Two Vital Factors Of A Successful In-Company Negotiation Training System
Think about negotiation as an organisational competency. A regular error made by companies is to only think about the development of the negotiation skills of individuals. If your organisation depends solely on the negotiation skills of individuals it directly signifies that you will always be exposed to the dangers associated when people move. What happens when your best negotiator is advanced or decides to sign up with your rival or supplier?
Your organisation's ability to negotiate effectively is dependent on 4 element:
* The negotiation strategy (or absence thereof)
* The negotiation process
* The negotiation skills of individuals
* The negotiation supporting network
Enhancing an individual's negotiation skills is clearly a critical factor in support of the negotiation capability, but a mistake is easily made by focusing on negotiation skills training without having contemplated the 2 steps that should head negotiation skills development; an organisational negotiation strategy definition and an organisational negotiation process design or redesign.
Investing in a negotiation skills development program without thinking about the negotiation strategy & supporting process can be compared to focusing on the training of troops for battle independent of the general strategy for the war.
The 2nd oversight is that companies will invest in the development of the negotiation skills of individuals but fail develop a supporting network for deployment of these skills. Using the war analogy, this would be like training soldiers how to use their weapons and then not supplying them with the ammunition and materials needed to keep the weapons functional in action.
If you are contemplating investing in a negotiation skills development initiative and you are not prepared to:
* outline or refine a negotiation strategy,
* develop or redesign the negotiation process, and
* produce a best practice negotiation supporting network
I would like to suggest that you invest your money elsewhere as you are likely to receive a better return on your investment!
Another tips is to ensure that your negotiation training program includes individual negotiation preference profiling.
An individual's negotiation capability is made up of 3 factors:
* Their competence (that which they are capable of doing)
* Their preferences (that which they like to do)
* Their behaviour (that which they actually do)
Contrary to popular certainty, the biggest influencing factor on your negotiation activities is not your competence but your preferences. Think about it, if your capability to do something was reliant on your competence to do it, then not one person would smoke, we would all eat five fruits and vegetables daily and we would all participate in exercise on a regular basis.
The truth is that you have a habit to behave in negotiation (as in life) according to your preferences. You could therefore convincingly say that your preferences in life have a much bigger significance on your behaviour than your competencies. It follows that one of the biggest mistakes made by businesses in recruitment and negotiation assessments, is to test the competence of individuals without gaining an understanding of their preferences.
In other words, the fact that you are able to do anything doesn't necessarily mean that are actually going to do it. In the context of negotiation skills development, this means that it is essential that each person understands their own preferences with regards their approach to negotiations together with their competencies and equally, that they are made conscious of the fact that different people and different cultures will have varying preferences when it comes to negotiations.