Negotiation Skills Training: Define Your Negotiation Style

How would you characterize your negotiation style: Are you collaborative, competitive, or compromising? During any professional negotiation skills training, you’re likely to find out your negotiating style when setting goals and revealing your negotiating personality.

But if you have trouble answering that question, you’re probably not alone.

That’s because skilled negotiators typically take on all these styles during a negotiation:

• They listen closely and collaborate to create value.
• They compete for the biggest slice of the pie.
• They make compromises when necessary.

Putting labels on negotiation style can be a mistake in negotiation skills training, writes Marquette University Law School professor Andrea Kupfer Schneider in an article for the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy.

Schneider notes that when teaching negotiation in the past, she would educate her law school students on the most common negotiation styles, debate their merits, and then urge the students to build their negotiation skills so that they could draw on various styles as a negotiation unfolds.

By contrast, these days, Schneider introduces students first to the negotiating skills that support the various negotiation styles rather than debating the effectiveness of these styles.

Rather than beginning by teaching negotiation students about various styles, negotiation instructors should encourage them to cultivate five specific skills, writes Schneider.

• Assertiveness
• Empathy
• Flexibility
• Social skills, or intuition
• Ethics

Adult professionals learn better by talking first about experiences and skills, and then focusing on framework or style selection, writes Schneider.

Labeling negotiating styles – such as distributive, integrative, problem-solving, conciliatory, and so on – can help us learn general differences in how people view negotiations and behave during them, she adds.

Labels also help negotiating researchers organize their thoughts around a shared language.

On the downside, however, labeling negotiation styles can be confusing in negotiation skills training, according to Schneider.

A student who is taught that an integrative (or value-creating or collaborative) negotiating style is superior to a distributive (or value-claiming or competitive) negotiating style may have a hard time understanding why both value creation and value-claiming behaviors are helpful in negotiation.

In addition, the labels that describe various negotiation styles don’t map neatly onto the negotiation skills.

A highly competitive negotiator may belie the stereotype of this style by having a friendly demeanor and a strong sense of fairness. Moreover, many of the negotiation skills that are commonly taught in the classroom, such as researching criteria to back up fairness claims, can be used in both competitive situations and collaborative ones.

Have you defined your negotiation style yet? Let us know how negotiation skills training has helped you in the comments.

Originally published in Negotiation Briefings 2013.