Blog: The Negotiation Edge

You’ve landed a new job or been offered a promotion. Awesome.

How do you get paid more? Use the following subject line and then follow The Black Swan Group’s email negotiation guidelines.

How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of the company?

Anyone can be a leader. But not every leader is an effective one.

Great organizations are built on the backs of effective leadership. That’s because effective leaders inspire their teams to reach their full potential and can even get them excited to show up to the office every day.

If you’re looking to take your leadership skills to the next level, here are four characteristics that effective leaders possess.

Employees don’t quit because they hate their jobs. In large part, they quit because they hate their managers.

On the flip side, great managers have the ability to inspire their teams and encourage their employees to reach their full potential.

But what exactly makes a great leader?

Although there’s no cookie-cutter framework you can follow to become a great leader, here are five behaviors that effective managers engage in.

Anchoring, or establishing a reference point in a negotiation, is a technique that can help you get the best deals. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Today, we’ll explore four rules of anchoring that can help you better understand how you can use this technique to get better deals.

There are four reasons that logrolling negotiation—a negotiation strategy that’s solely based on making trade-offs—is garbage

1. It’s a compromise.
2. It’s lazy.
3. It assumes a zero-sum game.
4. It lacks tactical empathy. 

The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in. 

How do you set a tone of collaboration that sticks—especially with someone that sees the negotiation as win-lose, and they want you to lose?

It’s easier than you might think. 

The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to become aware of this: If the words I want or I need are about to come out of your mouth, then you’re about to enter into a negotiation.

Next time this is happening to you, try this little exercise that works like a charm every time. It’s easy peasy, and it’s great practice for the cold read and a quick accusations audit.

As MIT Professor Peter Senge once said, “the only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.”

How do you learn faster than the competition? Read. 

As a bonus, reading is also enjoyable and fulfilling. 

With that in mind, here are 12 books that should be in any expert negotiator's library.

To many, leadership failure looks like a toxic boss scolding their employees and causing a mass exodus.

But true leadership failure comes in other forms.

For example, when organizations don’t understand the value of empathy.