Negotiation
Units: 6
Welcome to Negotiation. The same basic communication and cognitive skills that got you where you are today - advancing toward your personal and professional goals - are the ones you need to negotiate effectively. Negotiation is not based on simple intuition. Instead, negotiation is rooted in understanding people, process, perception and presentation and learning how to establish collaborative negotiations that create value for you and your counterpart. This course is designed to dispel the common and pervasive belief that people are either good or bad at negotiation and little can be done about it. Some of this stems from the thought that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Together, we will work to give you the confidence to build your own reputation and style as a negotiator and to strengthen your practice through rehearsal, roleplay, discussion and debate. You will learn critical frameworks and bargaining tactics to build alliances, strengthen interpersonal dynamics, disarm hostility, balance competing interests and resolve conflicts of all kinds. You will learn to become an effective negotiator in the workplace and to use trust-based influence to empower colleagues, partners and negotiation counterparts regardless of differences in age, experience, seniority, race and/or gender.
Course Objectives
Negotiation is the process by which two or more parties with interdependent interests secure agreements. This course is designed to cover the range of negotiation situations and issues faced by managers and decision makers. This course explores negotiations in many contexts; simple personal transactions, public and private sector collective bargaining, resolving disputes out of court, resolving conflicting interests within an organization, and resolving conflicting interests across organizations.
As a basis across our course of study, we will work to achieve goals through collaboration and the use of tactical empathy to produce trust-based influence. This approach is rooted in Information-Based Bargaining and will focus primarily on: (1) proactive planning and preparation (2) careful listening to the other side's wants, needs, priorities and timing and (3) thoughtful attention to the 'signals' our negotiation partners send through their conduct at the bargaining table.
Through class discussion and case-study deliberation, roleplay exercises and lecture, our three learning objectives are as follows:
Learn to identify, understand and appreciate your unique and individual negotiating style and approach. Learn to identify, adapt to and/or collaborate with competing bargaining styles.
Gain the ability to analyze negotiation environments, including identifying key negotiation features and parameters, and;
Learn to apply critical communication skills and techniques in a manner called trust-based influence.
No pre-requisites are required for this course.