Strategic Communications and Negotiations

Effective Decision-Making through Collaboration

This Executive Education seminar will help you become a more effective communicator and decision-maker, learning proven techniques for building and maintaining relationships, applying appropriate power and influence, structuring agreements, and developing buy-in. Strategic Communications and Negotiations examines core decision-making challenges and provides strategies and techniques to effectively engage your colleagues, staff, partners, customers, and clients in collaborative decision-making and negotiations.

Upcoming Seminar Dates

2019 dates to be announced soon.

Learning diplomacy in the Strategic Communications and Negotiations seminar was very valuable. As a project manager I negotiate 2- to 3-month projects costing upwards of $10M dollars. I have to understand my customer’s viewpoint so we can contract work quickly. If a negotiation drags out, I have a team of workers standing by, and that has heavy cost implications. It’s in our best interest that I get to a decision without being abrasive and pushy.

Marty MunizProject Manager, Todd Shipyards

Benefits of attending

Examine your core decision-making challenges.
Achieve your communication goals and maintain critical relationships.
Use powerful strategies for planning, negotiating and implementing agreements.
Resolve difficult situations using dispute settlement skills.
Select the best mix of tools for your personal communication and negotiation style.
Negotiate successfully with those with more influence and authority.

Why businesses sponsor

Invest in the long-term success of your company when you register employees for this seminar. Your bottom line will benefit from leaders who help maximize successful and efficient operations, improve quality and output, and take the strategic goals of an organization from vision to implementation.

Content overview

An Integrated Approach to engaging in Decision-Making:

Recognizing and responding to differing communication and decision-making styles.
How to achieve your goals while building and maintaining relationships.
Key strategies for ensuring that agreements are implemented.

“Lenses” to view and develop Effective Communications:

Who needs to be engaged and why?
What is really important and why?
How do I recognize, create and apply power and influence?
What is the nature of the relationships involved?

Negotiations and Decision-Making:

Applying decision-making techniques to negotiation.
Knowing when engagement is and is not appropriate.
Managing internal and external relationships when negotiating.

Protocol and Rules of Engagement:

Identifying and engaging the appropriate partners.
Ensuring effective representation.
How to use time and deadlines effectively.

Strategies for Building Solutions and Agreements that work:

Effective use of formal and informal communication strategies.
Agreeing on “how” and “why” before “what.”
Exploring alternatives and crafting packages.
Moving from concept to detail.
Developing a single text format and drafting “straw” documents.
Knowing when to agree and when not to agree

Strategies For Implementation:

How to build commitment and investment in the agreement.
How to take the agreement for a “test drive.”
Creating agreements that can “learn” and evolve.
When you need an “implementation protocol.”

Customize this seminar for your company
We can tailor this seminar to meet your key strategic business needs. That way, your employees stay focused on your mission and goals as they learn from University of Washington faculty. We can create in-house versions of any of our three seminars in Finance and Accounting, Business Communication Strategies and Leadership. Or work with Executive Education staff to develop a new program specifically for your company. For more information, call UW Executive Education at 206-543-8560.

Faculty

Gerald Cormick, Ph.D.

Gerald (Jerry) Cormick brings a unique breadth and depth of experience to negotiation and dispute resolution with 45 years of experience as a negotiator, mediator, trainer, and coach. His initial dispute resolution experience was mediating labor-management contracts. In 1968, he pioneered the application of negotiation and mediation to racial and community-based conflicts. In 1972, he was the first to apply mediation to complex environmental/economic and public policy disputes. Areas of particular expertise include regulatory issues, resource management, infrastructure projects and developing sustainable solutions for the private and public sectors from the local to international levels.

His recent assignments range from training and coaching government negotiators in major mining contract negotiations in Africa to mediating a multi-state agreement on water and endangered species in the Colorado River Basin to advising and coaching two organizations negotiating a partnership structure and protocol for an important joint initiative. Current areas of research and writing focus on negotiation as a decision-making process and building implementation protocols and flexibility into contractual agreements.

Dr. Cormick holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. in Business from the University of Michigan and has had academic appointments in the U.S., Canada and Europe. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, teaching in advanced degree programs for experienced managers and professionals. He is a Principal in The CSE Group, a negotiation and dispute management consulting firm.