Negotiate
Negotiation often has a negative connotation. That's for car salesmen. Clap hand. If you look at it a little more nuanced, you may realize that you're negotiating all day. With colleagues, business partners, team members, your manager, your employees, your partner, your family and even with your friends.
Definition of Negotiation
By negotiation we mean: communication between two or more parties with the intention of influencing/convincing each other.
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If you look at it in a little more detail you can say that it is very often about creating and distributing value, where the benefits and burdens have to be shared and where it is an extra challenge when there is short and long term value and the it is often not certain whether the value can be achieved.
You probably recognize that it is now important to sharpen your negotiation techniques because we want to work together in a VUCA environment and often have to work:
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It is Volatile : markets are under pressure, political decisions are felt quickly, we have become a large open market. It is almost impossible to make long-term plans; in any case, you have to readjust them after a few months.
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It's Uncertain : It's uncertain. As a result, you often do not know how your project / collaboration is affected by the volatility around you. Markets, but also yourself, experience more uncertainty with which you have to deal, and the question is whether and how you can deal with this.
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It is Complex : The complexity you experience can often be unraveled in relational complexity: there are often many parties involved in the activities you undertake, people at the table influence each other, games are played, characters can clash, expectations differ and sometimes conflict management plays a role. How do you deal with this dynamic? It can also be very complex in terms of content because there are many and often major interests and risks at play and finding good solutions and decisions is a challenge in itself. Process-wise, it is often a challenge to get everyone on board, to take the right steps and to intervene in the process if this is important to you.
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And it's Ambigious . We experience Ambiguity; There is no longer one solution, but there are several and several roads lead to Rome.
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In companies, organisations, partnerships, etc., people experience the dynamics described above. And we have to act faster, earlier, with more added value, more 'businesslike'. Projects are getting bigger, more complex and the interests are getting bigger. And large projects often run out of time, money and quality. Where we went out together to enter into a good collaboration/project, we often experience a lot of hassle in the implementation. We are under pressure.
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Many have lost their compass and anchor in this VUCA world. From what do I think and act? Where do I want to go, and which path do I choose? How do I deal with the challenges that come my way? And if I get lost, or things get tense, what do I do? Am I aware of my personal barriers/pitfalls in this? Do I learn from it? Increasing complexity can paralyze with dysfunctional processes and results. And if we don't know how to deal with it, we revert to old behavior.
You can learn to negotiate
Negotiation cannot be learned early enough and especially in a business environment (private and/or public) it is important to sharpen your negotiation techniques. Are you a project manager, consultant, sales manager, account manager, program manager, change manager, area manager, entrepreneur, team leader, research manager, etc .: a negotiation training helps you deliver your projects more profitably, get your environment involved in the creation and distribution of value, come to better deals, prevent conflicts and resolve them when they arise.
For more than 30 years we have been advising and coaching on complex negotiations and training negotiation techniques. To do this, we use negotiation principles and negotiation techniques based on the principles of Harvard negotiation and we have further deepened and broadened these over the course of more than 30 years. As far as we are concerned, negotiation is the mother of all competences. It is the core around which all other competences revolve.