Negotiating Negotiations

Winter Session students learn the benefits of give-and-take bargaining

'When negotiating, you've got to be yourself and find a style that works...Negotiating is a social process, a teachable and learnable skill.'

 

– Bill Dwyer

The art of effective negotiation is an everyday essential: Whether bargaining with an employer for a raise or with a roommate about whose turn it is to take out the trash.

“Negotiations take place every day, in many places, about many things,” said Bill Dwyer, an instructor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) who teaches the popular winter session course “Negotiation”. “Negotiating is a life skill. It’s about gaining value for yourself, but having the other party win something, too.”                    

Dwyer is no stranger to the negotiation wars. He joined SMLR full time in 2013 after logging more than 30 years as a labor and employment relations practitioner with Public Service Enterprise Group, the parent of PSE&G.  He also has worked as a court-appointed mediator since 1994.

In his Labor Education Center office in New Brunswick, he recalled his first session as a lead negotiator. “I was very tough,” he said, pointing to a small canine figurine on his bookcase. “That’s where I got my nickname, ‘mad dog.’”  

Though he scored a victory, the two-time Rutgers graduate (bachelor’s degree in labor studies, master’s in labor and industrial relations) was not entirely pleased because his hard-boiled performance was out of character. “When negotiating, you’ve got to be yourself and find a style that works,” he said. “When we start the course, I ask students about their comfort level with the process. Negotiating is a social process, a teachable and learnable skill.”

Dwyer believes in the “dual concerns” model of negotiation, which seeks to balance the importance of the relationship between the two sides and the importance of the outcome. Squarely in the middle lies compromise, a worthy, if not easily attainable goal.

There are two types of bargaining, Dwyer said, distributive and integrative. As an example of the former, he cites an employee seeking a 5 percent pay raise. His boss counters with 2 percent and they compromise in the middle.

Integrative bargaining is more complex. “Each side needs to figure out what they, as well as the other, really wants and why,” Dwyer said. “We call these interests. By identifying and discussing interests, the parties can begin to explore settlement options. By finding an option that meets the interests of the parties, you can arrive at a more 'elegant' solution.”

Students put theory into practice during each class, which will feature both a lecture and a hands-on negotiations exercise. Many scenarios will be work related, but Dwyer observed that negotiations leading to collaborative solutions are often carried out at venues other than the bargaining table. For instance, dinner tables have seen their share of compromises, he said.

Serge Sachko, a part-time MBA candidate at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, found he needed to do some negotiating before enrolling in Dwyer’s class.

As a supply chain professional with Johnson & Johnson, Sachko regularly negotiates with colleagues and vendors on their manufacturing and project activities while readying a controlled substance medication for an 80-country market. He thought the intensive, three-credit elective would complement his supply-chain concentration, but because of curriculum differences between SMLR and RBS he needed to convince the business school. He got the green light – only to find enrollment had been capped.

“I’d read great student reviews about Professor Dwyer,” Sachko said. “I thought I could learn new negotiating tricks to get my external contacts to be more flexible and creative to solve our day-to-day issues. So I emailed him about my job and asked for special permission to enroll.”

As soon as Dwyer read the email, Sachko’s negotiation to enroll was successful.

“He had me at, ‘Hello, Dr. Dwyer.’ It was flattering,” joked Dwyer. “Seriously, I thought Serge could bring a lot to the class with all his work experience and insight he could offer.”

To learn more about Rutgers University-New Brunswick Winter Session, visit wintersession.rutgers.edu.