Let’s take a look back at the 2008 US presidential election and the win-win coalition forged between Barack Obama and his then-rival, Hillary Clinton. As this example demonstrates, if carefully managed, disagreements and diplomatic negotiations can lead to better results than you might expect.
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Learn how to negotiate like a diplomat, think on your feet like an improv performer, and master job offer negotiation like a professional athlete when you download a copy of our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
negotiating skills and negotiation tactics
What are Negotiating Skills and Negotiation Tactics?
Learning the negotiating skills and negotiation tactics that go behind effective bargaining can help achieve a negotiator’s goals at the bargaining table
The right negotiating skills and negotiation tactics can help with everything from dispute resolution to crisis management to making ordinary business deals.
In fact, some negotiating skills and negotiation tactics come into play before you even get to the table. Well before they sit down, negotiators typically make a number of decisions, small and large, that can have a dramatic effect on how their talks unfold. One of the most important questions to ask is whom you should be negotiating with to meet your goals.
Once you’re at the table, some of the most important negotiating skills and negotiation tactics you can embrace are around value creation. To do this, you have to establish a relationship with your counterpart and through this discover the zone of possible agreement with her (ZOPA). When you know the areas of agreement where you and your counterpart are in alignment (and those areas on which you diverge), a skilled negotiator can craft an agreement that most closely approximates her own and her counterpart’s needs while building a bargaining relationship with her counterpart.
Rather than antagonistic, the negotiation process becomes a value-creating, integrative situation in which each side gets a “fair share” of the pool of resources.
Learn more negotiating skills and negotiation tactics, and discover how to handle complicated, high-level business negotiations in this free special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
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The following items are tagged negotiating skills and negotiation tactics:
Advanced Negotiation Strategies and Concepts: Hostage Negotiation Tips for Business Negotiators
Upset by a delay in the delivery of one of your products, a longtime buyer threatens to turn to the media unless you meet his extreme demands. Not only is the relationship in jeopardy, but your company’s reputation seems to be as well. What should you do? Turn to some tried and true hostage negotiation … Read More
Challenges Facing Women Negotiators
On the average, women often obtain less favorable or advantageous outcomes at the bargaining table when compared with their male counterparts.
… Read Challenges Facing Women Negotiators
Emotional Intelligence as a Negotiating Skill
The concept of emotional intelligence burst into the cultural imagination in 1995 with the publication of psychologist Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book of the same name. Experts have predicted that scoring high on this personality trait would boost one’s bargaining outcomes and have found many successful negotiation examples using emotional intelligence in their research.
… Read Emotional Intelligence as a Negotiating Skill
Negotiating Skills: Learn How to Build Trust at the Negotiation Table
In this article some negotiating skills and negotiation tactics for building trust with your counterpart are presented.
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3-D Negotiation Strategy
Here are some negotiating skills and negotiation tactics from 3-D negotiation by James Sebenius and David Lax.
… Read 3-D Negotiation Strategy
Crisis Negotiation Skills: The Hostage Negotiator’s Drill
Here are some negotiating skills from the world of crisis negotiations: Hostage negotiators stress the importance of discussing the “drill”—goals, ground rules, and operating principles—with their team before beginning talks with a hostage taker.
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Setting Standards in Negotiations
As the starting point from which all commercial transactions occur, from purchasing equipment to setting salaries, negotiatiosn in business is an essential skill no matter what field a negotiator finds herself. Using an objective standard can strengthen your proposal and eliminate emotional bias.
… Read Setting Standards in Negotiations
10 Popular Business Negotiation Articles
Here are ten popular business negotiation articles on the Program on Negotiation website. Drawn from a variety of negotiation case studies as well as negotiation research, the following articles offer strategies for engaging in integrative negotiations aimed at creating win-win scenarios for each party at the negotiation table.
… Read 10 Popular Business Negotiation Articles
Dispute Resolution on Facebook: Using a Negotiation Approach to Resolve a Conflict
For several years, Facebook has been working with social scientists to bring traditional methods of dispute resolution to cyberspace. The site has begun to offer users tools to resolve disputes with one another over offensive or upsetting posts, including insults and photos.
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Negotiation Training: What’s Special About Technology Negotiations?
Executives are increasingly faced with the task of negotiating in a realm that many know little about: technology.
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Negotiated Agreements: Why You Should Limit Your Options
A process of finding your counterparts interests and reconciling them with your own. But what if you or your counterpart presents a myriad of options and offers at the negotiation table?
