Reflective Essay on Negotiation

Reflective Essay on Negotiation
Negotiation is an important strategy and plays an indispensable role for people to solve the problem in our lives. It is a good way to make both parties find acceptable solution by each parties use tactics to persuade another party to approve his or her viewpoint. The application of the advanced negotiation skills definitely not only brings success in our daily life but also improve people’s work ability. This essay will show my natural preferences for different types of influence tactics which have been utilized in in-class, the understanding of the negotiation and analyze how to use proper tactics at different situations which are based on the role-play activity in tutorial.

According to the in-class role play, I noticed that one of the preconditions of successful negotiation is role reversal. The reason is only when participants consider the other party’s position and situation, then they can completely understand what the advantages and weaknesses of that position has and it is an effective way to select relevant tactics to defend in the negotiation. There are three characters involved in the role play activity: one manager (Dale Williams is acted by two students separately) and two subordinates (Pat Taylor and Chris Johnson). My role is Pat, a senior operator of a group of technical personnel, who is not willing to wearing the safety glass in workshop.
When I started to explain the reason why I do not want to wear safety glass to the first Chris, my natural preferences for influencing tactics was rationality and emotional appeal. According to the concept what I learnt from the lecture, we can use rationality by using logic and reason to persuade others to change mind or action and as for emot...

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...w to apply these tactics into practice. Understanding the meaning of each tactics is just the first stage, flexibility in the use of appropriate tactics in future issues is more important. Besides, I need to make a detailed plan before the negotiation. Firstly, analyzing the interests, perspectives and weak points of the opposite side and selecting suitable tactics. Secondly, preparing several response strategies will help me to control the situations. Thirdly, setting the minimum level what I can agree on the issue is also essential part of negotiation.
Negotiation has been used as a vital communication tool not only in business but also in social intercourse. It helps people make common agreement and avoid conflict. So we need to use the tactics which we learned from this course and books to do more practice, only in this way we can gain advantages in negotiation.