Kennedys' Simulations for Negotiation Training

Florence Kennedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351924108
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Improving negotiation skills has become an important part of the development of any manager or supervisor. But writing negotiating simulations that are effective can be a hit or miss exercise for any busy trainer. This manual provides you with a set of 24 detailed and proven simulations (and six negotiation 'cases') involving scenarios for purchasing, selling, industrial relations, disputed invoices, change management, problem solving and contract negotiation. The simulations are graded 'basic', 'intermediate' or 'advanced' and provide scenarios suitable for managers wishing to improve negotiation skills, whatever their level. Each of the simulations follows Gavin Kennedy's renowned 4-phase 'wants' method of negotiating and includes detailed trainer's notes and full participant's briefs. In the first half of the manual, Professor Kennedy provides guidance on how to prepare for simulations, controlling the exercises, evaluating the outcome and using observers. There is also comprehensive guidance on the 4-phase 'wants' method of negotiating. For this third edition, six completely new simulations are provided to match the changing circumstances of business negotiation, related to the widening readership among trainers in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. All the simulations have been field-tested by practising negotiation trainers and all are based on real-world experiences and business incidents. There is also a new section ('Negotiation Cases') containing negotiation training materials for small sub-group discussions by participants, who apply the negotiation concepts introduced in the training sessions. This wide-ranging and proven collection of exercises should be extremely useful to anyone responsible for developing negotiation skills as well as to those training in sales, purchasing, people management and problem solving.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

NEGOTIATION SIMULATIONS AND CASE STUDIES IN TRAINING

Kennedys’ Simulations for Negotiation Training fulfils at least one need: there is no similar resource available and, judging from correspondence we have received from trainers across the world, many are averse to reinventing the wheel every time they need simulations suitable for running their negotiation training sessions. Many of you write and ask if we can supply negotiation simulations for the courses you intend to run. Invariably we have agreed – for a fee of course!

Writing your own simulations for a single negotiation workshop, or a short series of them, is a hit-or-miss enterprise for busy trainers. By the time you develop a ‘hit’ – that is, a simulation that works – many of your potential trainees have missed the benefits of you getting it right from the start, because, as they were your guinea pigs, they suffered through your earlier versions.

We know how long it can take to develop an original simulation into one that works, as well as just how many ostensibly ‘good’ ones can fail no matter how many embarrassing and avoidable ambiguities, plus the inevitable bugs, you eliminate from the first-draft simulations. Happily, some of those early simulations have survived and are still in use. Now, we would rather be flattered by plagiarism than ignored with indifference but, of course, we would rather be paid than plagiarized!

THE SUBJECT OF THIS COLLECTION

Each simulation can be prepared and negotiated by individuals in either one-to-one negotiating sets or by groups and teams in various combinations of team sizes. Each negotiation case study can be discussed in small-group sessions within a workshop agenda, with each group reporting on the tasks to the whole group.

Trainer’s notes

Trainer’s notes on the simulations and negotiation case studies, which are graded according to their complexity into ‘Basic’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Advanced’ sets, are provided to assist in selection and in evaluation of performance. The notes make suggestions on how to use the simulations and case studies. Some, in our experience, work best if they are completed in a single non-stop session, while others are best interspersed with breaks for review and assessment.

Naturally, the duration of each simulation must vary to suit your own schedules and the learning progress of your participants, but we have made suggestions on timing based on our experience of running them in a wide variety of circumstances and for varying group sizes, with participants of differing experiences and aptitudes.

Using our guidelines and taking into account your own circumstances, you can plan your own training workshops using these simulation and case study materials.

WHO THIS COLLECTION IS FOR

This collection is primarily for trainers who wish to develop workshops in negotiation skills training for personnel in the same or mixed functions. The simulations do not assume a specific employee grade, although we offer some advice on selecting simulations for different levels of difficulty.

Subject knowledge

Experience suggests that employees, from beginners to senior professionals, relate to these simulations and case studies, and create learning situations in negotiating performance, whether or not they have a detailed knowledge of the issues at stake, or whether or not they are familiar with the business environments from which the simulations are drawn.

In short, trainees can prepare and negotiate a simulation, say, in commercial property without having to be chartered surveyors, architects or estate agents. Naturally, property professionals will feel more familiar with some of the issues than non-professionals, but, because they will tend to look for a great deal more functionally-specific information than we choose to provide, they too can be as inhibited as those outside the property business in developing the learning opportunities of a practical session.

Training and coaching

The simulations are for coaching in negotiation techniques and skills, and are not meant to be analogous to coaching sessions in the practice of particular functions. Nobody, for example, should expect to become a fully competent change agent in, say, a performance enhancement programme as a result of exposure to a negotiation simulation or case study.

How trainers use the simulations is a matter of personal preference; we make numerous suggestions based on our own experience with many different clients. Basically, we suggest that you use the simulations and case studies to create learning opportunities rather than to critique policy issues or to coach trainees into specific business roles.

