Negotiations Knowledge and Development Plan (NKDP; 40% of your final grade)
Goal
To help you discover an ongoing program of negotiation skill development that will increase your personal effectiveness, your ability to achieve your personal goals, and your understanding of how you impact and interact with others in negotiation situations.
Philosophy
The value of the NKDP is almost solely dependent on you. My job is to provide you with a framework for helping you to develop not only during this course, but down the road as you continue to negotiate throughout your career and life. To do so takes a great deal of introspection on your part, and an understanding of how your thoughts and actions form a pattern that creates opportunities and barriers to effectively negotiate with people around you. A more pragmatic aspect of the NKDP is that it can be a useful talking point during interviews, especially if you can discuss how you've improved yourself based on an action plan.
In summary, I want you to recognize that:
• We all have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to negotiation situations.
• By honestly identifying weaknesses, we can deal with them. Addressing weaknesses permits us to take steps to
overcome them so that they do not interfere with the pursuit and achievement of goals.
• Personal honesty and willingness to confront weaknesses are essential to individual development and to
becoming an effective negotiator.
Elements of the NKDP
Section 1: Personal assessment of your performance during the course. In this section, I would like you to review, for any three out of the six scheduled exercises we did, your performance in those exercises, thus allowing you to gauge “who you are now” as a negotiator. Specifically, for each of the three exercises you choose, answer the following questions:
• How do you think you performed, and what criteria did you use to make that assessment?
• What challenges with this exercise did you face that prevented you from doing better, and what might you do
differently in the future, if you were to face a situation similar to that in the exercise?
I highly encourage you to complete this “as you go” in the course, after each exercise when you can accurately recall what happened.
Section 2: Others’ assessments. The purpose of this section is to reflect on external feedback about how others perceive you as a negotiator. Specifically, I will provide feedback to each of you comprising your counterparts’ assessments of your negotiation experiences. I will also ask you to solicit feedback from one other individual outside of the course who can provide you with objective feedback about your negotiation abilities. This would preferably be a co-worker or other business associate, but can also be a family member or friend. Identify what role this person is in and specify their feedback they provided to you for this paper.
Reflect on the information contained in this feedback, and even feel free to follow up with exercise counterparts. In particular, assess what this means in terms of your ability to influence and negotiate with people in the future, acknowledging both strengths and areas for improvement. Also, how are the assessments consistent or inconsistent with the personal assessments you provided in Section 1?
Section 3: Negotiation knowledge gained in the course. In this section, I would like you to review in detail at least four major concepts you have learned from the course, and how those concepts relate to your current standing as a negotiator. Specifically, for each of these four concepts, I would like you to clearly demonstrate your in-depth, comprehensive understanding of the concept, based on what was presented and discussed in class videos and Zoom meetings. That is, for this review, you will need to rely on and specifically refer to relevant course material.
Then, for each, relate the concept to your current standing discussed in Sections 1 and/or 2. For example, you might discuss in-depth the meaning and implications of the concept of “constituents” used in negotiation. Then, discuss how you have been able to effectively use them (or not) in your negotiations this module.
Please choose your four concepts from the below concept list. For example, if you choose to cover hardball tactics, you’d want to include all the hardball tactics we covered rather than just a single tactic. Or, if you choose “Big 3” as one of your concepts, cover all of the Big 3 rather than only “BATNA” as a concept. Other very specific tactics, such as “tactical empathy” or “post-settlement settlement” are important, but not broad enough to comprise a standalone concept.
• Choosing a negotiation strategy
• Bargaining mix
• Big3
• Constituents
• Offers
• Protocol issues
• Hardball tactics
• Handling emotions in negotiations
• Agents in negotiations
• Cognitive biases in negotiations
• Integrative negotiations
• Cross cultural negotiations
• Multi-party negotiations
Section 4: Action plan. Finally, discuss how you plan to develop your skill in applying course concepts to future negotiations. These can be, but do not have to be the concepts you discussed in Section 3. Specifically, outline several action steps you plan to take going forward to ensure your best chance for success in your ongoing personal and professional negotiation encounters. Obviously, being the end of the course, I will have no way of holding you to these objectives; this is where your own personal initiative and desire to continuously improve come in. I will, however, judge the consistency of your proposals with your reflections in Sections 1 and 2, as well as the realism of your proposals (e.g., don’t propose reading 50 books and attending 10 negotiation seminars over the next two months!).
In particular, your action plan should consist of choosing content areas you found challenging and/or useful and would like to focus on more in terms of improvement (e.g., engaging in cross-cultural negotiations, understanding what a BATNA is and how to cultivate a good one). Then, propose some specific action steps you will take toward improvement, preferably during your remaining time in your program if you are not graduating yet. These action steps should extend beyond simply saying you will work on getting better at something, to identifying resources or specific steps you plan to take to improve yourself. For example, if you want to improve how you manage your emotions when you negotiate, go beyond simply saying “I plan to work on improving my emotions and will practice this next month when I negotiate my rent” to identifying specific resources you can draw on to learn more about emotion management strategies.
You will benefit most from action steps that:
• Place you outside of your comfort zone
• Provide you with a diversity of experiences
• Require specific milestones or tangible indications of progress
• Include assignments/situations where either success or failure is possible
Other Details
• Unlike the planning documents, you may NOT use AI as an aid in completing your NKDP
• All NKDPs should be typed, double-spaced, use 12-point Times New Roman font, and have one-inch margins
all the way around
• There is no set page limit, although I would say that plans in the 9-12 page range will probably be typical
• Please save your document as a Word document (not a PDF) with a filename of “lastname_NKDP” (e.g., Dineen_NKDP).
• A copy of the finalized document should be submitted via Brightspace by the due date in the course schedule.
• Please see also the grading rubric available on Brightspace, titled “NKDP_Rubric