Teaching negotiating skills — the pragmatic approach

Negotiation is an important part of management, but many managers receive no formal training in negotiating skills. Hardly any executive, senior civil servant, trade union official or professional consultant is not involved occasionally in some form of interpersonal bargaining. Most managers would like to improve their negotiating abilities, but are prevented by the lack of training facilities and by the confusing, inconsistent, and contradictory approaches to negotiation theory evident in the limited literature that exists. Negotiation can be tedious and time‐consuming; yet managers must be able to negotiate effectively if they are to fulfil their proper roles as controllers, co‐ordinators, and allocators of resources. Regrettably, negotiation is not a significant component in the Human Resources Management or similar syllabuses of the major professional bodies. I believe it should be. Moreover, I wish to argue in favour of a specific approach to the teaching of negotiating skills.