Our simulations and case studies can form the core of a negotiation skills workshop or can be integrated into a broader personal skills workshop. For instance, sales training workshops can usefully include one of the sales negotiation exercises as part of a staff development programme or to reinforce existing selling skills. An exercise in negotiating a relationship between two departmental functions could be used as part of an introduction to a performance management culture.

TRAINING METHODS

The simulations provided in this book can be used with a variety of commonly taught negotiating methods and styles. There are no absolutely correct solutions to the problems identified in the simulations and case studies. Negotiation trainers are more concerned with the process of achieving agreements that satisfy the parties’ interests than they are in ‘winning’ a specific outcome. Thus, you can use any method in training negotiators that you find successful. Over many years we have developed our own method, which we have found to be successful with clients all over the world. We call this the ‘Wants’ method and we describe it below in the briefest outline only to enable you to refresh your memory, if you are familiar with it, or to enable you to start your workshop using it. The method is demonstrated in the training film, Do We Have a Deal? available from Gower.

The ‘Wants’ method

This method was based on our original idea that negotiations have distinct phases, but it has the added dimension (courtesy of our colleague, Colin Rose in Victoria, Australia) that each of the phases answers a different question.

The ‘Wants’ method is based on the concept of what each side wants and on how they should negotiate to obtain some, or all, of the ‘wants’ they identify. In training terms it is easy to set out the tasks of each of the phases of a negotiation by posing a single question for each phase.

The four phases and their related questions are:

Four phases	Four questions
Prepare	What do we want?
Debate	What do they want?
Propose	What wants could we trade?
Bargain	What wants will we trade?

In answering these questions, and through asking related and derivative questions, we generate the tasks that lead the negotiators to productive outcomes, assuming that one is possible.

Prepare: what do we want?

Preparation for a negotiation involves deciding what you want to achieve, the range of your options and how much you are willing to trade to allow the other side to gain some of what it wants. The preparation process involves prioritizing and qualifying your ‘wants’ in such a way that you know how much movement you are able to make in the negotiation.

You reduce the chance of reaching agreement if you enter a negotiation without being fully prepared. You can train negotiators to prepare by using the simulations as examples.

In preparation it is wise to consider what you think the other side might want, although you may not find out for sure until the debate phase.

Debate: what do they want?

In the debate phase people often show behaviours that are unhelpful, such as issuing demands, making sarcastic comments, stating their own positions or indulging in a hectoring manner. These behaviours seldom work as the purpose of debate is to find out what the other party wants and to help them understand what you want. Often, negotiators become entrenched in argument which, of course, is counter-productive.

Propose: what wants could we trade?

Once a negotiator has found out what the other side wants, he or she can make tentative proposals on a conditional ‘IF–THEN’ basis: ‘If you could agree to an earlier delivery date, then I might be able to arrange earlier payment.’

The proposal phase allows negotiators to exchange tentative suggestions of what might be acceptable. In the process there may be adjournments for further preparation or discussion when a new proposal is received, or even a return to the debate phase to find out, by questioning and summarizing, exactly what is being proposed.

Bargain: what wants will we trade?

Once the proposals have been properly discussed, the bargaining phase can commence. Here one side can offer (always conditional) trades: ‘If you were to deliver on January 23rd then I would settle your invoice by February 15th.’ The bargain statement is specific but still conditional; if the answer is ‘yes’ then an agreement has been achieved.

We have found that linking negotiating behaviour to the ‘Wants’ method produces lasting changes in behaviour, with a consequent increase in the trainees’ personal effectiveness as negotiators.

CHAPTER 2

How to Use the Collection

USING SIMULATIONS

Simulations are not ‘role-plays’ which require people to imagine that they are somebody else and ‘act’ accordingly. When playing a simulation in an interactive training session it is important to remember that the negotiators will learn most by being their normal selves, rather than trying to act an imaginary role which may be completely alien to their normal, let alone professional, selves.

What constitutes the participants’ normal selves will usually be known only to themselves and their colleagues, but by making a determined effort to lead them away from the imaginative play-acting of a role, about which they feel strongly, you can help them secure more profitable learning experiences.

It is because role-playing encourages acting out arbitrary roles that modern negotiation training has adopted in its place the practice of ‘case playing’.

Preventing ‘acting’

In the simulations that follow, participants should concentrate on the negotiating issues, rather than on playing imaginary roles. This is not always possible as anybody who has asked professional buyers to develop negotiating stances as if they were sellers, or sellers to behave as buyers, knows. We all have difficulty in transferring ourselves across what we regard as an unbridgeable gap with the people we deal with.

Sometimes shop stewards, for example, thrust by the accident of a training session into the role of managers, forget the main purpose of the training method – namely to improve their negotiation skills – and slide into stereotypical portrayals of how they believe managers think and act. The reverse, of course, happens when managers role-play their version of how shop stewards behave.

Overcoming these disabilities is not easy if you do n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Index of Skills
• Index by Subject
• Symbols
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 How to Use the Collection
• Chapter 3 How to Prepare a Simulation for Negotiation
• Chapter 4 Training with Simulations and Case Studies
• Part 1 Basic Simulations
• Part 2 Intermediate Simulations
• Part 3 Advanced Simulations
• Part 4 Negotiation Case Studies