On August 11th, Shane English School Taiwan presented a negotiation workshop at the British Chamber of Commerce in Taipei. A total of 37 people signed up to learn how to become better negotiators, especially with people from the West.
We are all negotiators. We negotiate with our spouses, our children, our bosses and our co-workers. This doesn’t mean, however, that we are necessarily good negotiators. To become better, we need to learn how to be self-critical and how to understand where the people we negotiate are coming from. This was the focus of the Shane English School Taiwan Negotiation Workshop.
Shane English School Taiwan Negotiation Workshop
We started our course looking at our situations and defining our goals, and we looked at some cases trying to find out what the root problem was to ensure our goals were true to our desires. We followed our goal setting with learning some new terms to help us describe a negotiation and looked at the stages of a negotiation and the best things to do when opening and closing one. Students learned the importance of making a personal connection at the beginning and putting yourself in the other party’s shoes. The group practised role-playing traits from other cultures and looked into the importance of asking questions and setting expectations. Finally, we looked at the importance of making commitments based on how the other party makes commitments and reviewed all the new words that were learned.
As with any good workshop, most of the activities were based on students sharing their own stories and experiences regarding each topic covered. We shared stories of how to negotiate with one’s child to get them to do their homework and examples of negotiating with Westerners in a business context. Together we were able to get fresh perspectives on our problems.
About the Author
Michael Piraino developed and presented the Negotiation Workshop. As Director of Studies in Shane English School Taiwan’s Corporate Lessons Department, he has worked with some of Taiwan’s most successful companies. Click here for more information about Shane English Schools’ lessons on location.