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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5 Common Negotiation Mistakes and How You Can Avoid Them

Katie Shonk   •  08/10/2023   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

negotiation mistakes

Sometimes our negotiation mistakes are glaring: We accidentally reveal our bottom line, criticize the other party when patience was warranted, or get our numbers mixed up. More often, though, our negotiation mistakes are invisible: We get a perfectly good deal but are unaware that we could have gotten a better one if we hadn’t succumbed … Learn More About This Program

How Emotions Affect Negotiations

PON Staff   •  08/07/2023   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

joint gain

Emotions play a critical but little-understood role in negotiation. Strong emotions such as anger can derail negotiations, yet keeping emotions under wraps can lead to misunderstandings and impasse. Increasingly, researchers are looking more closely at how emotions affect negotiations. The results of two studies offer lessons related to the impact of emotions in negotiation. … Read How Emotions Affect Negotiations

5 Good Negotiation Techniques

Katie Shonk   •  08/07/2023   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

negotiation techniques

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

Successful Team Building Strategies Can Help Pull Off Big Negotiations

PON Staff   •  03/14/2023   •  Filed in Negotiation Skills

successful team building strategies

Sometimes our negotiations to achieve a desired dream take months. Sometimes they take years. The dream of building a museum of African American history on Washington, D.C.’s, National Mall endured over 100 years, ramped up in the past 15, and culminated with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on … Learn More About This Program

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