Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
THREE-DAY PROGRAM | May 11–13, 2026
At Negotiation and Leadership, you will test your beliefs and assumptions, overcome emotional and rational biases, examine complex negotiation scenarios, and discover a range of competitive and cooperative negotiation strategies. In this acclaimed program, we compress 40 years of groundbreaking research into six thought-provoking sessions. In sessions taught by our expert faculty, you’ll broaden your understanding of negotiating concepts, acquire proven negotiating techniques, and have the opportunity to put your learning into practice.
Our program will feature:
- Role plays and negotiation exercises—You’ll have the opportunity to test what you learn by taking part in realistic negotiations with your fellow participants.
- One-on-one interaction with top faculty—You’ll have the opportunity to talk one-on-one with negotiation experts from Harvard, and other leading institutions.
- Live collaboration—Collaborate, network, and build relationships with peers from across the nation and around the world.
Our faculty members have negotiated peace treaties, closed multimillion-dollar deals, and have created Negotiation and Leadership, a highly interactive program that features negotiation best practices and cutting-edge research.
BONUS DAY | May 14, 2026
Negotiating When Parties Have Diverse, Deeply Held Convictions
Three-day Program Agenda: Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Monday, May 11, 2026
UNDERSTANDING KEY NEGOTIATION CONCEPTS
MORNING:
Registration, Continental Breakfast and Overview
8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. ET
Negotiation Fundamentals: Key Concepts and Core Vocabulary
9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET
Negotiation is a high-transaction-cost activity, and the side that is better prepared nearly always has the upper hand. This session will examine core frameworks of negotiation, including the importance of principled bargaining and shared problem solving.
Alongside your fellow participants, you will:
- Prepare for your negotiation
- Explore the difference between interests and positions
- Determine alternative options you are open to if you cannot reach an agreement with your counterpart
- Learn to analyze a negotiation problem and find ways to unlock new value
- Evaluate your standing with your counterpart and identify potential actions for developing a more positive relationship
Through negotiation exercises and interactive discussions, you will examine ways to structure the bargaining process to accommodate joint problem solving, brainstorming, and collaborative fact finding. These frameworks will help you create smarter negotiation conditions, make more strategic decisions, and leave the bargaining table with improved outcomes
AFTERNOON:
Managing the Tension Between Creating and Claiming Value
1:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. ET
In most negotiations, we pursue two goals: value claiming and value creating. Successful negotiators know how to create more value by negotiating trades across issues and then claim the lion’s share of that value through distributive negotiation strategies. In this session, you will:
- Learn to clarify your interests and priorities, and then estimate your counterpart’s interests and identify 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 might creatively satisfy both parties’ interests
- Establish legitimacy for your side by exploring arguments that make an agreement or a term feel more fair and appropriate
- Assess your relationship with your counterpart and determine whether you can take steps to generate positive emotions and avoid negative reactions
- Outline your communication strategy and ask yourself: What do you want to learn from your counterpart? 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 by understanding the other party’s interests and goals, and recognizing that cooperative behaviors facilitate value creation while competitive behaviors do not
You will learn how to evaluate the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, create a zone of possible agreement, and implement the mutual gains approach to negotiation
DAY 2: Tuesday, May 12, 2026
MANAGING INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS
MORNING:
Managing Emotions and Relationships
8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET
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 frameworks learned the previous day, you will examine how positive working relationships are vital to creating and implementing lasting agreements. You will discover strategies for:
- Identifying the core concerns that must be addressed to manage emotions in the workplace
- Creating a relationship through engagement (Who are we?), framing (What are we doing?), and process (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 your own negotiation style and the styles of others
- Understanding your own biases and tendencies
- Avoiding common pitfalls and errors
- Achieving negotiation success
- Strengthen interpersonal relationships in business
By taking part in negotiation simulations, 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.
