• Getting work done faster
• Reducing conflict
• Relieving stress
• Demonstrating you are a team player
• Being a better negotiator

Research suggest that people are hired and promoted for their technical skills and are fired for their lack of effective interpersonal skills. It is critical to your success to get others to work with you to accomplish your goals as well as the organization’s goal.

Influence skills help you succeed. You can achieve your goals in a way that values, supports, and nurtures a positive working relationship with others.

Some people think great negotiators should be aggressive. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The best negotiators:

• know what they want and why
• are excellent planners
• know how to strategize
• are great listeners who can uncover needs, priorities, and alternative currencies to set up win-win outcomes
• show the other side that they can be trusted
• work with negative feelings (defuse) and positive emotions (magnify)
• know that emotion is always an issue that can help or hurt the process
• can effectively address any dirty tactics

Great negotiators are interested in what the other side wants, and understand the adversary is not the person across the table from them; their adversary is the situation.

Negotiation is a process with distinct stages and types of energy associated with it.

• Learn the Negotiation Focus Model®
• Understand how to develop strategy, plus define positions, needs, and currency
• Control the 4 stages of the road map when face-to-face
• Manage the process and timing. Learn to slow everything down, so you are less likely to make mistakes.