Investing time and effort into improving your negotiation skills is valuable regardless of your role and industry. It can also positively impact your personal and professional life. Yet, developing those skills can come with challenges, such as a fear of conflict, lack of confidence, and difficulty establishing rapport with others.
Before diving into strategies you can use to overcome those hurdles, here's an overview of why negotiation skills are important.
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DOWNLOAD NOWThe Importance of Negotiation Skills
Whether you're a real estate agent or a professional musician, negotiation proficiency is crucial. After all, negotiations occur in everyday life—from resolving conflicts with friends to buying a car.
No matter your career stage or personal needs, improving your negotiation skills can enable you to better:
- Close business deals
- Resolve conflicts
- Boost your earning potential
- Get a promotion
- Build relationships
If you’re a prospective manager, you need negotiation skills because your role will require interacting with clients, employees, and organizational leaders. Your ability to negotiate can also impact your team’s performance and workplace’s culture.
If you want to improve your negotiation proficiency, here are six strategies for doing so.
Check out the video below to learn about essential negotiation skills you should develop, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!
6 Tips for Improving Your Negotiation Skills
1. Track Your Negotiations
Habitually tracking your negotiations can help you learn what did and didn’t work.
For example, you can document your everyday negotiations in a journal to have a tangible record of them, track your progress, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas for improvement.
2. Reflect on Past Negotiations
Once you've started tracking your negotiations, learn from them. By reviewing and reflecting on your past experiences, you can identify patterns in your behavior and adjust your negotiation strategy.
“Frequent self-reflection is essential to better understanding your strengths, preferences, and negotiation best practices,” says Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler in the online course Negotiation Mastery.
Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. Review concepts like the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA), and consider whether there were times you could have applied them more effectively to create value for yourself and your counterpart.
3. Learn How to Create Value
Creating and claiming value is critical to achieving win-win outcomes in negotiation.
“Value creation is a key part of the negotiation process,” Wheeler explains in Negotiation Mastery. “If it's done well, it can turn stalemates into deals and transform good deals into great ones.”
Here are three ways to create value in your negotiations:
- Establish trust: Throughout the negotiation process, work on building a positive relationship with your counterpart. Be open to hearing their perspectives, practice active listening, and convey genuine interest in their opinions.
- Find uncommon ground: Instead of searching for ways you and your counterpart agree, find areas where your interests and perceptions differ.
- Be ready to improvise: Planning is important, but negotiations can be unpredictable. You don't know what the other party will bring to the table. Understand that you may need to refine your tactics as you learn more about their vantage point.
By searching for ways to create value, you'll improve your chances of a successful negotiation.
4. Develop Emotional Intelligence Skills
Emotions can play an enormous role in your conversation's outcome. Your counterpart may be immediately opposed to your proposal. Or they might stereotype you or try to diminish your contributions to a project or your organization.
It's easy to get frustrated if the conversation doesn't go your way, and you may be anxious from the beginning. Controlling your emotions is vital to negotiating effectively.
“Stress and anxiety will undermine your negotiation effectiveness,” Wheeler says in Negotiation Mastery. “You need to manage those feelings.”
Handling those emotions requires emotional intelligence skills, including:
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Empathy
- Motivation
- Social skills
These skills won't just improve your ability to negotiate but also help you grow as a leader.
Related: 6 Characteristics of an Effective Leader
5. Build Confidence
When negotiating, it's crucial to be assertive without appearing rude. Projecting confidence and power while remaining open to the other party's perspective is one of the most effective negotiation tactics to master.
Pay close attention to your body language and facial expressions. Your physical responses can convey disinterest if you're not careful.
One way to improve how you're perceived is by smiling. In addition to building rapport, it can make your counterpart feel happier.
However, it's important to know when not to smile. For example, smiling during a particularly difficult negotiation could affect your counterpart’s sensitivity to unfairness. Smiling could also indicate an imbalance in the discussion and cause further tension.
6. Pursue Learning Opportunities
Seeking opportunities to continuously improve is critical to developing and maintaining your negotiating skills. Read books and articles about negotiation, and consider how to apply the insights you glean from them.
Another option is enrolling in an online certificate program, such as Negotiation Mastery. The course is designed to improve your skills through negotiation simulations that enable you to gain practical experience and receive feedback from peers.
Ready to Develop Your Negotiation Skills?
Negotiations can be unpredictable.
“Your success depends not only on your own strategy and ability but also on your luck—good or bad—as to who happens to be sitting across the table from you,” Wheeler explains in Negotiation Mastery.
It's vital to be as prepared as possible before approaching the bargaining table to improve your likelihood of success. You never know how your counterpart will respond.
Ready to improve your negotiation skills to reach the next level of your career? Explore Negotiation Mastery—one of our online leadership and management courses—and download our free leadership e-book.
