The World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs Report highlights how AI is moving from experimentation to core business operations, something which is having a direct impact across all manner of roles. According to the report, on average, 39% of workers’ core skills worldwide will be subject to disruption and evolution by 2030, with some countries undergoing even more transformation. As demand rises for augmented organisations where human judgement is now amplified by AI and the subsequent shift in skills required, we must equip our teams to meet these needs.
There are five top skills currently highlighted by employers as most important: analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness. It’s these key skills which will not only have to shift in line with the expected disruption, but will also explode in value as AI continues to embed itself in our daily work. The beauty of this is they are the same skillset required for modern negotiation.
The art of negotiation is the art of possibility and as such it requires skills including leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and AI and big data. Negotiation is a meta skill which sits at the intersection of the combination of these core skills.
Having seen how jobs are changing and the disruption caused to skills by AI, the question then becomes how do we best prepare our next generation of leaders? Here’s my top five tips:
Practice – and by this I mean real world exposure. Exposure therapy is the number one way to improve negotiation confidence and strategy. Negotiation confidence is earned in the arena and I recommend setting weekly challenges for your team. This could be pushing back on a supplier or even elevating language – such as replacing linguistic crutch words like “very” and “really” that dilute authority, with precise words such as “exceptional” and “insight driven”. This signals quality rather than vagueness. Similarly, the challenge could be to focus on improving the duration of listening time during presentations and subsequent silences between responses. Measuring this across the team turns it into a friendly competition whilst reinforcing its importance and value.
The future of negotiation is the hybrid negotiator. This is the executive who can combine AI driven intelligence with the human led persuasion, judgement and trust. AI gives you the efficiency and the ability to analyse the data and spot the trends as well as enhancing your negotiation preparation through expansion of value creation and simulation. However, it must be balanced with the human principles of authenticity, intuition and connection to ensure expert delivery and understanding. Have your teams use AI to prepare for negotiations. Ask AI to identify headwinds, tailwinds and areas of value creation in a specific deal, leveraging its speed and creativity to expand the size of the pie.
Listening to understand, not to respond. This is still massively underutilised. Interruptions and finishing off sentences all signal to the counter party you think you know better than them – this decreases connection and trust. Whereas listening to understand creates the space for alignment and the opportunity to bond. Listening, truly listening, and probing deeper to understand the underlying motivations of the other party is vital in leadership and social influence. Track optimal speaking vs listening amounts in meetings using AI.
Cultivate a growth mindset. This means learning never stops and you approach each conversation with the intention of curiosity. Doing so will enable you to look to further your understanding and generate insights about the other party. In turn, this makes it easier to spot opportunities for mutual value gain, and the creation and deepening of a trusted relationship. Develop a series of five open questions that establish a curiosity protocol for each client meeting, track responses in a notion page and have AI keep a real time analysis of the top trends for answers. This creates a self-fulfilling loop and places possibility and curiosity at the top of your team’s culture.
Leverage AI as your negotiation coach across the commercial team. Make it part of your approach for every high-stakes deal. Ask it to role-play the conversation and give you suggestions on how to be more empathic. For example, ask it to play the role of an angry and frustrated client whose shipment has been delayed and therefore trust has been broken, or an abrasive business partner that gets under your skin. Then have it coach you through the situation and give feedback on your responses in real time so that it can show you how to embrace the energy of empathy.
About the author: Tim Castle is a mindset and performance coach and founder of business and career training programs, including the Negotiator’s Edge. With leading business growth knowledge and deep experience in developing high performing teams across commercial, account management, solutions and operations, Tim coaches teams and individuals to reach their maximum potential, creating momentum, stability and establishing clear strategic advantage. He is the bestselling author of four books, and is soon to release his fifth book Magnetic Influence: How to negotiate and persuade in a disrupted world.