Improve Your Negotiation Skills

Join Andy Palmer and Darren A. Smith in the first episode of the Weekly Training Booster. This episode is about how to improve your negotiation skills with better preparation. Darren and Andy discuss using the squaredance, being more ambitious, and knowing that there are 8 methods of resolving conflict.

You Can Read the How to Improve Your Negotiation Skills Episode Transcript Below:

Andy Palmer:

All right. Good morning. Welcome to MBM's Weekly Training Booster. Over the next few weeks, we are going to be covering a whole host of soft skills. Here at MBM, the home of Sticky Learning, we are looking to improve those soft skills that you've got, very practically and pragmatically in the workplace. I'm Andy from MBM. My colleague here is Darren, and today we are going to talk about how to improve your negotiation skills. So our Weekly Booster is how to improve your negotiation skills. Darren, let's kick off. For you, what is negotiation skills?

Darren A. Smith:

Negotiation skills. Yeah, it's a question we get asked a lot and we have over the last 20 years of training. Most people think that when they haggle, they're negotiating. They're not. They're not. There are eight ways of resolving conflict. The one I'm going to talk about right now is haggling versus negotiation. So, you know when you go to a market, a foreign market, and you buy a pair of Roy-Bans. And Roy-Bans, you got them for €5 and they're worth about €900; they're not.

Haggling is you start here, I start here, we meet in the middle. That is not negotiating. That is one valid form of resolving a conflict, but haggling and negotiating are different. Negotiation is where we are discussing and we have more than one variable. So haggling is one variable, price, negotiation is one, two, three, four, five variables.

Andy Palmer:

Awesome. Brilliant. Great overview. You mentioned eight stages, eight stages to negotiations and how you can improve those negotiation skills. Can you give us a flavor for some of them?

The first episode of the Weekly Training Booster with Andy and Darren

Darren A. Smith:

Okay. There are eight methods of resolving a conflict. So we've got haggling, negotiation, surrender, where you just give in, normally with the kids, we've got problem solving, we've got unilateral action, and so on. So there are eight, but the one we're really talking about today is negotiation. And we have to be careful when we think we're "negotiating" ... hate doing that ... where it's normally we're either haggling or we're problem solving. They're both absolutely valid, but we're not negotiating.

Negotiating has four stages to it. And those four stages, so we prepare, which most people don't do. Then we go in and we ask a bunch of questions; we poke around. Then we propose, and then we count the winnings, right? So really four stages. And the one that most people miss is the prepare one.

Andy Palmer:

Cool. And if we were to kind of just talk about preparing for a moment, what one thing in your mind and the experience that you've got stands out to being the best way you can prepare for a negotiation?

Darren A. Smith:

Okay. So when most people prepare for a negotiation, they do one of two things. They either have a bit of a think about it and then they go into a negotiation, hit a brick wall, wonder how they got there. Or they do the dreaded PowerPoint. You open up PowerPoint, start typing away, and present. Actually, that's not negotiation either. We created a Squaredance, a simple template, A4 template of how you can prepare for your negotiation with competence. So it's a Squaredance, and we named it something rather apt, silly, so you can find it on the web. So if you just search Squaredance Negotiation, you get a free template, please use and abuse it as you wish.

Andy Palmer:

Good stuff. All right, so maybe we can include that template in the video and we'll certainly put the link around somewhere towards the end....