Negotiation skills

Communication Skills

Negotiation skills

Disputes and negotiations are all around us, all the time. The best negotiators are able to make progress by recognising and speaking to core interests and values. We teach you the essentials of the ‘Getting to Yes’ framework so that you can apply it to positional disagreements. This training is for anyone, irrespective of their level of formal authority, who is required to engage in, or mediate, disputes between two or more parties.

Key Outcomes

Learn the ‘Getting to Yes’ framework for principled negotiation
Develop competence at analysing conflicts through both ‘interests’ and ‘positions’
Practice preparing for a negotiation with guided coaching
Engage in simulated negotiations with peers and trained actors to build competence

Featured project

Australian Museum

Leadership and communication skills for research institute scientists

Researchers at the Australian Museum juggle a lot of responsibilities; managing internal staff, working with external communities, and balancing budgets. Not to mention the most important aspect of their work, curating, conserving and producing research from Australia’s largest natural history…

Our Approach

Polykala’s Negotiation skills training blends the structure of Fisher and Ury’s ‘Getting to Yes’ framework with insights from the Adaptive Leadership framework. The aversion to loss and its connection to individual/collective identity is a key insight that informs our approach. We approach negotiation as both a communication skill and a diagnostic practice. The ‘Getting to Yes’ principles require that you understand the other party’s needs and seek to work with them in addressing a joint need; not as adversaries, but as partners. Like all of our skills sessions, our negotiation training encourages participants to learn by doing. We distil the framework into a cogent and digestible form to maximise opportunities for participants to practise, persevere and build competence. Throughout the session, our dispute and conflict resolution specialists provide personalised coaching and feedback to orient participants to their strengths and overstrengths. We encourage participants to bring existing or recent case-studies of negotiations or disputes to make the training immediately applicable.