Dr. Catherine H. Tinsley
Founder & CEO, Negotiation Consultants

Build Your Negotiation Confidence and Effectiveness

Negotiation is central to all organizations, and though managers must be competent in a broad array of analytical skills (such as marketing, finance, or operations), these skills will take managers so far. As a complement, you need a broad array of negotiation and influence skills. These skills not only help smooth internal dynamics, they also help managers bargain with external actors—competitors, suppliers, customers, and regulators.

 Although you are already a negotiator, you can become a better one by deepening your understanding of the bargaining process and by learning more sophisticated techniques for creating mutual gain. The focus of this workshop is on improving managers’ negotiation confidence and effectiveness.  We will incorporate findings from economics, psychology, sociology, and game theory to build a conceptual framework for understanding most negotiation situations. Moreover, particular emphasis will be placed on helping you identify your own effective negotiation strategies and improving your negotiated outcomes.

Objectives

• To develop confidence in using negotiation as a tool to help you get what you want.

• To reevaluate your notions of when and why people negotiate.

• To understand the central strategies and tactics of negotiation.

• To improve your ability to analyze the behavior and motives of others.

• To diagnose situational factors and how they will influence the negotiation process.
  
  

Who Should Attend

• Managers with bottom-line responsibility
• Managers who negotiate with customers, suppliers, regulators, or other external constituencies
• Managers who have to coordinate with others within the organization

Bring Your Negotiations Problems

Participants are encouraged to bring negotiations issues to the seminar so that we might diagnose how to best resolve these issues and maximize your gain.

Content

Creating a Winning Game Plan

• Knowing your BATNA
  
• Forming a bottom line
• Setting your objective
  
• Understanding the other party's perspective
  

Strategic Anchoring

• Value context theory
  
• Using anchors to set your context
  
• Defending against the other party's anchors
  

Learning the Different Approaches for Reaching a Negotiated Agreement

• Exploring the tension between creating and claiming value
  
• Basic integrative bargaining techniques
  
• Basic distributive bargaining techniques
  

Identifying and Overcoming Negotiator Mistakes and Negotiation "Traps"

• Understanding the "fixed pie" bias
  
• Confusing strategy and objective
  
• Separating issues, interest, and positions
  

Group-on-Group Negotiations

• Group dynamics and competitive escalation
  
• Multi-level issues (inter- and intra-team negotiations)
  
• Adding third and fourth parties to the mix
• Understanding power and how to use it effectively
  

Coalition Formation

• Characteristic of coalitions
  
• Minimum formation principles
  
• Shifting alliances and how to stay on top
  
  

Format

The two-day seminar meets from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day. It uses a mix of exercises, lectures, and case discussion. All materials are provided.

Instructor

Catherine H. Tinsley is an associate professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, and is the executive director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Initiative. Professor Tinsley is a faculty affiliate of the Washington Interests in Negotiation at the School for Advanced International Studies at John’s Hopkins University, and of the Center for Peace and Securities Studies at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. She is also a Zaeslin fellow at the college of Law and Economics, University of Basel, and a CPMR fellow for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She has received several grants from: NASA and the National Science Foundation for her work on decision making and risk and from the Department of Defense and Army Research Office for her work on modeling culture’s influence on negotiation and collaboration. She is a past Board member and past Division Chair of the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management and a past board member and past program chair of the International Association of Conflict Management.

Contact Us

Paula Dorminy or Gary Holler
Phone: 814-863-2782
Fax: 814-863-0413
E-mail: isbm@psu.edu