Business Communication. Sharpen your communication skills.

This negotiation skills course is designed to help you power up your negotiation skills. Learning negotiation skills is a smart career move. Managers, consultants, service providers and salespeople can all benefit from becoming better negotiators. Explore four principles of win/win negotiation. Hear how to plan and structure a negotiation – whether you’re negotiating individually or as a team. See the tactics professional negotiators use to get positive results from negotiations. Try out a range of negotiation tools, so you can become a confident and assertive negotiator.

Aims

Becoming a confident negotiator can help you drive business success, resolve conflicts and get more of what you want in life. The techniques covered in this course can be used to:

• prevent other people dominating your negotiations
• keep your negotiations on track, so you get results which work for you
• prevent relationships being damaged by conflicts and disagreements
• build respectful, positive relationships
• eliminate any ‘bad habits’ which undermine your success as a negotiator
• become the most confident and successful negotiator you can be.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• decide which approach to take when negotiating in a range of contexts
• use the ‘principle based’ negotiation model
• plan your approach to a negotiation
• map all parties’ needs and concerns during a negotiation
• develop options and outcomes using win/win principles
• handle the ‘people’ side of negotiation
• respond to problematic situations which occur during negotiations.

Content

Introduction to negotiation

Explore the principles of win/win negotiation and how they can be used to create positive negotiation outcomes. Hear how four key principles can be used in everyday negotiation situations. Learn how to decide whether to take a distributive or integrative approach to a specific negotiation.

Planning your negotiation

Learn how to plan your negotiation using three key concepts – BATNA, WATNA and ZOPA. Create a negotiation map in order to assess the situation in which you are negotiating.

Exploring needs and concerns

Hear why understanding needs and concerns is a key step in any negotiation. See two key skills– questioning and active listening- being used by professional negotiators. Try out these techniques for yourself. Use a questioning template to lead a conversation about needs and concerns.

Creating win/win options

Discuss how creating win/win options increases your influence as a negotiator. See how to draw an ‘option generator’ in order to manage conflicting needs and concerns. Try out win/win problem solving tools.

Handling the people side of negotiation

All good negotiation skills course covers the people side of negotiation. After all, people problems can get in the way of solving issues-based problems. Explore ways of handling others’ emotions and keeping your own emotions resourceful during negotiation. Hear how to handle difficult behaviours which can block your efforts to find fair solutions during negotiation and conflict resolution sessions.

How to put your learning to use

The practical focus of this course means that you use what you learn immediately. Negotiation skills can be used in business to agree on terms of employment (including your salary), sort out team conflicts, develop commercial contracts and set the price for goods and services. In your personal life, you can use the skills learned in this negotiation skills course to make major purchases, find fair solutions to family conflicts and handle neighbourhood disputes.

Intended audience

Suitable for all managers, team leaders, supervisors and individuals wishing to enhance their negotiation skills.

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Delivery style

Delivered as an interactive workshop. It covers the why, what and how of negotiating in professional contexts and will be delivered through a variety of methods including:

• small group discussions
• role plays or simulations
• written exercises in which you will apply key concepts
• Q&A sessions with the trainer.

You will get the most from this course if you are:

• willing to contribute to group discussions
• confident communicating verbally in small groups
• comfortable participating in role play style activities.

Materials

Course notes are provided electronically using Dropbox.