Term Paper on Negotiation - Essay Example

My job as a trainee was to work closely with the head of the Training and Development Department and basically shadow him on the job to learn the breadth of his work. My boss and I put our heads together to schedule the year’s calendar and make our proposal that we put forward to the Director of HR. We proposed that the HR Department let us initiate a series of employee training modules and seminars that would continue year round. The problem was that HR had a limited budget and credible external trainers were charging exorbitant rates.

Also, in this organization, the Training and Development Department was seen as an extra wheel, one that was not critical to the functioning of the company and thus the Director of HR would normally prioritize other departments over the Training and Development Department. My boss was a young guy in his 30s; he was driven and smart and had proliferate experience in his line of work given his age. He was a published author, a motivational trainer and read extensively all new research related to his field.

He was dedicated to his work and put in longer hours than necessary, but was exasperated by the fact that the Director of HR was not prioritizing the needs of his department and instead saw the action of granting them the proposed budget a waste of money which would yield negligible returns for the company. One of the things that my boss lacked, in spite of being very knowledgeable in his field of work was how to negotiate with another person to get what he wanted. He would get very emotional and heated up about his viewpoint and would not be willing to listen to the other person’s side of the story.

I noticed through his dealings with various other people that even when he did, his focus during the negotiation would be on how important he thought his own agenda was and he wouldn’t properly acknowledge why the other person’s aim or request could be equally as important. As driven as he was to work for the betterment of the company, he couldn’t bring himself to be impartial in negotiations and leave his emotions about the whole thing at the door. And these were the same issues that posed the hurdle in our consequent dealings with the director of HR.

Had my boss been able to listen to the Director of HR’s view point without getting heated up or explain to him the importance of our agenda while being impartial about the whole decision, maybe the Director of HR would have considered our proposal and maybe even accepted it and things would have gone completely differently compared to how they eventually did because of the unsuccessful negotiations that followed. The mountain we had to climb, between my boss and I, was to negotiate with and convince the Director of HR that funding the proposed trainings and seminars would have a substantial beneficial effect on the productivity of the company’s employees and consequently the company itself.

The problem was, that the effect of education and training is hard to quantify in an organization because the effects are not immediate but only apparent in the long term. We had heated meetings all week and it was very apparent that my boss and the Director of HR were adamantly at odds and often times the meetings turned ugly in the form of verbal abuse from both sides. Neither my boss, nor the Director of H