Advanced Negotiations Programme Onboarding

In the Launch Week, you will find guidance on how to make the most of the programme, information on certification requirements, an overview of the learning journey and you will get to know your peers. 

You will find information on how to organise your negotiation role play exercises and your coaching sessions.

In this week you will complete both mandatory electives to ground you in the dynamics of expert negotiation.

A. Critical Moments: Building from a more strategic approach to win-win and a deeper understanding of Value Negotiation, this segment revisits the idea of winwin and further clarifies the concept in ways that makes it more pragmatic and effective. Then it pivots to the more technical aspects of doing the best out of our negotiation critical moments.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to manage your energy in line with negotiation scenarios
• Anticipate and diagnose common and unique critical moments
• Discover best practices that facilitate good decision making during critical moments

AND

B. Difficult Behaviours: Everyone has already negotiated with someone difficult. Be them tough or subtle, in-your-face or manipulative, difficult negotiators can become our worst negotiation nightmare and a significant obstacle to successful deals. In this segment, we deconstruct the difficult behaviours portrayed by difficult negotiators and introduce a strategy and specific moves to counter them successfully and consistently with win-win strategies.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to minimise the odds of the counterparty becoming problematic
• Diagnose and make sense amidst numerous challenging tactics
• Practice robust strategies to convert difficult into productive negotiation behaviours

From this week onwards, you will deep dive on the elective topics that you have selected. Follow the content relevant to your weekly elective to fully benefit from the coaching and live call sessions in Week 2, 3 and 4. 
 

A. Virtual Negotiation: Virtual negotiations have become ubiquitous since COVID. We were forced to move all our negotiations online through virtual means. The world of negotiation is unlikely to return to a F2F-only pattern, and yet there are fundamental differences between them that can hinder the performance of even the best of F2F negotiators. As advanced negotiators, we need to transit in and out of virtual with the same confidence as in our F2F negotiations. 

Learning Objectives

• Appreciate the important differences between F2F and virtual negotiations
• Diagnose when negotiations require unique virtual strategies
• Practice tactics to choose and negotiate through the “best” channels

OR

B. Internal and Team Negotiations: Either fully present at the negotiation table or with members waiting back at their desks, most professional negotiations involve teams. Teams require internal negotiation among its members, which often can come across as harder than the external ones for which the team might be preparing. As such, advanced negotiators need to be aware and manage their team negotiations unique set of challenges, risks, and rewards.

Learning Objectives

• Diagnose the differences between internal and external negotiations
• Learn how to build and lead high-performance negotiation teams
• Understand how to lead your team to bridge external and internal negotiations

A. Negotiating Conflict : As social animals, conflict is a part of life. Conflict often raises negative emotions, which highjack our ability to negotiate well, and pushes us into suboptimal outcomes, destroyed relationships, and painful processes. However, with the right techniques, we can minimize the negatives and turn a conflict into a source of opportunity for negotiation, value creation, and positive change.

Learning Objectives

• Learn what leads to conflict and how you can manage your own
• Understand how to manage particularly emotional and difficult negotiations
• Practice how to mediate third party disputes towards agreement    

B. Cross-cultural and Gender Negotiations: Coming from different cultures makes it harder to communicate, build relationships, or create value in negotiations. In this segment, we deliver advice on how to negotiate with as many cultures as you need without having to become an expert in any of them. We also have an additional segment on gender negotiations given the timeliness and pervasive nature of this unique cross-cultural negotiation context.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the impact that culture and gender have on negotiations
• Learn how to diagnose cultural and gender from other negotiation challenges
• Practice negotiation strategies and moves that work across cultures and genders and how to bridge cultural and gender differences

A. Negotiating Power and Power Differences: Most negotiators wrongly believe that power is the most important variable in a negotiation. And while it is a very important one, it is often misused to the detriment of its wielder. Thus, understanding the relationship of power and negotiation will help you use your negotiation power wisely and counter power abuses from your counterparty (or yourself).

Learning Objectives

• Differentiate negotiation power from power in a negotiation
• Understand the different sources of negotiation power and their pros and cons
• Learn how to maximise your leverage independently of your initial position

OR

B. Multiparty Negotiation, Consensus Building and Stakeholder Management: As negotiations grow in value and complexity, advanced negotiators inevitably find themselves involved in multiparty dynamics. Be it an external stakeholder or an internal change management process, these negotiations are exponentially more complex, and at times difficult, than 1-on-1 negotiations. No advanced negotiator would be complete without mastering at least the basics of multiparty dynamics, and hopefully also its more win-win focus on consensus building.

Learning Objectives

• Appreciate the additional complexities of multiparty vs 1-on-1 negotiations
• Learn how to lead multiparty negotiation dynamics and its many stakeholders
• Practice consensus building strategies to build sustainable agreements

This programme includes 3 group role-play exercises. These simulated negotiations offer you an opportunity to practice various tactics in a low-risk setting that not only helps improve your skills, but also boost your confidence, a key ingredient to negotiation success. Each case is designed to help you focus on the key concept covered in the corresponding week. Please note that these role-plays are mandatory for your programme completion.  More details will be provided during the kick-off call.