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How to Resolve Cultural Conflict: Overcoming Cultural Barriers at the Negotiation Table
After recently losing an important deal in India, a business negotiator learned that her counterpart felt as if she had been rushing through the talks. The business negotiator thought she was being efficient with their time. In this useful cross-cultural conflict negotiation example, how should this negotiator improve her negotiation skills?
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Patience is a Winning Negotiation Skill for Getting What You Want at the Negotiation Table
On April 9, 2012 the hearts of internet entrepreneurs everywhere must have skipped a beat at the news that Facebook was paying $1 billion in cash and stock to buy Instagram, a San Francisco-based start-up.
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Win-Win Negotiation Strategies for Rebuilding a Relationship
When negotiators come together after a period of mutual mistrust, it can be difficult for each side to reconcile their grievances with the other. Here are some strategies that others have used to bring bargaining counterparts together even after a long, contentious period of silence.
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Six Strategies for Creating Value at the Negotiation Table
In today’s market, consumers are often the more powerful parties in negotiations with sellers.
To claim the most value in your next haggling experience, use the following six negotiation strategies.
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Building Coalitions: Apple and the Art of Persuasion
Whether you have one of its ubiquitous products or even its rivals offerings, you most certainly have heard of Apple, the United States electronics giant whose phoenix-like rise to the top of the business world has inspired legions of fans and detractors alike.
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How to Overcome Cultural Barriers in Negotiation
Imagine that you’re the American representative of a U.S. food company, and you’re hoping to procure a new ingredient for several of your products from a German company. A representative from the company is flying in to meet with you. Do you expect your German counterpart to behave differently than the Americans you typically deal … Read How to Overcome Cultural Barriers in Negotiation
Test Your Negotiation Decision-Making Ability
A negotiation research study using distributive negotiation examples sheds interesting light on decision-making capabilities, intelligence, and “intuition.”
… Read Test Your Negotiation Decision-Making Ability
Employee Grievances: Are Most Legal Disputes Resolved in Litigation or Arbitration?
A common question asked is, “If most legal disputes are resolved in litigation, is there room for arbitration or mediation?”
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Negotiation in Business: Ignore Sunk Costs
Think about what your house, condominium, or some other valuable asset might be worth in today’s market. Did the price you paid for it affect your answer?
… Read Negotiation in Business: Ignore Sunk Costs
Body Language in the Negotiation Process and the Impact of Gender at the Bargaining Table
How important is body language in the negotiation process? Negotiators are often advised to engage in small talk before getting down to business.
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Using Negotiation Games to Develop Skills for Commercial Dispute Resolution
Teach your students the art of negotiating for success with these great negotiation games.
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How to Find the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) Between Friends
Finding the zone of possible agreement in negotiations can be difficult, especially when dealing with friends and family. We all know people who have “alligator arms.” When the restaurant check comes, they can’t manage to reach their wallets, or they quibble that they had the small tomato juice, and you had the large.
… Read More
What is Dispute Resolution in Law: The Ins and Outs of Arbitration
A “one-shot” form of dispute resolution, arbitration is usually faster and cheaper than litigation. In addition, rather than being assigned a judge, parties are able to select their arbitrator.
What is dispute resolution in law and how do alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods like arbitration operate inside and outside a courtroom? Here are some examples of … Read More
How a Bad BATNA Keeps Medicare Drug Prices High
It’s Negotiation 101: to get what you want, you need to be able to make a credible threat to walk away from a subpar deal. And for your threat to be credible, you can’t walk in with a bad BATNA, you have to have a strong BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In … Read How a Bad BATNA Keeps Medicare Drug Prices High
MESO Negotiation: Learn from a Seller’s Market
What negotiating skills can negotiators take away from hyper competitive bargaining situations? With home sales heating up (again) in some parts of the United States, homebuyers are facing competition they haven’t seen since before the real-estate bubble burst back in 2008, and it’s showing up in the form of packed open houses, multiple bids above … Read MESO Negotiation: Learn from a Seller’s Market
Top Business Negotiations: Michael Bloomberg versus the New York Teachers’ Union
Business negotiators seeking to resolve a dispute should foster a cooperative spirit, framing negotiations around gains rather than losses. And when negotiators are far apart, it may take a professional mediator or other independent party to help bridge the divide.
… Read More
Negotiating Skills and Negotiation Tactics – Body Language in the Negotiation Process: Confront Your Anxiety, Improve Your Results
Body language, and how to monitor and interpret it, is a negotiating skill and negotiation tactic every effective negotiator should add to her skillset according to negotiation research.
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Projecting Power at the Negotiation Table
Projecting power at the negotiation table is one tactic bargainers can employ to obtain their objectives in bargaining scenarios. In this article we examine Amy Cuddy’s research with regards to power, body language, and the impact they have on your negotiating skills and negotiation tactics.
