Four Negotiation Skills Everyone Should Master

Negotiation skills are important to us, be it in our working environment or everyday life. We need to put these skills to use in our day-to-day activities, like returning a defective item that we have bought from a business owner, or formal dealings such as the drafting of legal contracts. To ensure that we have better relations around us and improve people’s first impressions of ourselves, we should master four negotiation skills consisting of communication, persuasion, planning, and cooperation. I’ll list down the importance of each one and how beneficial it is for us in our daily lives.


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Communicating What You Want

It is a common knowledge that we require a high level of communication skills to secure a satisfactory job in a good office, but what hasn’t been emphasized is its presence in resolving disputes. This may even be a misunderstanding between yourself as a customer and the business owner. Let’s say that you are a dissatisfied customer who purchased a faulty product from a retailer and your attempts to settle the issue have been to no avail due to a wide array of reasons. By clearly expressing your ideas, it’ll prevent further unnecessary problems from distracting you from the outcome you desire.

A concise communication, in that sense, permits you and the business owner to pick up on each other’s nonverbal cues or vocal tones while being succinct on the problem. Yes, I understand that there would be barriers that may prevent this, such as language barriers and differing communication styles. In their article on negotiation, Indeed.com has suggested the use of translators and the adoption of a verbal or written confident tone as a way to circumvent the hurdles.

Persuading the Other Side

You won’t be wrong to believe that you are expected to enter into a roundtable negotiation with a fixed mindset about what you want at the end. You would also want an outcome that benefits yourself and vice versa for the other party, but this is not to say that a compromise can’t be reached. A great negotiator would emphasize on the value of persuading the parties to reach a mutually beneficial compromise instead. This art is one of the most important negotiation skills as it allows everyone to communicate their ideas and encourages those at the roundtable to support your points.



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It is easier to comprehend this once you have an idea of how it works and chances are that you already do. You know how you are interested in purchasing something from a shop and the sales assistant would use various methods to persuade you that a particular item is better than the other, right? While persuasion in that sense is inapplicable to negotiation, it gives you a better idea on how it applies in our lives. It also gives way to the next skill, which is planning an outcome.

Planning an Outcome

No matter what the final decision of the negotiation is, it’d affect the parties involved, including yourself, with different effects. It may even have a ripple effect across the board as well. In their article, LinkedIn opines that “by explaining clearly to your stakeholders how you intend to reach the objectives set, you will gain their trust in letting you dictate the pace and schedule of the negotiations.” Someone who is great at negotiation would understand that planning for an outcome is just as important as communicating one’s ideas at a roundtable. What this means is that communication and planning would have to complement each other.

Planning for an outcome also includes considering the repercussions of the compromise on those in the negotiation while factoring any unforeseen circumstances that might occur as a result of someone’s failure to fully adhere to the terms. What this means is that you need to also formulate something that works well for everyone as a compromise instead of solely insisting for your outcome.

Cooperation Between Parties

The fourth and final negotiation skill is cooperation. As human beings, there would always be something encouraging us to desire for a certain favorable outcome from the get-go. It can range from anything from financial interests to something simple as returning a faulty product. To ensure that this is realized, all parties involved would have to work together with each other. And this is where the art of cooperation enters the picture.

As Beyond Intractability writes, when people cooperate with each other to arrive at a reciprocal deal, it creates an element of trust and understanding that both parties would want to maintain even when the negotiations end. In essence, the desire to increase, if not maintain, the level playing field between the parties involved while maintaining their objectives will serve as a stimulus to arrive at a similar outcome. Mastering this is also powerful due to its ability to recognize and ensure everyone’s individual interests in the final outcome.


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It doesn’t necessarily matter whether you are a professional negotiator or someone who wants to learn the basic negotiation skills as a method of dispute resolution. The key is always to maintain the long-standing trust and relationship while ensuring that everyone leaves the negotiation, feeling like they contributed to the outcome. As long as you’re able to incorporate these four aforementioned negotiation skills, you should be able to handle disputes that may occur in your everyday life.