Management & Strategy Classes

>> Managerial Negotiation Program

Negotiation is an essential skill for managers both on and off the job. It is the process of gaining commitment to a course of action. It's hard to get anything accomplished if others don't agree to what the manager is trying to achieve. So everyone needs to learn how to negotiate effectively.

This program covers the spectrum of situations in which a manager must negotiate effectively: between buyers and sellers, within a group of managers, between two groups, and between bosses and subordinates. The learning is focused on business situations, but is equally applicable to situations outside of business—government, non-profit agencies, and within the family.

Most people who have attended a negotiation program in the past would benefit greatly from this offering. Most negotiation programs focus on transactions with strangers—one-shot deals in which one’s success is judged by how much you gained in the contest of skills, and how much better off you are than if you had walked away. This portrays the world of the trader, not the manager. In management, you seldom deal with strangers, you’re not involved in a series of contests, and walking away from a settlement you don’t like is rarely an option. This program focuses on how to craft agreements when the ongoing relationship matters.

The program is largely experiential, which means that participants "learn by doing" rather than by sitting and listening. They are put in a series of simulated situations and allowed to experiment with different ways of approaching the situation. Then we talk about what worked well and what could be improved, each time supplying a conceptual framework that illuminates the key factors in negotiation success. This is a fun way to learn.

The program is taught by Professor Leonard Greenhalgh, who has more than 25 years of experience in teaching this topic at the Tuck School, Stanford University, and MIT, as well as at many major corporations (sees the appended brief biography). He is the author of Managing Strategic Relationships, published by the Free Press in 2001.

An example program’s content and sequence of sessions follows.

MANAGERIAL NEGOTIATION PROGRAM

A SUMMARY OF THE PROGRAM CONTENT

The program covers the following topics:

I. Increasing Managerial Effectiveness when Negotiating

• Creating the right relationships
• Choosing the appropriate interaction process
• Learning the important steps in negotiation
• Making the other negotiator satisfied
• Understanding and allowing for cultural differences

II. Negotiation as a Basic Business Process

• Tactics for achieving strategic consensus
• Building commitment to business decisions
• Effective negotiations within groups
• Benefiting from others' knowledge and experience
• Tactics that cause managerial problems

III. The Emotional Experience of Negotiation

• Avoiding conflict escalation
• Understanding what the other negotiator is experiencing
• Diagnosing the causes of deadlocks in negotiation
• How the mediation process works
• The importance of healing strained relationships

IV. Negotiation Between Business Organizations

• How teams should negotiate with other teams
• Maintaining sight of the negotiation objective
• Avoiding destructive competition
• The difficulty of communicating accurately
• The challenge of maintaining trust
  

MANAGERIAL NEGOTIATION PROGRAM

SEQUENCE OF LEARNING EXPERIENCES

DAY ONE

Session 1: Negotiating as a Principal or Agent

• The effect of relationships on negotiating success
• Helpful and harmful forms of competition
• Alternative allocation mechanisms: Auctions and private sales
• The impact of successful negotiation on managerial effectiveness

• A seven-step model for effective negotiation
• The influence of tactics on ongoing relationships
• Creating negotiated solutions that are easy to implement
• Cultural differences in approach to negotiation

• How negotiations become deadlocked
• The links between issues, meanings, and emotions
• A diagnostic model for analyzing deadlocks
• Avoiding conflict escalation

• Communicating effectively when negotiating
• Dealing with power differences
• Negotiation ethics

DAY TWO

Session 5: Strategic Decision-Making as a Negotiation Process

• Tactics for achieving strategic consensus
• Building commitment to a course of action
• Effective negotiation within groups
• Achieving inclusiveness through coalitions

• Negotiation between teams
• Development of trust and rapport
• Avoiding destructive competition
• The negotiator’s role within the company