As a business professional, you likely participate in negotiations—regardless of your role or industry—more often than you realize.
Negotiating a job offer, asking for a raise, managing a team, making the case for a budget increase, buying and selling property, and closing a sale are just a few examples of the deals you might be involved in.
Negotiation skills also extend to your personal life, making them essential to develop across all areas.
To strike effective deals and achieve better outcomes, you need a strong skill set. Investing time in developing your capabilities and understanding the negotiation process can help you maximize value at the bargaining table.
“Enhancing your negotiation skills has an enormous payoff,” says Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler in the online course Negotiation Mastery. “It allows you to reach agreements that might otherwise slip through your fingers. It allows you to expand the pie—create value—so you get more benefits from the agreements that you reach. It also, in some cases, allows you to resolve small differences before they escalate into big conflicts.”
Here are six essential negotiation skills and tips for how to strengthen them.
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6 Essential Negotiation Skills
1. Communication
To achieve your ideal outcome, clearly communicate your goals and boundaries.
Effective negotiators engage in productive, respectful discussions to reach mutually beneficial outcomes.
“Building trust is really critical [to negotiations],” says Erin Egan, director of strategy and business development for Microsoft, in Negotiation Mastery. “And when you're dealing with someone that you don't communicate with perfectly, it's challenging to build that trust.”
Deal-making requires give and take; it’s critical to articulate your thoughts and actively listen to others’ ideas and needs. Failing to do so can lead to missed opportunities and leave counterparts dissatisfied.
2. Emotional Intelligence
Emotions play a critical role in negotiation, and you can use them to build trust and guide conversations.
For example, positive emotions can increase feelings of trust at the bargaining table. Similarly, you can channel anxiety or nervousness into excitement.
You need a high degree of emotional intelligence to read other parties’ emotions. This enables you to recognize unspoken cues while managing your own emotional responses.
3. Planning
Planning ahead with clear goals and defined boundaries is essential to any negotiation. Without adequate preparation, you can overlook important deal terms or alternative solutions.
First, consider the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA). Sometimes called the "bargaining zone," ZOPA is the range in which you and other parties can find common ground. A positive bargaining zone exists when the terms you’re willing to agree to overlap. A negative one exists when they don’t.
Next, it’s beneficial to understand your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). If your negotiation falls outside that range, your BATNA is the course of action you’ll take if the conversation is unsuccessful. Knowing your BATNA can ensure you have a backup plan if you can’t reach an agreement. It can also help you avoid leaving the table empty-handed.
“Weighing your own interests is an important part of preparation in any negotiation,” Wheeler says in Negotiation Mastery. “It involves knowing in advance how much you're prepared to concede on one item in order to do better on another. These often involve difficult choices. But knowing your priorities ahead of time is far better than making hasty decisions in the heat of negotiation.”
Check out our video on negotiation skills below, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!
As a business professional, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be required to participate in negotiations from time to time, regardless of your job title or industry. Here are three essential skills for mastering the art of negotiation.
4. Value Creation
Value creation is a critical negotiation skill.
“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.”
Consider this analogy: In many negotiations, you and the other parties typically try to obtain the biggest “slice of the pie” possible. Vying to maximize your slice inherently means someone will get a smaller piece.
To avoid this, shift your goals from growing your slice to expanding the whole pie. This approach offers two benefits: greater value and stronger trust for future discussions.
5. Strategy
In addition to preparation and value creation, you need a clear understanding of effective negotiation tactics. By knowing what works and what doesn’t, you can tailor your strategy for every negotiation.
To develop a strong negotiation strategy, take the following steps:
Define your role
Understand your value
Consider your counterpart’s vantage point
Check in with yourself
Following this process can enable you to formulate a clear plan for the bargaining table. By understanding the roles of those involved, the value they offer, and their advantages, you can work toward a common goal. Regularly reassessing your goals throughout the negotiation can also ensure you stay on the path to success.
6. Reflection
Finally, to round out your negotiation skills and develop your proficiency, reflect on past negotiations and identify areas for improvement.
After each negotiation, successful or not, consider what went well and what could have gone better. Doing so can allow you to evaluate the tactics that worked in your favor and those that fell short.
Next, identify areas you want to work on and create a plan of action. For example, if you had trouble aligning your goals with your counterpart’s, review concepts like ZOPA and BATNA. If your negotiations often leave you dissatisfied, learn new ways to create value.
How to Improve Your Negotiation Skills
To improve your negotiation skills, consider these five strategies.
1. Track Your Negotiations
Tracking your negotiations can help you learn what did and didn’t work.
For example, you can document your everyday negotiations in a journal or spreadsheet. This will create a tangible record of them and help you track your progress, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and identify improvement areas.
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,” Wheeler says in Negotiation Mastery.
Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and consider whether there were times you could have applied different negotiation strategies more effectively to create value for yourself and your counterpart.
3. Build Confidence
When negotiating, it's crucial to be assertive without appearing rude. Project confidence while remaining open to the other party’s perspective.
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.
It's important to know when not to smile, however, such as during a particularly difficult negotiation, which could affect your counterpart’s sensitivity to unfairness. Smiling could also indicate an imbalance in the discussion and cause further tension.
4. Learn to Control Your Emotions
It's easy to get frustrated if the conversation doesn't go your way, and you may be anxious from the beginning. As noted above, 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 help you grow as a leader.
5. 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.
You can also gain real-world skills by enrolling in an online certificate program, such as Negotiation Mastery. The course is designed to develop your competency through AI-powered negotiation simulations—giving you practical, hands-on experience and personalized feedback you can use to improve.
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How to Negotiate Professionally
No matter your strengths and weaknesses, practice is a surefire way to develop your skills. The more you negotiate, the more prepared you’ll be in the future. Simulated practice, as discussed above, is a valuable tool.
Negotiation Mastery offers dynamic, interactive negotiation simulations with real-world, case-based examples that allow you to apply your knowledge and develop your skills. You'll learn from real experts, including public officials, executives, and military officers.
HBS Online learner Maurice Stassen especially enjoyed the real-world examples presented in Negotiation Mastery. “The challenge is to find the win-win,” Stassen says. “If managers in corporate companies would learn and apply what [HBS Professor Michael Wheeler] taught me, I think innovations and change in corporations would go so much smoother. I encourage all managers to take this course.”
Are you ready to improve your negotiation skills and advance your career? Explore Negotiation Mastery—one of our online leadership and management and entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and download our free leadership e-book to start your leadership journey today.
This post was updated and republished on April 13, 2026. It was last republished on May 11, 2023.