Workshop:
Negotiating Across Borders
Strategies and Skills for Optimizing International Negotiation
Our approach to negotiation is shaped by our cultural beliefs and values. It is easy to "see" motives and assumptions in negotiating partners that are in reality simply reflections of our own cultural perspective.
Skilled international negotiators explore and understand their own assumptions and stereotypes rather than imposing them on others. They are aware of the pervasive influence of culture in their own thinking and behaviour. They use each intercultural negotiation as a learning opportunity.
This workshop provides participants with a systematic framework for understanding the international negotiating process. It assists them to develop specific skills that significantly assist job performance and enhance personal competence and confidence in negotiations across cultural boundaries.
Learning Outcomes
As a result of attending this workshop, participants will:
- develop skills that promote effective interactions with other cultures
- understand the key concepts underlying every negotiation and apply these concepts systematically to international negotiations
- identify the stated needs as well as "hidden agendas" of all parties and use this knowledge to build common ground
- be flexible in your choice of a negotiation style
- establish an emotional climate which promotes the desired outcome
- develop positive negotiating strategies, apply negotiation tactics to alter the balance of power and counter tactics being used by others
- obtain meaningful concessions and break deadlocks creatively
- systematically prepare for an upcoming international negotiation
- structure language to promote cooperation and more effectively negotiation across language barriers
- be aware of the phases which most negotiations follow and use timing to secure commitment to lasting agreements
Who Should Attend?
This workshop is suitable for executives, middle managers, supervisors and professionals. Because it allows you to focus specifically on your own negotiation scenarios, the program has proven to be of practical value to seasoned negotiators as well as those with less experience.
Workshop Content
How culture shapes the negotiation process
- Culture and the role it plays in our lives
- Exploring the values and beliefs other cultures
Strategies for understanding other cultures
- Learning approaches, emotions and goals
- Stages in understanding another culture
Skills and attitudes for effective negotiation across cultural boundaries
- Learning to see beyond stereotypes
- A learning orientation
- Understanding and using high and low context communication styles
- Using International English
How organizational culture influences negotiations
- Four archetypes of organizational culture
- Strategies for bridging organizational culture gaps
Preparing for an international negotiation
- How different cultures view and prepare for negotiation
- Optimizing your own preparation
- Preparing for the unexpected
- Pre-planning the time-frame and the six critical negotiating phases
- Developing a systematic preparation framework
Managing the "atmosphere" in international negotiations
- The impact of the emotional climate
- How to manage the venue and setting
- Controlling the critical variable of time
- Emotional conflict and how to contain it
- The structure and use of language in negotiation
- Developing mastery in process observation
Tactics in international negotiations
- How to identify tactics being used in negotiations across cultural boundaries
- How to restore/alter the balance of power
- Tactical influences prior to the formal negotiation
- Planning your opening move
- Developing key counter-tactics to influence the other side
- How to gain concessions in other cultures
- Making and breaking negotiation deadlocks
- How to lock-in agreements with your negotiating counterpart
International negotiation case study
- Planning and conducting a negotiation
- Diagnosis and critiqued review
- Building on your strengths and strengthening weak areas
- Planning your negotiation future
Workshop Details
Course duration: Three to four days.
Number of participants: Eight to twenty-four.