Beyond the Back Table February 2025 Program Guide

Claim your free copy from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Go Beyond the Back Table
In this two-day online course, you will step back to look beyond the negotiating table and discover how to understand and manage the individuals and groups who are not at the table, but who have a significant impact on the outcome of your negotiation, on your side and the other side.

When you think of negotiation, you may picture two parties across the table from one another. But the truth is far more complex. Most negotiations also involve internal and external stakeholders, and feature “back table” negotiations on either side that require all parties to manage complicated relationships and build consensus.

Discover the keys to “getting to yes” with all your negotiation stakeholders
Developed by the experts at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Beyond the Back Table will help you gain the strategies you need to be highly effective at the negotiating table —and behind it. With the skills you learn, you’ll be well prepared to “get to yes” with your colleagues, your organization, and your negotiation counterparts. This highly interactive, two-day online course, will equip you to:

• Become a highly effective consensus-builder within your organization.
• Actively manage the expectations of one’s own backtable by continuously integrating internal and external negotiations.
• Diagnose how cultural differences can be reframed as opportunities rather than barriers.
• Build winning coalitions to generate buy in and drive deals that create value.
• Overcome blocking coalitions and spoilers.
• Learn how to better understand the other parties’ internal process.
• Apply key insights from great negotiators on how to best mobilize and orchestrate a complex multiparty negotiation and confront
• holdouts and spoilers.
• Learn how to craft innovative agreements that successfully capture stakeholders competing interests.

Learn powerful strategies that get results
Led by Brian Mandell, Beyond the Back Table blends dynamic video-based lessons, breakout discussion groups, case studies, and realistic negotiation simulations to help you develop the skills to lead at the negotiating table and beyond.