Jen Bergren Blog

MBA Update: Negotiation in the Workplace

Written by Jen Bergren | Mar 6, 2019 11:21:00 PM

Guess what? I graduated! Negotiation in the Workplace was a useful class where we did mock negotiations via Google Hangouts. This was one of my favorite classes, aside from the marketing classes.

Course Description

Negotiation occurs in our daily lives; every day we negotiate with potential employers, friends, roommates, landlords, bosses, customers, etc. Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties. This course will develop your understanding of the principles, strategies, and tactics of effective negotiation and professional relationship management. It is designed to be relevant to a broad spectrum of problems faced by managers. As a manager you not only need analytical skills to discover optimal solutions to problems, but also good negotiation skills to get these solutions accepted and implemented.

Through experiential learning, you will prepare for and engage in a variety of negotiation exercises (individually, and as a team). The objective is to explore your talents, skills, shortcomings, and strengths as a negotiator in a safe setting and to learn about yourself and how you respond in specific situations. You will learn to identify and assess the variables in negotiations, develop sound negotiation planning techniques, develop an understanding of various strategies and tactics to use as you ethically resolve conflicts, transactional and interpersonal differences. This course will examine the fundamentals of negotiating within today’s business world. Topics include both distributive and integrative bargaining. Additionally, time will be spent on facilitating the best practices for communication.

Course Goals

  1. Become a more knowledgeable negotiator, familiar with the basic concepts, theories, and practices of negotiation and conflict resolution.
  2. Become a more strategic negotiator, knowing how to systematically prepare for a negotiation with proper and strategic information collection regarding self, other(s), and negotiation situations.
  3. Become a more effective negotiator, equipped with the toolkits of negotiation strategies that result in achieving goals without jeopardizing relationships.
  4. Become a more reflective negotiator, adopting the habit of continually evaluating, and seeking to enhance your knowledge base and effectiveness.

Books

A Few Lessons

  • Prepare for Negotiations: Preparation documents include BATNA (Best alternative to the negotiated agreement), target points, reservation points, and more.
  • Distributive Negotiation: Exploring all the issues that could possibly be negotiated, from both sides, finding ways to “divide the pie.”
  • Win-Win Negotiation: Finding creative ways to “expand the pie” when negotiating.
  • Developing a Negotiating Style: We took a lot of personality-type tests for this class to help us develop a style, and the practice negotiations helped as well.
  • Multiparty Negotiations: When mediators or agents are involved in negotiations.
  • Trust, Power, and Ethics in Negotiation
  • Job Offer Negotiation

I started an online MBA at Montclair State University in January 2017 and graduated in February 2019.