Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
THREE-DAY PROGRAM | October 20–22, 2025
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 | October 23, 2025
Negotiating in Uncertain Times: Turning Disruption
into Opportunity
Three-day Program Agenda:
Negotiation and Leadership: Dealing with Difficult People and Problems
DAY 1: Monday, October 20, 2025
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, October 21, 2025
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, October 22, 2025
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 in Uncertain Times: Turning Disruption into Opportunity
Thursday, October 23, 2025, 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET
This one-day program is designed for individuals who are responsible for leading negotiations on behalf of their organization and want to be proactive in turning disruption and uncertainty into opportunities.
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.
James Sebenius
Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Vice Chair for Practice-Focused Research, Program on Negotiation Executive Committee; Chair, Great Negotiator Award Committee; Director, Harvard Negotiation Project; Co-Director, American Secretaries of State Program
An authority on complex negotiations, James Sebenius has advanced the field in the academic realm, in the public and diplomatic sectors, and the business world; outside Harvard, he has worked full-time in the U.S. Commerce and State Departments as well as at the Blackstone Group.
At the Harvard Business School, Sebenius spearheaded the effort to make negotiation a required course in the M.B.A. program, and he created the negotiation department, which he led for several years. As a co-founder of Lax Sebenius LLC, he provides negotiation advisory services to corporations and governments worldwide.
Daniel L. Shapiro
Associate Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital; Director, Harvard International Negotiation Program; Associate Director, Harvard Negotiation Project Professor
Shapiro’s pioneering research focuses on how to address the emotional and identity-based dimensions of negotiation and conflict resolution. He is author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable and Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate (with R. Fisher). He has published extensively in the research literature, developing innovative psychological models to conceptualize the affective and relational factors driving conflict and its resolution.
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.
Debbie Goldstein
Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School; Lecturer on Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Managing Partner, Triad Consulting
Debbie Goldstein has extensive experience in both the private and academic sectors. She is a lecturer at both Harvard Law School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a lecturer at Tufts University School of Medicine. Goldstein also shares her expertise with executives through the Harvard Negotiation Institute.
She is also the principal and managing director of Triad Consulting, a consulting firm specializing in the field of conflict resolution. Her clients range from private equity firms to teaching hospitals and from large banks to public and independent schools. Her work often takes her internationally: to Dubai, where she worked with government leaders; to Ethiopia, where she worked with newly elected members of Parliament; and to Cyprus, where she taught public policy students from across the globe. In the public sector, she helped found and run LINC (Legal Initiative for Children), a free legal aid clinic to improve health care for low-income families.
Robert Wilkinson
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Leadership, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Robert Wilkinson teaches graduate courses on negotiation and leadership effectiveness. In 2023, he won the Harvard Kennedy School Carballo Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has more than 30 years of experience, in over 50 countries, across the public, private and not-profit sectors. He supports numerous organizations of all kinds to help them increase their overall effectiveness.
Rob's non-profit and public sector clients include the United Nations, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), US Postal Service, Oxfam, CARE International, and several others. Corporate clients include IBM, Deloitte, Merck, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, Walmart and many others. Since 2011, Rob has regularly consulted for the White House, supporting the Leadership Development Team within the White House Presidential Personnel Office.
Previously, Rob worked overseas for 15 years, on a variety of international projects. This included spending three years in Rwanda working with Hutu and Tutsi communities, two years working with the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Angola, and 18 months in Laos, consulting on a variety of community development programs.
Rob also led a 2-year Security Sector Reform project in Burundi, bringing together government and rebel forces to support the formation of a unified military and police force. He began his overseas work in Nicaragua, in both Sandinista and Contra areas. In 2007, he won a Governors' Service Award (from the Governor of Massachusetts) for leadership in delivery of development aid operations.
Rob earned his Masters of Science (MS) from Stanford University, and Bachelors of Science (BS) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His recent publications provide a new Leadership Development Framework, called the 4P Framework for Strategic Leadership
Bonus Day Faculty
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.
Tim McDonald
Policy Researcher, RAND; Visiting Researcher, Program on Negotiation
Tim McDonald is a policy researcher at RAND, where he co-directs its Systems Transitions Applied Research (STAR) Initiative, and is a visiting researcher at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He leads research in social and economic policy and national security strategy, and advises leaders managing complex, high-stakes challenges under high uncertainty. Tim holds a PhD from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Hamline University.