Negotiation Skills

Negotiation is a deliberative process between two or more actors that seek a solution to a common issue or who are bartering over an item of value. Negotiation skills include the range of negotiation techniques negotiators employ to create value and claim value in their dealmaking business negotiations and beyond. Negotiation skills can help you make deals, solve problems, manage conflicts, and build relationships as well as preserve relationships. Negotiation skills can be learned with conscious effort and should be practiced once learned.

Negotiation training includes the range of activities and exercises negotiators undertake to improve their skills and techniques. Role-play simulations developed from real-world research and negotiation case studies, negotiation training provides benefits for teams and individuals seeking to create and claim more value in their negotiations.

The right skills allow you to maximize the value of your negotiated outcomes by effectively navigating the negotiation process from setup to commitment to implementation.

Negotiation training courses include Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems, the Advanced Negotiation Master Class, Harvard Negotiation Institute programs, and the PON graduate seminars.

This training allows negotiators to:

  • Acquire a systematic framework for analyzing and understanding negotiation
  • Assess and heighten awareness of your strengths and weaknesses as a negotiator
  • Learn how to create and maximize value in negotiations
  • Gain problem-solving techniques for distributing value fairly while strengthening relationships
  • Develop skills to deal with difficult negotiators and hard-bargaining tactics
  • Learn how to match the process to the context
  • Discover how effectively to manage and coordinate across and behind-the-table negotiations
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Negotiation Skills: Should Put Off What You Could Negotiate Today?

PON Staff   •  12/12/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

To reach agreement, negotiators sometimes postpone the resolution of certain issues until a later date. We look at how this practice plays out in the real world. Remember the federal debt ceiling talks? In mid-2011, congressional Republicans insisted on significant spending reductions from their Democratic counterparts in exchange for voting to raise the nation’s debt … Learn More About This Program 

Negotiation Skills and Dealmaking: Committing to an Arbitrary Deadline

PON Staff   •  10/27/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

During the NBA’s 2011 lockout, NBA commissioner David Stern’s arbitrary deadlines may have done more harm than good. But he had more luck with an arbitrary deadline during the league’s previous lockout, which whittled the 1998–1999 NBA season down to 50 games per team, as Don A. Moore explained in a 2004 article for Negotiation. … Learn More About This Program 

To set more accurate negotiation goals, try unpacking

PON Staff   •  10/15/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

As negotiators, we understand the importance of estimating the likely parameters of an agreement in upcoming talks. Yet even the most experienced negotiators have moments of surprise at the bargaining table when they realize that their estimates were far off the mark.

A new negotiation study by professor Michael P. Haselhuhn of the University of California … Learn More About This Program 

Negotiation Skills: A Failure to Communicate

PON Staff   •  09/15/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Question: I’ve just finished reading the recent book No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller (Wiley, 2010) by Harry Markopolos, the whistle-blower in the Bernard Madoff scandal. Why do you think Markopolos was so ineffective at persuading the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Madoff was a fraud? What does this story tell us … Read Negotiation Skills: A Failure to Communicate 

Thanks to Keen Negotiation Skills, the Carolinas Avoid a Border Dispute

Katie Shonk   •  09/10/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Due to the frequency of their border disputes, the United States can at times seem not so united. The states of Georgia and Tennessee are currently embroiled in a heated conflict over a mile-long strip of land. A dispute between Georgia and South Carolina over several islands reached the Supreme Court, as did a conflict … Learn More About This Program 

Negotiation Skills: Are You Sure You’re Sharing?

PON Staff   •  09/08/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

If you’ve ever been annoyed by a negotiation counterpart who can’t seem to remember your interests and priorities, it could be that your communication skills, not his poor memory, are to blame. Negotiators typically aren’t as transparent as they think they are. In some cases, we think we’re revealing more information to the other side … Learn More About This Program 

Negotiation research you can use: Anger, sadness, and sacred issues

PON Staff   •  08/15/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Anger, sadness, and sacred issues

We’ve seen that people whose sacred, or morally significant, values are threatened tend to react with strong emotions that make them uncompromising. In a new study published in Judgment and Decision Making, University of Southern California researchers Morteza Dehghani, Peter J. Carnevale, and Jonathan Gratch find that our counterparts’ emotions affect how cooperative we are … Learn More About This Program 

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