Reinforce the business acumen of young team members through negotiation trainings

As a leader of effective team you always try to find the synergies among your team members’ skills and talents. Companies which are build on inclusivity are better positioned to achieve objectives and are more sustainable against external shocks. Sooner or later if you manage the team, you will need to introduce a new person to the team. This new member  can be young, eager to gain experience. The best in class companies have embed in their business culture an access to modern trainings. Moreover these trainings well fit employees individual needs. How negotiation training can accelerate junior employee business acumen and self-confidence within your team?

How professional negotiation trainings build up the self-confidence and decision making skills of young employees?

High quality negotiation trainings should help junior employees to build proper relationships with suppliers, customers, internal business partners. The program of the training should emphasize the importance of trust and mutual security as elements which strongly support achieving business objectives, KPIs.

The life always can surprise us with unforeseen negotiation scenarios. Over the last months your team might have fought for business, continuity of deliveries, or for access to personal H&S equipment. The COVID19 breakout verified very quickly who is a good negotiator. The sudden interruption in supply chains unveiled people who can negotiate effectively and respect other people.

Many of managers were forced to take dramatic choices, feeling like deciding between bad and worse scenarios:

• which customer to serve and which to put on hold?
• which business partners to collaborate with in pandemic time and which ones to leave?
• who to keep satisfied for the long term benefits of the  company?

Above mentioned three decisions are definitely linked to tense negotiation with business partners. To support business the negotiation training should teach how to positively reinforce the message. The positive reinforcement means to avoid saying “NO”, “I do not agree”, “we cannot accept it!”, “that is impossible to do”. The negotiator who only rejects the offers of the other party in the negotiation is in fact completely passive player in the field. The counterpart gains 100% initiative, can keep placing new offers which are convenient for them. With time the negotiator who all the time uses negative reinforcement of the message is perceived as “a difficult, and counterproductive person”. The power of NO of such anti-negotiator deteriorates greatly. At the end we all prefer people who come with the solution and not only the problem.

They young inexperienced individual who knows the power of positive reinforcement can easily develop constructive, positive offers. Such person will be quickly perceived by business partners as business acumen, a mature partner in the business talks.

Negotiation trainings should also teach team work. The times when seller or buyers did preparation to negotiation on their own is over.  Nowadays, with the business complexity and multilayer relations with internal and external business partners, team preparation to the negotiation is the key to the success. Quite often the negotiation itself are conducted by teams of negotiators. The challenge is that the universities do not pay enough attention to team work and young people have to catch up on it at the beginning of their professional career. We see it especially among people with technical background who need to negotiate at work. That is why in Eveneum we spend substantial time to train team preparation and team negotiation at our negotiation trainings.

Many young negotiators join more experienced colleagues’ negotiations to gain experience. Such method of learning is only partially effective. There are many negotiation styles, negotiators’ personalities. People are simply different and that’s the beauty for leaders but the danger for young, inexperienced negotiators. If e.g. young, responsive person is matched with direct, sharp elder colleague and is told to watch and try to be a like, it may inflate the level of stress to the level of demotivation. In the worse case scenario, high potential employee can decide to quit! Learning by imitation can be devastative to young people.

Each negotiator should know own strong points and areas for possible improvements to work on specific aspects of negotiation and to maximize their own assets. The Negotiator E-360 Profile from Eveneum gives such an overview. The negotiation trainings should give an opportunity to the young professionals to understand various negotiation styles and to work out own style.  Such knowledge increases self-confidence and effectiveness as well outside negotiation domain. The fusion of the positive reinforcement and of the team work is a must have skill set nowadays.

What the good negotiation training should not include?

What to pay attention to, if you want your people to be successful in negotiation? First of all the negotiation training should not promote the techniques of blackmailing, of being aggressive to the other party based on discrimination, personal offenses, forcing decisions without letting people to think over an offer. Someone who has spent at least a few years in business sectors where trust and relationships are important, knows how quickly these two merits can be damaged by misbehavior of the negotiator. If you send your team to the wrong negotiation training, you put at risk relationships with customers or suppliers. Putting them back on track may take months or years!

If a trainer dedicates too less time during the training to the aspects of preparation, to define negotiation scenarios, it means that he does not believe in the power of the argument but the power of the force. Preparation stands for 90% of the success based on Harvard Negotiation Model. Without preparation it will be hard to find satisfactory solution for both negotiating parties.

Safety, sustainability and superior quality!

Working with international corporate customers, leaders for who conducting international negotiation is a daily job, we noticed that the most of them pay attention on safety, sustainability and high quality of business relationships. Over 90% of surveyed managers stressed that trust and business continuity are the top priority for them.

If you like to recognize your team members and give your people a chance to test their negotiation skills, then we invite you to register  your negotiation teams to the National Tournament of Negotiation and ADR in Business. Last year we had a pleasure to host teams from:

• ABB
• BorgWarner,
• Dovista,
• Eurofins,
• Lotos,
• Pratt&Whitney,
• Tauron Dystrybucja,
• Valeo,
• Jacobs

You can register under the link (Polish language)