problems—knowing how to make better managerial and financial decisions, learning the art of saying no, and determining when to negotiate (and when to walk away)—all taught by the experts who literally wrote the books on them.

Depending on which program best fits your need, they may aid in deciding which dates you attend the full program.

  • March 22: Make Better Decisions: Improve Judgment and Decision-Making Capabilities
  • April 19: The Art of Saying No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship, and Still Say No
  • June 21: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate and When to Walk Away

Each one-day session is run only once (and space is limited), so be sure to plan ahead to reserve your space.

Three days, six information-packed sessions

Through case studies, interactive discussions and a series of negotiation simulations, you will examine ways to structure the bargaining process to accommodate joint problem solving, brainstorming, and collaborative fact-finding.

You will gain a better understanding of different negotiation and decision-making strategies—enabling you to determine which approach is most appropriate in a given situation.

Session 1: Managing the Tension Between Creating and Claiming Value

In business, negotiation is a high transaction cost activity, and the side that is most prepared nearly always has the upper hand. This session provides a framework for preparing for and analyzing negotiations.

You will examine the key elements of negotiation:

  • Learn to clarify your interests and priorities, and then estimate your counterpart’s interests. Which interests are shared, and which are different?
  • Identify the range of alternatives you are willing to consider if your counterpart does not give consent.
  • Brainstorm possible agreements or concessions that may creatively satisfy both parties’ interests.
  • Establish legitimacy for your side. research or create standards, principles, and arguments that make an agreement or a term feel more fair and appropriate.
  • Draw up statements of what each party will or will not do.
  • Assess your relationship with your counterpart and determine if you can take steps to generate positive emotions and avoid negative reactions.
  • Outline your communication strategy. What do you want to learn from them? What are you willing to share? What is your agenda and how will you handle disagreements or stalemates?
  • Identify opportunities to capture and create value. Do you understand the other party’s interests and goals? Cooperative behaviors facilitate value creation; competitive behaviors do not.

Session 2: Building Successful Relationships

Negotiating better outcomes is contingent upon building successful relationships.

To be effective, executives must learn to navigate personality differences, diverse agendas, and social pressures. Building on the earlier session’s framework, you will examine how positive working relationships are vital to creating and implementing lasting agreements.

You will discover strategies for:

  • Creating a relationship through engagement (who are we?), framing (what are we doing?), and norming (how will we do it?).
  • Projecting warmth and competence.
  • Determining when to cooperate to create value and when to compete to claim your share.
  • Recognizing the structure and social context of the game.
  • Understanding our own biases and tendencies.
  • Proactively changing the game by how we play.
  • Avoiding common pitfalls and errors.
  • Achieving negotiation success.

Session 3: Managing the Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness

Building on the earlier session that examined the tension between creating and claiming value, this session focuses on active listening and how to manage the tension between empathy and assertiveness.

You will find that:

  • Assertion is effectively expressing your own interests, needs, and perspectives to the other party.
  • Empathy is expressing to the other party their interests, needs, and perspectives.
  • Active listening is key.
  • Many times, negotiators are poor listeners; other times, negotiators are not able to effectively defend their own interests.
  • A great negotiator is able to do both well.

Session 4: Difficult Tactics and How to Deal With Them

In this session, you will be introduced to a set of breakthrough strategies for dealing with manipulative tactics, stonewalling, obstructive behavior, and dirty tricks in negotiation. It is designed to enhance your skill in mutual gains negotiation and increase your proficiency in overcoming hard bargainers and hard bargaining situations.

This session will help you:

  • Equip yourself for difficult negotiations.
  • Prepare to negotiate when you do not have much time.
  • Neutralize threats, lies, and insults.
  • Deal with someone who is more powerful than you.
  • Handle power more constructively.
  • Strengthen interpersonal relationships in business.
  • Regain control of the negotiation.
  • Locate and control your own tendencies in the face of conflict.

Session 5: Organizational Obstacles

In managing internal and external negotiations, what can you do to maximize the deal for both sides—even in the face of obstacles and barriers? What tools work best for managers who need to shape agreements and informal understandings within a complex web of relationships? In this session, you will discover strategies for anticipating and responding to an array of complicating factors—from multiple parties and coalitions to cultural and value differences.

You will acquire techniques for:

  • Responding to obstacles.
  • Evaluating five key obstacles to the mutual gains approach.
  • Addressing cultural differences.
  • Examining value differences and determining when they can be reconciled (and when they cannot).
  • Coping with value-based disputes.

Session 6: Putting It All Together

The final session builds on your accumulated knowledge to generate descriptive and prescriptive insights for negotiating across a variety of competitive contexts.

