New Daniels Executive Education workshop teaches advanced skills to improve high-stakes business outcomes
Joe Hernandez
Can you confidently negotiate a competitive salary increase or a good business deal with a client? Even if you have negotiated and closed hundreds of deals, additional tactics can give you an even bigger edge when the stakes are high. And chances are good you haven’t learned them yet.
Although skilled negotiation is a required competency in many fields, Daniels College of Business adjunct instructor Joe Hernandez says it’s rarely taught in business curricula. Instead, employees typically learn negotiation through practice, afraid to ask for help developing a skill they are expected to already know.
Hernandez, a professional master negotiator, business coach and CEO of Lionshare Negotiations, LLC, has spent decades fine-tuning the art through a research, practice and measurement feedback loop with negotiation experts. He is sharing proven principles and techniques during an inaugural one-day, in-person workshop offered to the public through Daniels Executive Education this fall.
“Negotiating with Confidence” debuts Oct. 15, on the University of Denver campus. It is intended to help organizational leaders and others who want to leverage proven, real-world skills to negotiate better business outcomes.
“If you think about it, just about every functional area within a company or corporation has a requirement to negotiate,” Hernandez said. “If you have a position in sales, HR, legal or executive leadership, negotiation is important to your role.”
The topics can be applied in personal matters as well but are reserved for situations where stakes are high, and the parties need to maintain a relationship after the negotiation concludes.
“When the outcome is critical to your company, your livelihood, your career, your ability to generate income, that’s when we start talking about having a negotiation strategy to maximize your outcome,” he explained, “while still maintaining the relationship with the other party so that you can do business together on an ongoing basis.”
The workshop will cover the key concepts that differentiate great negotiators from those who struggle with inconsistent results. Hernandez says workshop participants can expect to learn strategies and tools that are rooted in psychology and human heuristics, which give master negotiators a distinct advantage. These concepts include:
- Ensuring the other party is willing to make a deal
- If not, it will devolve into a price-only negotiation with sub-optimal outcomes.
- Knowing who should make the first offer, why, and how it sets the stage for success
- Hint: The first offer controls the result.
- Assessing one’s power and leverage in a negotiation
- Most people tend to underestimate their level of power and leverage compared to the other party.
- Presenting multiple options
- Providing options to the other party creates more openness to negotiation. The option they gravitate toward provides clues about what is most important to them.
- Preparing alternatives
- Having a strong alternative can be a big power move and helps parties avoid settling for poor terms out of desperation.
- How to architect a deal
- There’s a seven-step process, from identifying the deal issues to building in mitigating terms.
- Reacting to concessions
- Anticipating concession requests helps drive a more effective response, often expanding the size of the deal.
While Daniels offers negotiation skill-building as part of Executive Education’s five-day leadership workshops, Hernandez will offer a deeper dive with practical and easy to understand strategies that are applicable to all professions and levels.
Learn more about the workshop and register by visiting: https://daniels.du.edu/executive-education/workshops/negotiating-with-confidence/