Top 5 Benefits of Employees Learning Negotiation Skills

A Negotiation Expert Answered:

Employees need to focus on learning negotiation skills because we engage in the negotiations practically every day through our interactions with our colleagues, our clients or suppliers. Interpersonal interactions can be simple or complex. Mostly, negotiation is about problem solving or finding creative solutions. By elevating our negotiation skills, either through negotiation skills learning from training or from the tough teacher of on the job hard knocks school, we can increase our ability to communicate, listen and negotiate more effectively. There are many empowering reasons why an employee should pro-actively seek to raise the level of their negotiation skills.Here are just five negotiation skills learning incentives:

1. Professional Development and Career Advancement

By learning negotiation skills we will develop and evolve into better employees. As employees we will become more effective in whatever employment capacity we find ourselves in, due to our learning invaluable negotiation skills. We will become better problem solvers and learn how to navigate our way through conflict and disputes with greater ease and accomplish better business results along the way. Negotiation skills will enable us to achieve a more powerful rapport with our co-workers, managers and especially with our clients or suppliers. Increasing our negotiation skills will help us to elevate our own career paths because we will have a better understanding of the needs of both management and our clients.

2. Conflict resolution

One of the most vital areas where negotiation skills offer us a considerable advantage is in learning to resolve conflicts. Negotiation can resolve conflicts more smoothly because the process revolves around our ability to pro-actively communicate and listen. We learn to understand not just the positions being adopted in a conflict; we learn to uncover the reasons behind the positions. The ability to resolve a conflict by striving to find a creative solution can only elevate our value as a member of the team.

3. Problem Solving

Negotiation is about solving problems. Every day we are challenged by a variety of problems ranging from mundane disagreements to major interpersonal or professional disputes. Each situation is unique, but by the learning and practicing negotiation skills we can more readily adapt to the vast array of challenges we face. As negotiation skills includes problem solving, we can learn an assortment of effective strategies which we can adapt to almost any problem we encounter.

4. Communication

A successful negotiation is made possible by learning to communicate proficiently. Negotiation skills require that we learn about exchanging and sharing information. We learn to not only see the world through our own eyes more clearly, but more importantly, we learn to see through the eyes of the people we need to persuade and influence. By gaining a broader and more complete perspective of the situation we can engage with our peers and clients with a greater level of both confidence and ability. Likewise, by learning to listen we will be able to relate and to fully appreciate their interests with a more productive understanding. Few would argue against an employee benefiting through learning to improve their communications skills.

5. Persuasion

One of the most positive results which can emerge from developing good negotiation skills is the ability to persuade. Becoming persuasive can only occur when we learn to understand the nature of the problem and through our ability to effectively connect communicating. The ability to persuade is one of the most powerful negotiation skills an employee can have in their skills repertoire.

Negotiation is a dynamic process encompassing all of the above motivational rewards for learning the varied negotiation skills that business negotiation demands. Employees can only benefit by learning and developing their negotiation skills. Benefits are enjoyed by both the career enhancement of the individual and the bottom line of the organisation.