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 as the Art of Interaction

PON Staff   •  11/28/2011   •  Filed in Events, Negotiation Skills, Student Events

“Negotiation as the Art of Interaction”
A workshop with
Professor Alisher Faizullaev
Visiting Fulbright Scholar, Tufts University

When: Friday, December 9
Time: 12:00 — 1:30 p.m.
Where: Pound Hall, Room 334, Harvard Law School Campus
Please bring your lunch. Drinks and desserts provided.

No negotiation happens without interaction between negotiators, but there are many concepts, ways and forms of organizing and executing interaction. … Read Negotiation as the Art of Interaction

Dr. William Ury and Dr. Gary Slutkin speak at the PON screening of The Interrupters

PON Staff   •  11/22/2011   •  Filed in Events, Negotiation Skills

The Program on Negotiation Film Series recently screened The Interrupters, a documentary film that follows three “violence interrupters” as they work to prevent violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods. The interrupters are outreach workers who were once notorious for their past gang-related experience, but who now work for an organization called CeaseFire, an initiative of the Chicago … Learn More About This Program

How comparisons affect satisfaction

PON Staff   •  11/22/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Social comparisons are a critical factor in guiding negotiator satisfaction, Maurice E. Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania and Yale psychologist Nathan Novemsky have found in their research. Not only do negotiators compare their profit from a deal with the profit they imagine their counterpart earned, but they also compare their profit with the profits … Read How comparisons affect satisfaction

Making threats strategically

PON Staff   •  11/21/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

In negotiation, the time, energy, and resources that you devote to reaching agreement can suggest that you’re desperate for a deal—any deal. The greater your investment in the negotiation, the less credible the threat of walking away becomes.

In such instances, one way to make this threat more credible is to find someone else to take … Read Making threats strategically

Address your negotiation jitters

PON Staff   •  11/15/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

The prospect of negotiating often sparks anxiety, especially if substantive or emotional stakes are high. The mere thought of failing can be self-fulfilling. In sports, it’s called choking. While negotiators don’t have to worry about fans’ reaction to dropping the ball in a packed stadium, critical voices can come from within. The negotiation process is … Read Address your negotiation jitters

Choose the right messenger

PON Staff   •  11/14/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

The evidence from social science is clear: people’s behavior is powerfully influenced by the actions of those who are like them. A classic study by Harvey Hornstein, Elisha Fisch, and Michael Holmes found that New York City residents were highly likely to return a lost wallet after learning that a “similar other”—another New Yorker—had first … Read Choose the right messenger

Professor Robert Mnookin: Negotiation Strategy and Bargaining with the Devil

PON Staff   •  11/11/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Success in negotiation, according to Professor Robert H. Mnookin, Chair of the Program on Negotiation, depends largely on being capable of managing each of the three tensions that he defines as being inevitable within almost any negotiation process. These include the tension between how to expand value and how to divide … Learn More About This Program

“Advice for the Advisor” by Jeswald W. Salacuse

PON Staff   •  11/11/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

Jeswald Salacuse

Jeswald W. Salacuse, (professor, Tufts University), explores the five principles behind offering beneficial advice. Salacuse’s five essential rules (listed below) are drawn from his book, The Wise Advisor.

Know your advisee. Clients are not interchangable. Don’t generalize with your advice; instead, try to understand the particular needs and perspectives of your clients.
Help, or at … Read “Advice for the Advisor” by Jeswald W. Salacuse

Are you asking enough questions?

PON Staff   •  11/08/2011   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

At the time of the final presidential debate between President Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan during the 1980 election campaign, the U.S. economy was tanking and the Iranian hostage crisis smoldering. Ronald Reagan used his concluding statement of the debate to address a string of questions to the nation that highlighted Carter’s vulnerabilities: “Are … Read Are you asking enough questions?

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