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.

The Program on Negotiation’s Executive Education negotiation training programs include Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems, the Harvard Negotiation Master Class, and the Harvard Mediation Intensive.

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: How “Close Calls” Can Hurt You

PON Staff   •  06/20/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

In the early 1990s, NASA managers and engineers were warned by an expert in risk
analysis that the heat-resistant tiles that protected space shuttles during reentry into Earth’s
atmosphere could be damaged by debris from the insulating foam on the shuttle’s’ fuel tanks.

During missions over the next 10 years, debris did, indeed, hit tiles, but the damage … Learn More About This Program

Is your negotiating style holding you back?

PON Staff   •  06/15/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

The story, related by an anonymous job candidate on a blog called the Philosophy Smoker, went viral. According to the job candidate, referred to only as “W,” the philosophy department of Nazareth College, a small liberal-arts college in Rochester, New York, offered her a tenure-track position following a round of interviews. W said she responded … Read Is your negotiating style holding you back?

The Consensus Building Institute Honors Program on Negotiation Faculty Member Lawrence Susskind with New Fellowship

PON Staff   •  06/10/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

The Consensus Building Institute (CBI) based in Boston, Massachusetts and in Washington, DC has honored Program on Negotiation faculty member Lawrence Susskind with its creation of a one-year graduate student fellowship that offers the successful candidate the opportunity to work with CBI in Boston or DC on an area of focus for bot CBI and … Learn More About This Program

For Steve Ballmer, Negotiation Skills Go on the Back Burner

Katie Shonk   •  06/10/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

On May 30, the National Basketball Association (NBA) announced it had approved former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s record-breaking $2 billion offer to buy the Los Angeles Clippers from Shelly Sterling, wife of Clippers owner Donald Sterling. In April, the NBA banned Sterling from the league for life after racist remarks he made during a phone … Learn More About This Program

2014 Winner of the Raiffa Doctoral Student Paper Award

PON Staff   •  05/22/2014   •  Filed in Awards, Grants, and Fellowships, Negotiation Skills

The Program on Negotiation has awarded Eugene B. Kogan the 2014 Howard Raiffa Doctoral Student Paper Award for his paper “Coercing Allies: Why Friends Abandon Nuclear Plans.” This paper was submitted as his thesis for the Ph.D. program at Brandeis. Mr. Kogan is currently a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the International Security Program at … Learn More About This Program

Disappointed by Results? Improve Accountability in Business Negotiations

PON Staff   •  05/19/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

When it comes to planning and carrying out talks, negotiators are too often left to their own devices.

Here’s how to guide your employees toward better results.

How satisfied are you with the outcomes that negotiators in your organization achieve?
Most likely, you can think of a few successes worth crowing about, a few you’d like to sweep … Learn More About This Program

Great Negotiator 2014 Tommy Koh Describes Negotiation as an Art and Science

PON Staff   •  05/09/2014   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Program on Negotiation and Harvard Kennedy School’s Future of Diplomacy Project Great Negotiator award winner for 2014, Singaporean diplomat Tommy Koh, wrote an article about his experience winning the Great Negotiator award from Harvard University and the insights into negotiation he offered while honored here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. … Learn More About This Program

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