Essential Soft Skills for the Workplace - Negotiation

Negotiation is one of the most important skills you’ll develop as a businessperson. In the latest iteration of our Jobs and Salary Trends Report, employers establish that soft skills – particularly interpersonal skills, such as negotiation – are sorely lacking in many new hires. Successful negotiators rely on knowledge, intelligence, nerve and a host of other communication and interpersonal skills. While this might seem difficult to learn, the truth is that most people already have some semblance of these abilities. Honing and maximizing their potential is what you need to do to succeed. 

Colin McRoberts is an expert negotiator and consultant, who provides training through his co-owned company Vasher McRoberts LLC, as well as lecturing at the University of Kansas School of Law. We asked him about the importance of negotiation skills and how to improve your own: 

“There may not be any skillset more important in business than negotiation. Any particular job or task may depend on other skills, but in general, nothing is more consistently critical than the interpersonal and strategic skills that contribute to effective negotiation. 

“For example, a treasury officer will obviously rely on skills from risk management to Excel. But every single day of her career she will be interacting with other people: she’ll be working with colleagues, managers, direct reports, vendors, and others to achieve her day-to-day and long-term goals. 

“There are essentially no tasks a businessperson could perform that don’t require good negotiation skills: understanding another person’s interests, marshalling resources to create mutually beneficial solutions, and persuading others to contribute to and accept those solutions.” 

It’s clear then just how vital it is to be a good negotiator, but how can you learn to become a master at the art? The key is developing the skills already there. 

While the basis for good negotiation skills - effective communication, confidence, ability to read others - might be the same for all roles, for specific positions a narrower field of expertise is often required. This means paying attention to others in similar sectors and understanding how they do things. 

“Every negotiator has a different set of strengths and weaknesses and needs to develop the skills to complement their own circumstances. For commodity buyers, for example, the most important skill may be knowing when to walk away from a negotiation; an HR manager, on the other hand, will rely much more heavily on communication and people skills,” says McRoberts.

To negotiate successfully, you need to understand not only the problem itself but how the other negotiating party sees the problem. You need to look at what their motivation is and what the ‘best case scenario’ for them would be. By doing so, you’ll establish where the middle ground is and how you can successfully reach a deal. To do this, ask open-ended questions and consider their responses carefully. Clarify any queries you have and make sure you’ve done your research.

”One of the most important and underutilized skills, though, is the ability to see the negotiation from the counterpart’s perspective. This sounds easier than it actually is; most negotiators never really try to see the conversation from the perspective of the other side of the table. In fact, we’ve found that some negotiators become very uncomfortable even trying to do this,” says McRoberts.

“It’s important to remember that in any complex negotiation, it’s not possible to see the other side’s perspective completely accurately—there are too many variables, including the unpredictable human element. The skill is not to perfectly predict the other side’s beliefs or behavior, but to get a deeper insight into their perspective. Done well, the result is faster, more confident, and more effective negotiations.”