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.

negotiation topics

What are Negotiation Topics?

Studying different negotiation topics helps us prepare for the sometimes unpredictable nature of real-life bargaining and negotiation situations.

From business bargaining to tough conversations to sensitive and controversial issues, studying and reviewing a variety of negotiation topics can help us prepare for the issues that may come up at any point in a negotiation. 

For example, though it’s usually beneficial to discuss all relevant issues simultaneously, there are times when quarantining a particularly controversial issue will allow you to make headway—and build trust—on more manageable matters.

Other negotiation topics may trigger your own assumptions and behaviors that can help create and perpetuate negotiation dynamics you desperately want to avoid. In almost all negotiations, however, the issue of fairness is involved. 

Bargaining research has identified three fairness norms that negotiators frequently invoke: equality, equity, and need. Harvard Business School and Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School professor Max Bazerman has found that professional arbitrators relied on a fourth fairness norm: maintaining the status quo. 

Many organizations resolve conflict by resisting radical change. Your annual raise, for instance, is probably a percentage increase from last year’s salary—the status quo. What if last year’s salary wasn’t fair to begin with? Then the organization has simply institutionalized a past inequity.

In negotiations, you should strive to bring fairness considerations to the surface, so that everyone will understand one another’s needs and wants.

Learn how you can build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download 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.

We will send you a download link to your copy of this free report and notify you by email when we post new information on our website about how to handle conflict management.

The following items are tagged negotiation topics:

5 Good Negotiation Techniques

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

You’ve mastered the basics of good negotiation techniques: you prepare thoroughly, take time to build rapport, make the first offer when you have a strong sense of the bargaining range, and search for wise tradeoffs across issues to create value. Now, it’s time to absorb five lesser-known but similarly effective negotiation topics and techniques that … Read 5 Good Negotiation Techniques

In Business Negotiations, Dress the Part

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Negotiators involved in high-stakes mergers and acquisitions typically come to the table armored in meticulously tailored apparel and designer shoes. But as Dana Mattioli reports in a recent Wall Street Journal negotiation topics in business article, those who are trying to woo business from an apparel company often end up dressing down at the bargaining … Read In Business Negotiations, Dress the Part

Negotiation Topics in Business: Make a Bump Plan

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Regrouping from the cancellation of the 2004–2005 season due to failed labor negotiations, National Hockey League (NHL) teams and players faced the challenge of radically restructuring their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in July 2005. The new CBA instituted a uniform cap (as well as a floor) on team payrolls. It also set maximums and minimums … Read Negotiation Topics in Business: Make a Bump Plan