AFTERNOON:
Dealing with Difficult Situations
1:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. ET
In this session, you will be introduced to a set of breakthrough strategies for dealing with manipulative tactics, stonewalling, and obstructive behavior. 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 with:
- Equip yourself for difficult negotiations
- Prepare to negotiate when you do not have much time
- Understand the importance of active listening
- Improve your ability to analyze a situation and choose the appropriate strategy and response
- Neutralize threats, lies, and insults
- Deal with someone who is more powerful than you
- Handle power more constructively
- Regain control of the negotiation
- Identify and control your own tendencies in the face of conflict
- Separate intention from impact
- Proactively change the game by how you play
You will learn to recognize the most common manipulative tactics used by difficult people, along with strategies for neutralizing their effects. Discover how to succeed, not by defeating the other side but by advocating persuasively for your own.
DAY 3: Wednesday, May 13, 2026
ADDRESSING NEGOTIATION COMPLEXITIES
MORNING:
Complex Negotiations and Organizational Challenges
8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ET
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. You will acquire sophisticated techniques for:
- Working in complex situations and planning ahead for future negotiations
- Understanding the tension between principals and agents
- Begin dealing with multiparty negotiations, including building coalitions, mapping out stakeholders, and blocking coalitions
- Examining value differences and determining when they can be reconciled (and when they cannot)
- Coping with values-based disputes
- Responding to obstacles
- Adopting preparation guides and procedures
- Committing to value-creating moves
- Considering contingent agreements that take into account different assumptions about the future
- Identifying internal obstacles that can hinder your negotiations
- Overcoming anxiety about committing to cooperative efforts that can create value
AFTERNOON:
Leading Through Negotiation
1:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. ET
People become skillful negotiators and leaders through practice and analysis. In this culminating session, you will have the opportunity to practice many of the key concepts, frameworks, and tools you have acquired throughout the program, while learning about the challenges of team decision making. Using a final relevant case study, faculty will bring to life challenges of negotiation and leadership that you will face when you return to your roles and responsibilities. You will practice with the tools you have added to your tool kit, building negotiation agility and resilience so that you can lead more effectively within and beyond your organization.
BONUS DAY:
Negotiating When Parties Have Diverse, Deeply Held Convictions
Thursday, May 14, 2026, 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
You will emerge from this one-day program with a deeper understanding of the circumstances that lead to conflict—and the best ways to address them through negotiation.
Learn More About This Bonus Day 
Our Faculty
Our faculty is comprised of world-renowned faculty from all across Harvard including Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School.
Guhan Subramanian
Faculty Chair, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School; Joseph H. Flom Professor of Law and Business, Harvard Law School; H. Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, Harvard Business School; Faculty Chair, JD/MBA Program, Harvard University
The first person in the history of Harvard University to hold tenured appointments at both Harvard Law School (HLS) and Harvard Business School (HBS), Guhan Subramanian is a consummate educator, dealmaker, and leader. As the chair of the Program on Negotiation, he spearheads negotiation and mediation training programs for the more than 3,000 professionals who attend every year. At HLS, Subramanian teaches courses on negotiation and corporate law. At HBS, he teaches in several executive education programs, including Strategic Negotiations, Changing the Game, Making Corporate Boards More Effective, and Mergers and Acquisitions, of which he is faculty chair.
Subramanian’s research focuses on corporate governance, corporate law, and negotiation. His books include Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions. Eleven of his articles have been selected as being among the “top 10” articles published in corporate and securities law. The two-volume treatise Law and Economics of Mergers and Acquisitions, which includes 33 seminal articles from the field over the past 45 years, contains four of his articles—more than from any other scholar.
Subramanian advises individuals, boards of directors, and management teams on issues of dealmaking and corporate governance. He has been involved in major public-company deals, such as Oracle’s $10 billion hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft, Cox Enterprises’ $9 billion freeze-out of the minority shareholders in Cox Communications, Exelon’s $8 billion hostile takeover bid for NRG, and the $26 billion management buyout of Dell Inc. Over the past 10 years, he has been an advisor or expert witness in deals or situations worth more than $150 billion in total value. He is also the director of LKQ Corporation (NASDAQ: LKQ), a Fortune 500 company in the automotive sector.