Through relevant case studies, faculty will bring to life different negotiation problems and examine their real-world outcomes. You will focus on the most common psychological biases within organizations and acquire best practices for creating psychological safety within a group.

As a result of your participation, you will become a more effective decision maker and negotiator over the long term. You will also be better prepared to acquire support from your organization as you lead future negotiations.

In-Depth One-Day Sessions

Whether you attend just one of these extra sessions or save $597 by attending all four days, these additional full-day programs deal with three of the most difficult negotiation strategies you may face in business:

  • March 22: Make Better Decisions: Improve Judgment and Decision-Making Capabilities
  • April 19: The Art of Saying No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship, and Still Say No
  • June 21: Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate and When to Walk Away

Make Better Decisions: Improve Judgment and Decision-Making Capabilities
March 22, 2012

When faced with a decision, we all believe we are weighing the facts objectively and making rational, thoughtful decisions. in fact, science tells us that in situations requiring careful judgment, every individual is influenced by his or her own biases.

Led by Max Bazerman and Iris Bohnet, this one-day session provides you with the insights you need to overcome biases, make sound judgments, and become a better decision maker and manager.

Drawing on the latest behavioral decision research, Bazerman and Bohnet will examine judgment across a variety of managerial and financial contexts and provide important insights that can help you make better decisions.

The Art of Saying No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship, and Still Say No
April 19, 2012

No is perhaps the most important and certainly the most powerful word in the language. Every day we find ourselves in situations where we need to say no—¬to people at work, at home, and in our communities—because it is the word we must use to stand up for what matters to us.

In business, how do you say no to an overly demanding co-worker or boss without hurting the relationship? Saying no the right way is possibly the single most valuable skill in negotiation—and absolutely key to getting to yes. As you will learn, the secret to saying no while protecting and advancing your core interests, without compromising relationships, lies in the art of the positive no.

Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate and When to Walk Away
June 21, 2012

A business partner betrays you, a competitor steals your company’s intellectual property, or a former employee poaches your clients. In business, the devil has many faces. You must rely on appropriate decision making to cope with the threats that they pose.

In this one-day course, you will learn how to decide whether to negotiate or fight with the devils you encounter in everyday life or whether to just walk away. You will learn how to arrive at a wise decision and avoid emotional, strategic, and political traps along the way.

Fees:

  • One day: $1,597
  • Three days: $2,997
  • BEST DEAL: Combined four days (one+three): $3,997 –save $597

Team Discount
Groups of two or more qualify for a $500 discount off of each registration.

Introducing Our Spring 2012 Teaching Team

Eileen Babbitt, Professor of international Conflict Management Practices at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Robert C. Bordone, Thaddeus r. Beal Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Director, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program

Deepak Malhotra, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Brian S. Mandell, Director, Kennedy School Negotiation Project; Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Robert H. Mnookin, Samuel Williston Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Chair, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

Bruce M. Patton, Co-founder and Distinguished Fellow of the Harvard Negotiation Project

Jeswald W. Salacuse, Henry J. Baker Professor of Law and former Dean, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Guhan Subramanian, Joseph Flom Professor of Law and Business, Harvard Law School; Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, Harvard Business School

Lawrence E. Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, The Massachusetts institute of Technology

Michael A. Wheeler, Class of 1952 Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School; Editor, Negotiation Journal

Join Us for Three/Four Days of Negotiation and Leadership!

Negotiation and Leadership attracts a diverse, global audience from both the private and public sectors. Participants span a wide range of titles and industries. This program is appropriate, although not limited to, to individuals with the following titles: Chief Executive Officer, President, Executive Director, Director of Human Resources, Director of Sales, Department Manager, Assistant Director and Supervisor.

Negotiation and Leadership is held at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts—next door to Harvard’s Kennedy School and just steps away from Harvard Yard. A truly unique, independent luxury hotel, The Charles Hotel overlooks the Charles River in Cambridge’s Harvard Square.

If you’d like to improve your negotiation and decision-making skills, I encourage you to register for one of our upcoming sessions. Alongside a diverse group of executives from all over the world, you’ll learn from acclaimed negotiation experts, authors, academicians, and researchers.

Together, you’ll test groundbreaking theories, practice new approaches, and put your newfound knowledge into action, right then and there.

I hope to see you in Cambridge this spring.

Sincerely,

Robert H. Mnookin
Chair
Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

P.S. Groups of two or more qualify for a $500 discount off of each registration!

P.S. Download our brochure for a full agenda, reservation codes and more information about fees and team discounts!

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