Successful business leaders integrate negotiating skills across every aspect of their daily functions. To sustain a competitive advantage, executives must know the powerful strategies used to increase influence, improve relationships, and enhance effectiveness. Negotiating Success: A Learning Laboratory is designed to help novice and experienced managers become better negotiators. The program creates an intensive learning laboratory where participants engage in a series of actual face-to-face negotiations that will help develop and enhance their skills. These negotiations are then followed by in-depth debriefs where the experiences are explored and analyzed to build best practices, insights, and conceptual frameworks shared by successful negotiators.

Using studies that contain a broad range of issues faced by operating managers and other professionals in typical business situations, this program helps participants develop core skills for assessing a negotiation, developing a strategy, and executing it to create better outcomes, sustainable relationships, and more comfortable negotiating processes.

Professionals who want to improve their negotiating skills and expand their influence both within and outside their organizations should attend this program. The course is appropriate for executives from firms of any size and any industry.

Recent participant functions and titles include:

• Founders of entrepreneurial ventures
• Global corporate executives
• Individuals who oversee and/or conduct business
negotiations
• Line managers and staff specialists
• Marketing and sales executives
• Operations and finance managers
• Service professionals and partners of service organizations

Participants will develop:

• A thorough understanding of the components of effective negotiating.
• A deeper appreciation of their personal negotiating styles and how their own effectiveness varies in different situations.
• Insight to create appropriate strategies—at and away from the table—to improve relationships and enhance effectiveness.
• Skills to analyze and structure negotiating situations.

• Conceptual Structures of Competitive and Cooperative Negotiations
• Mechanisms for Identifying and Creating Value
• Strategies for Ensuring a Good Deal
• The Role and Components of Effective Preparation and Analysis
• The Use of Value-Creating Alternatives to Achieve One’s Own Self-Interest
• The Value of Information, Goals, Opening Discussions, and Predetermined Walkaways

• Supervisor IT Specialist
• Program Manager, Business Development
• Quality Control Inspector
• Vice President/General Manager
• Director, Project Development
• Product Sales Manager
• Vice President, Global Marketing

• Negotiations: Participants will actively engage in individual and team negotiations. The combination of these negotiation styles, group work, and individual feedback presents increased opportunities for indentifying strengths and weaknesses.
• Audiovisual/Live Negotiation: A segment of the course is devoted to a live negotiation, transmitted into the classroom.

Sherwood C. Frey Jr.
Ethyl Corporation Professor of Business Administration, The Darden School, University of Virginia.

Marc W. Modica
Lecturer in Business Administration, The Darden School, University of Virginia.