Two Essential Elements Of An Effective In-House Negotiation Training Initiative


You should think about negotiation as an organisational capability. A familiar error made by businesses is to only think about the development of the negotiation skills of individuals. If your business relies solely on the negotiation skills of individuals it means that you will always be exposed to the risks associated when people move. What happens when your star negotiator is advanced or decides to join up with your competitor or supplier?

Your business' ability to negotiate successfully is dependent on four factors:

* The negotiation strategy (or absence thereof)

* The negotiation process

* The negotiation skills of individuals

* The negotiation supporting network

Enhancing an individual's negotiation skills is clearly an important element in developing the negotiation capability, but a mistake is easily made by focusing on negotiation skills training without having considered the 2 steps that should head negotiation skills enhancement; an organisational negotiation strategy definition and an organisational negotiation process design or redesign.

Investing in a negotiation skills development program without having considered the negotiation strategy & supporting process can be compared to focusing on the training of troops for war independent of the general strategy for the war.

The 2nd oversight is that companies will focus on the development of the negotiation skills of individuals but will then not develop a supporting environment for enhancement of these skills. Using the war analogy, this would be like training soldiers how to use their weapons and then not providing them with the ammunition and materials needed to keep the weapons serviceable in action.

If you are contemplating investing in a negotiation skills development initiative and you are not prepared to:

* define or refine a negotiation strategy,

* develop or redesign the negotiation process, and

* create a best practice negotiation supporting network

I would like to propose that you focus your money elsewhere as you are likely to receive a better return on your investment!

Another tips is to ensure that your negotiation training program includes individual negotiation preference profiling.

An individual's negotiation capability is made up of 3 element:

* Their competence (that which they are able to do)

* Their preferences (that which they prefer to do)

* Their behaviour (that which they in reality do)

Contrary to popular certainty, the biggest influencing factor on your negotiation behaviour is not your competence but your preferences. Think about it, if your capability to do something was dependent on your competence to do it, then nobody would smoke, we would all eat five fruits and vegetables daily and we would all exercise on a regular basis.

The simple truth is that you have a habit to behave in negotiation (as in life) according to your preferences. You could therefore convincingly say that your preferences in life have a much bigger impact on your behaviour than your competencies. It is also one of the biggest errors made by companies in recruitment and negotiation assessments, is to check the competence of people without attaining an understanding of their preferences.

In other words, the fact that you are able to do something doesn't necessarily mean that are actually going to do it. In the context of negotiation skills development, this means that it is essential that each person understands their own preferences with regards their approach to negotiations in addition to their competencies and equally, that they are made conscious of the fact that different individuals and different cultures will have varying preferences when it comes to negotiations.

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