We train executives and employees in a range of soft behavioral skills needed in the business world, including negotiating, influencing and persuading, decision-making, and applied psychological consultation for submitting tender bids and pricing procedures.
The art of negotiating has made great strides in the last decade, and a range of closely-related applications have appeared, including settlement, mediation, and agreed arbitration. We regard negotiating as a kind of persuasion process. From this perspective, we have developed a unique methodology that combines principal negotiation theories and tools for influencing and persuading from the realm of applied psychology. We teach techniques for changing another person’s positions in negotiations, while building a profile of the other party’s interests, identifying his needs, and outlining the right path for persuading him. The methodology includes an extensive repertoire of negotiating tactics, a range of sophisticated tools for exerting influence, bargaining techniques, tools for coping with crises and ultimatums, ways of introducing deliberate crises when necessary, the use of mediator, enhancing persuasion after an agreement, and immunizing the other side against regrets. Our approach is predicated on traditional negotiating approaches, but supplements them with a profound psychological knowledge of influencing, persuasion, and changing a person’s positions.
Over the years, psychology has accumulated a huge store of knowledge on persuasion processes, and has developed practical models and techniques for exerting influence effectively, constantly supported by systematic research. We provide training and consultation to improve personal influencing and persuasion skills for a range of applications. The training consists of providing tools for identifying conscious and unconscious motives impacting the target of persuasion; analyzing and dealing with emotional elements; reading another person’s “channels of persuasion,” tools for building trust, creating commitment and consistency and “immunization” against regrets and opposition after persuasion has been accomplished. We include hands-on experience in the training process, which enables the participants to gain practical experience in putting the theory into practice.
Decision-making is one of an executive’s most significant functions. In a complex and ever-dynamic world, the ability to make prudent and aware decisions becomes difficult in situations of uncertainty. We help executives in recognizing the rational and emotional elements in decision-making processes and their personal decision-making style. The advice we give enables managers to expand and enrich their decision-making mechanisms according to the managerial situation in which they operate, their personal styles, and the type of decisions they must make.
Participation in tender processes is a particularly challenging business endeavor with its own rules. The process of participating in a tender and after-bid negotiations covers a range of psychological aspects, in addition to financial, legal, and operational ones. Also in the case of tenders, which ostensibly only involves deciding on the amount of the financial bid, an array of psychological elements come into play, some of which are hidden or unconscious. We help organizations and companies to plan and participate in the tender and conduct the pricing procedure: put together a strategy for submitting the tender, analysis of the competitors’ strategy, map-out the dynamics of decision-making, and support accompanying negotiation processes.
