Negotiation Skills

Self-Appraisal Paper: Negotiation Skills, Weakness and Take-Aways

Before I joined the business school and took the Negotiations class, I thought I was a structured, good negotiator. Maybe I was a little presumptuous after some years of experience involved in multi-million dollar negotiations in my professional career involving large capital projects. The Negotiations class opened a new window of possibilities in how to engage in negotiations effectively, and provided tools that I will be putting to work not just in my professional life, but at a personal level.

Strengths as a Negotiator

Analyzing the other party: Culture has a strong influence in how you approach negotiations.

Trust and Honesty: Establishing relationships with my negotiating counterparts is another key point of my strengths. Through preliminary meetings or conference calls, I have always tried to learn and obtain as much information as possible prior to negotiations. This is directly related with the business-to-business sales approach that I follow in my professional career. Obtaining information on past negotiations, level of authority, possible walk-away points and BATNAs of my counterparts have resulted in effective planning, usually leading to either an agreement or sufficient reasons to be ready to walk away from the negotiations if required.

Weaknesses as a Negotiator and How to Ameliorate Them

I felt very comfortable in most situations, roles and negotiations we conducted in class, however during the employee-recruiter negotiation, in my role as a recruiter, my distributive bargaining was not as aggressive as in the other negotiations. During the exercise, I had a sense of sympathy for the employee, and somehow loosened up my goal of obtaining as many points as I could. I relate this to a more “yielding” or “obliging” strategy as defined in the textbook “Essentials of Negotiation” . I was more interested in the employee’s outcome than in mine, as long as it remained within my...