Negotiating Skills
How Aid Workers Bargain for Fair Outcomes

People with competing interests often need to find common ground in order to make progress and achieve desirable results. This workshop helps participants identify such situations and teaches them a broad variety of techniques for doing this. It particularly focuses on those situations that are best resolved with agreements that give no one everything they want, but where all feel they received fair treatment. Such agreements usually prove to be workable and long-lasting. There are two methods of negotiating that are in favor in the current organizational climate, and both are taught in this course.


What's Covered

1. The course begins with a quick review of: 1) the nature of human conflicts; 2) the normal differences that people feel and express (including those in cross-cultural situations); 3) why all this occurs; and 4) what effect this has on relationships at work and at home.
   
   
2. Participants then examine everyday techniques people employ to resolve their conflicts, including the relative merits and deficiencies of the three most common techniques:
   
   
   • Making a Quick Compromise
   • Splitting the Difference
   • Relying on a Third Part Intervention
     
     
     
   For the majority of minor differences and conflicts in life, these techniques work quite well and are worth the investment of time and skill they require. But for more serious issues (i.e., where the stakes are high, where the issues are complex or critical, where there are multiple constituencies involved, where outcomes affect a host of other choices and actions, etc.) these techniques are inadequate and typically do not work very well. Skillful negotiating does.
   
   
3. Next, Participants are asked to think of two real world situations in which they would like to settle a conflict, resolve a difference or make a deal with someone. The situations, one from their personal life and one from their work life, should be ones that the participant is comfortable revealing. We use these real life situations as the basis for role-plays throughout the remainder of the course.
   
   
4. We then introduce the two most frequently used and effective negotiating models applied in organizations today:
   
   
• Positional Negotiating
• Interest-Based Negotiating
  



5. We focus first on Positional Negotiating, the kind of back-and-forth bargaining that most of us are familiar with. This is the negotiating model we observe when Labor Unions or Used Car purchasers are in action. It is the model most people assume when they use “Negotiations.” It has a long history, it is widely employed in almost every culture, and as a result, it has become somewhat stylized. We teach participants how to succeed at positional negotiating by:
   
   
   • Establishing negotiating objectives that are clear and agreed upon
   • Opening negotiations and making an intelligent opening offer
   • Setting bargaining ranges
   • Determining a bailout point and other useful parameters
   • Selecting one of several possible bargaining strategies that fit the present issues
   • Mastering 12 basic negotiating tactics that are likely to support the selected strategy
   • Creating rationales for why the position they choose to take is in their adversaries best interest
   • Listening to their adversary’s counter-offers, considering their merits and making effective counter-offers in turn
   • Setting criteria for acceptance of a final solution
   • Making the deal
   • Learning eight additional tools and techniques that increase effectiveness in this form of negotiating
     
     
     
   At each step of this process, participants get practice using these techniques by applying them to the situations identified in step #3.
   
   
6. Interest-Based Negotiating is a process developed by the Harvard Negotiating Team as a better model for those situations where “winning” in a positional negotiating encounter described above could have very damaging effects on the relationships themselves (like differences between husband and wife, supplier and client, boss and subordinate, etc.). The Harvard Negotiating Team proposed a more open, transparent form of negotiating in which participants worked toward “Win-Win” outcomes that attempt to maximize gain as much as possible for all parties. We teach participants how to effectively use the following four-step process:
   
   
   • Separate the people from the problem, then seek to solve the problem conjointly
   • Separate interests from positions, then seek to satisfy underlying interests rather than trying to meet positions that are surrogates for those interests
   • Use brainstorming techniques to generate multiple options to see which ones cover as many of the expressed needs as possible
   • Collaborate in choosing the option that maximizes gain for all parties
     
     
7. In the final exercise, participants learn how to select—from all the conflict resolution techniques and models presented in the class—the ones that are likely to work best in the situations participants most often find themselves.
   

1. Participants are much more willing to see conflict as normal and natural in human affairs and to be both more confident that they can handle it better and less likely to engage in avoidance behavior.
   
   
2. They clearly grasp the differences among the models and techniques presented. They form preferences for some techniques, dictated to some degree by their circumstances but more by their personalities and style.
   
   
3. Participants are much more inclined to see their adversaries as people with different wants and needs rather than as “the enemy.” They are less likely to demonize their opponents, and they are more open to making deals with them.
   
   
4. They continue to express a preference for the easier techniques like Compromise and Splitting the Difference, because they are busy people who see conflict as a distraction and want to get past it as fast as possible.
   
   
5. For the same reason, they are reluctant to use the Positional Negotiating techniques because they require much preparatory thought, homework and time. They are, however, attracted to its competitive character. Most participants see it as harder and tougher than the other techniques and, therefore, more likely to be effective, especially with parties they do not trust. Our experience is that most managerial and technical people avoid this model unless they are partnering with professionals who have a lot of practice at it, like lawyers, consultants and mediators.
   
   
6. Given the value systems of most people who work in NGOs, they are strongly drawn toward Interest-Based Negotiating, and they bring great resourcefulness to making it work. They understand the problems of using this model in cultures where corruption is rife, where reading body language is difficult and where people have a practice of telling Aid workers only what they think they want to hear.
   

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