… Read Projecting Power at the Negotiation Table
Conflict Management Training and Negotiation Research: How Nervous Energy Affects Negotiation Scenarios and Attempts at Conflict Resolution
Negotiation is often characterized as a physiologically arousing event marked by pounding hearts, queasy stomachs, and flushed faces. We might assume that heightened physiological arousal would mar our negotiation performance, but this is only true for some, researchers Ashley D. Brown and Jared R. Curhan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a new … Read More
Contingency Agreement: The Risks and Pitfalls of Issuing Drafts
A draft agreement may allow you to control the early stages of talks, but be aware that it also can obstruct agreement in the long run. Putting a draft on the table may lock parties into bargaining positions prematurely, interfering with a search for common interests and creative options.
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How to Avoid Intercultural Barriers: A Better Negotiation Map
How often have you heard that, when entering a negotiation, you should get your allies onboard first? Conventional wisdom, but not always the best advice. When the United States sought to build a global anti-Iraq coalition following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, for instance, Israel appeared to be its strongest regional ally.
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With Patient Approach, FBI Steered Oregon Occupiers Toward Their BATNA
The 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon ended on February 11 when the last occupiers surrendered. Federal authorities in six states also arrested seven others accused of being involved in the occupation, according to the Associated Press. The standoff had begun when Ammon Bundy and his followers took over the … Read More
The Program on Negotiation’s Top Ten International Negotiations Posts
Whether dealing with difficult or hard bargainers like Putin or forging business partnerships, international negotiations are fraught with a level of complexity rarely encountered in everyday negotiations. Here are the top ten international negotiation articles on the Program on Negotiation’s website.
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Negotiating Skills and Negotiation Tactics: Damage Control in Conflict Resolution
Framing in negotiation, and the negotiating skills and negotiation tactics that go behind effective bargaining, can help not only achieve a negotiator’s goals at the bargaining table, but also can anticipate the fallout or kickback received from parties away from the negotiation table. President Obama’s tax-cut negotiations with Senate Republicans in late 2010 offer cautionary … Read More
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Articles & Insights
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- Business Negotiations
- How to Respond to Questions in Negotiation
- Negotiation Skills in Business Negotiation and Status Consciousness
- The Importance of Negotiation in Business and Your Career
- In the Negotiation Planning Process, to Capture the Force, be Patient
- Negotiation Advice for Buying a Car: Tips for Improving Your Negotiating Position
- Conflict Resolution
- Conflict Resolution Success Stories: A Surprising Tale from Congress
- Case Study of Conflict Management: To Resolve Disputes and Manage Conflicts, Assume a Neutral 3rd Party Role
- Pros and Cons of Email Communication
- 3 Types of Conflict and How to Address Them
- What is Conflict Resolution, and How Does It Work?
- Crisis Negotiations
- Dealing with Difficult People
- Dealmaking
- Dispute Resolution
- How to Negotiate with Friends and Family
- Cultural Barriers and Conflict Negotiation Strategies: Apple’s Apology in China
- What is Dispute System Design?
- Settling Out of Court: Negotiating in the Shadow of the Law
- What are the Three Basic Types of Dispute Resolution? What to Know About Mediation, Arbitration, and Litigation
- International Negotiation
- Political Negotiation: Negotiating with Bureaucrats
- International Arbitration: What it is and How it Works
- Diplomatic Negotiations: The Surprising Benefits of Conflict and Teamwork at the Negotiation Table
- The Importance of Relationship Building in China
- Overcoming Cultural Barriers in Negotiations and the Importance of Communication in International Business Deals
- Leadership Skills
- Dear Negotiation Coach: Do Leading Negotiation Experts Practice What they Preach?
- Leadership and Decision-Making: Empowering Better Decisions
- How Collaborative Leadership Helped Former Competitors Profit
- Directive Leadership: When It Does—and Doesn’t—Work
- Counteracting Negotiation Biases Like Race and Gender in the Workplace
- Mediation
- Negotiation Skills
- Negotiation Training
- Salary Negotiations
- Teaching Negotiation
- Labor Relations: Negotiating Collective Bargaining Agreements
- Teach Your Students to Take Their Mediation Skills to the Next Level
- Asynchronous Learning: Negotiation Exercises to Keep Students Engaged Outside the Classroom
- Negotiation Journal Now Open Access, New Issue Just Released!
- Teaching the Fundamentals: The Best Introductory Negotiation Role Play Simulations
- Win-Win Negotiations