Kessely Hong
Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Faculty Chair of the MPA Programs and the Mid-Career MPA Summer Program, Harvard Kennedy School
A highly skilled negotiator and educator, Kessely Hong was presented with the Manuel C. Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) graduating class of 2015, and the Holly Taylor Sargent Award for Women’s Advancement by the Women and Public Policy Program in 2018. As a lecturer in public policy and faculty chair of the Mid-Career MPA Summer Program at HKS, she teaches both degree program and executive education students. She has been a fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at HKS, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the Harvard University Native American Program.
Daniel L. Shapiro
Founder and Director, Harvard International Negotiation Program; Associate Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital; Affiliate faculty, Program on Negotiation
The founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, Daniel Shapiro teaches a highly evaluated course on negotiation at Harvard College; instructs psychology interns at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital; and leads executive education sessions at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. He also has served on the faculty at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Named one of the top 15 professors at Harvard University, Shapiro specializes in practice-based research—building theory and testing it in real-world contexts. He has launched successful conflict resolution initiatives in the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia, and for three years chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Conflict Resolution. Focusing extensively on the emotional and identity-based dimensions of negotiation and conflict resolution, Shapiro led the initiative to create the world’s first Global Curriculum on Conflict Management for senior policymakers as well as a conflict management curriculum that now reaches one million youth across more than 20 countries. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Early Career Award and the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker of the Year Award. In May of 2019, Shapiro was named Harvard’s Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the oldest of the teaching awards given out by the Undergraduate Council.
Gillian Todd
Gillien Todd is Lecturer on Law. She has taught the Spring Negotiation Workshop since 2001. For the Harvard Program on Negotiation, she leads the Seminar on Negotiation and Dispute Resolution and has assisted with the Executive Education series. She is on the Advisory Board of the Harvard Mediation Program.
Gillien is a professional consultant and facilitator. In that capacity, she has taught negotiation and difficult conversations workshops for professionals across the U.S. in a variety of industries, including biotech, computer software, and financial services, as well as at several top teaching hospitals in Boston. At Harvard University, she teaches leadership programs for administrators across all campuses. In addition, she has taught workshops for attorneys in a variety of practice areas – corporate, intellectual property, litigation, and family law – in the US and Europe.
Timothy O'Brien
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy Schoo
Tim O’Brien is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where he teaches Exercising Leadership and Developing People in degree programs and chairs the Leadership for the 21st Century and Art & Practice of Leadership Development executive programs. Tim designs and delivers leadership development programs for government, business, and non-profit organizations across the globe. His research interests focus on the complex challenges people hope to address, the understanding they bring, and the meaning-making they need to address those challenges. This lens on leadership development emphasizes self, group, and organizational awareness over content and discrete skills. How to develop and cultivate that self-awareness is the primary concern of Tim’s research. His teaching methods are experiential, collaborative, and reflective in nature and help participants develop the insight, inquiry, and purpose they need to meet the demands of the challenges they face.
Brian Mandell
Mohamed Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS); Director, HKS Negotiation Project; Faculty Associate, Center for Public Leadership, HKS; Vice Chair for Executive Education for the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
Professor Mandell is a preeminent teacher and curriculum designer at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he leads an innovative, intensive annual workshop course on advanced multiparty negotiation and conflict resolution.
He refined his case teaching methods in international affairs as a Pew Faculty Fellow and subsequently trained faculty from across the United States in case-method pedagogy with a special emphasis on teaching and writing cases for international security studies.
Bonus Day Faculty
Julia A. Minson
Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School
is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), where she is affiliated with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; the Center for Public Leadership; and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. She teaches offerings in negotiation and decision-making through both HKS Executive Education, and as part of the Management, Leadership and Decision Science Certificate.
Minson’s research focuses on the nature of disagreement around delicate identity topics such as politics, decision-making in the workplace, and personal lifestyle choices. Her work specifically aims to help people be more receptive to opposing views through simple and actionable interventions. She also studies the psychological biases in group decisionmaking and the factors that prevent people in positions of power from reaping the benefits of collaboration.
Additionally, she leads the HKS Conflict Management and Depolarization speaker series.