Author: Marina Akchurina 13 posts

Sales teams are the obvious candidates for negotiation training because their negotiations are visible and the results are relatively easy to measure. But negotiation happens throughout an organization, often without being recognized as such. Project managers, operations leads, HR managers, and other professionals regularly negotiate over resources, deadlines, scope, priorities, and exceptions, and when those conversations become difficult, the problem is often seen as poor communication rather than a lack of negotiation skills.

Most founders explain a bad negotiation by pointing to the market, the investor, or a lack of leverage. Often the real problem is something else: the negotiation has stopped being about the business and started feeling like a judgment of the founder. Once that happens, decisions are no longer driven by what the deal requires, but by what the founder needs to prove to themselves.

Standard advice tells every in-house team to try mediation before anything else. That advice holds often enough to become reflexive, and reflexive advice is exactly where good judgment stops. Certain disputes are structurally unsuited to mediation, whatever a step clause requires, or whatever the applicable procedural rule requires. Recognizing which ones early saves the one advantage mediation actually offers: timing.

Most executives approach renegotiating an existing contract with caution, softening the request and ready to retreat at the first sign of pushback. That instinct gets the risk backwards. What the other side is actually reading is not the request itself, but whether the business making it still looks reliable under pressure. Preparation is what answers that question.

Most negotiation training builds competence: vocabulary, frameworks, a temporary lift in confidence. Far fewer programs change how a participant relates to the negotiation itself, especially when conflict is involved. That shift, not better case studies or longer follow-up, is the real test of whether training actually worked.

When a counterparty stops responding in a negotiation, most people interpret it as bad news. It rarely is that simple. Silence in a business negotiation carries information, but the information depends entirely on what kind of silence it is. Reading it correctly, rather than reacting to it, is what separates a stalled negotiation from one that simply slowed down.