“I’d heard about INSEAD through a couple of colleagues of mine, one of whom is a senior director in a big bank. I took interest in the school and found the Negotiation Fundamentals programme which really seemed to tick all the boxes for me.”
Grace Zulu is a legal advocate in Zambia. She works for Multichoice Group, and manages regulatory affairs across three of the countries where her company is present. Hers is a role that requires her to close complex deals, which means managing multiple and key stakeholders, as well as the regulatory portfolio of the company she works for—the means by which it is legally allowed to work and trade in its markets. It’s her ambition to scale up her role and work at a higher level, negotiating in many more countries in negotiations. And further down the line, her long term goal is to become instrumental in brokering international deals—among them peace-keeping treaties—between countries.
Grace has lofty and laudable aspirations. Converting those aspirations into reality—mediating at an international level—brought her to the understanding that she would need some expert input to elevate her negotiation skills and prowess.
“I’d heard about INSEAD through a couple of colleagues of mine , one of whom is a senior director in a big bank. I took interest in the school and found the Negotiation Fundamentals programme which really seemed to tick all the boxes for me.”
Enrolling in the programme, Grace was keen to position herself strongly in the global market—a goal that she felt INSEAD had the prestige and renown as an international business school to help her achieve. What she didn’t expect, however, was that instead of INSEAD teaching her how to “become a shark,” she would come to appreciate negotiation as a “softer skill.”
“I was very pleasantly surprised. The programme really opened my eyes to negotiation as a softer process that gets you to what you want and to where you want to be. I was amazed in fact by just how much the programme opened my mind.”
Something that Grace found “essential” in the learning experience were the roleplays: simulations with peers that she says helped expose both skills and certain “grey areas” that she didn’t know she had.
“I really appreciated the way that roleplaying was structured, from the preparatory work in thinking about other parties’ expectations, through to analysing videos and exploring different approaches. This really helped me walk through the process of negotiation and open my mind to different scenarios where I can apply these skills. The learning was intense.”
So impressed was Grace by Negotiation Fundamentals, that she now intends to “go all the way with INSEAD.” She has signed up to pursue the advanced negotiation programmes that the school offers: Advanced Negotiations and Strategic Negotiations.
“I just loved the way that this programme was taught. You walk into the learning fully expecting to explore all of the technical elements of negotiation; things like your reservation point—how high or how low you’re prepared to go in terms of price or compromise. But the skills that you learn and that you take away are so much greater.”
Coming out of the programme, Grace says that she has developed the skills of listening, of communicating effectively, as well as “all of the tools in-between.”
“The other thing that really stood out for me was the skill of ‘anchoring’ where you take something outside of your target boundaries and bring it into the scope of the negotiation. I’ve learned how to stop and figure out what kind of negotiation I’m going into—and then deciding which of the new skills I’ve learned I’m going to deploy, depending on the situation,” she says. “From the concepts to the frameworks to the skills, I find that I am using it all on a day-to-day basis.”
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