Negotiating and Influencing Skills

The Art of Creating and Claiming Value

Negotiating and Influencing Skills provides the tools needed to negotiate effectively in order to obtain the best result--whether you are working on securing a contract, obtaining consensus on a goal, building commitment among your employees or classmates, coaching for employee development, or dealing with family and friends. Based on the theoretical approach to cooperative negotiating skills developed at the Harvard Project on Negotiation, the book presents a two-step process toward mastery of negotiating and influencing skills that includes the development of skills by means of interactive exercises and application of these negotiating skills in personal and professional life. Evaluation tools and many exercises are used to help the reader develop and broaden his or her negotiation style and become more flexible and fluid in approach. Difficult people and difficult situations provide us with one of the best sources of information on what we need to do differently in order to negotiate more effectively. The book examines the eight critical skills we all need to negotiate successfully with difficult people or difficult situations. Learning effective negotiating and influencing skills is a lifelong process. Reading this book is only the beginning point in that process. Suggestions are presented regarding books to read, courses to take, and the continuing use of the feedback forms provided in this book. Anyone who negotiates on a regular basis and is desirous of improving his or her negotiating and influencing skills, whether that be in the work setting or in their personal lives, will appreciate the approaches offered in this book, particularly professors and students of management, marketing, organizational communication, political science, public policy, psychology, industrial organization psychology, social work, negotiation, family studies, and law.