Everything you don´t learn in the lab
Negotiation skills for scientists
Topic area
(Self-) management
Format
Online or in-house workshop
Workload
Online: 2 x 2.5 h-webinars plus self-paced work on our learning platform
In-house: 2 workshop days
Trainer
Philipp Gramlich
Target group
PhD students, postdocs and junior group leaders
In brief
In this workshop, you’ll learn to negotiate your salary, contract and working conditions, and to engage constructively in conflicts.
Description
Negotiations are crucial to success in all types of careers. Yet many people dislike negotiating: they worry about damaging relationships or feel they have to be sleazy or aggressive to ‘win’.
There is another way. In this workshop, you’ll learn and practise principled negotiation: how to stand up for your interests without unnecessarily damaging relationships. You’ll apply these skills to salary and contract negotiations, difficult workplace situations and conflicts.
In this course, you’ll learn about:
Salary and contract negotiations
- Salary benchmarks and when to leave the table.
- What else can you negotiate besides salary?
- Negotiating contracts and working conditions.
Hard vs. soft: principled negotiation
- Do you need to be ‘tough’ to ‘win’ or is there a better way?
- Does the relationship with the other side have to suffer?
- Can I be assertive about my interests without being ‘bossy’?
Negotiation for conflict resolution
- Getting buy-in from the other side to reach lasting agreements.
- Looking for win-win solutions that address both sides’ interests.
- Using negotiation principles to mediate conflicts between others.
Gender and institutional perspectives
- How can stereotypes and social expectations affect negotiations and their outcomes?
- The institutional perspective on the gender pay gap: moving beyond the zero-sum game.
Workshop format and materials
We offer this workshop online internationally and in-house at universities and research institutions in Germany and across Europe.
Online: Two interactive 2.5-hour webinars, combined with self-paced work on our learning platform. Alongside the webinar phase, participants have three weeks to deepen their learning and can receive individual feedback from the trainers.
In-house: Two interactive workshop days. All participants receive a PDF script of the course, allowing them to revisit the material afterwards.
More information and next steps
Interested in reading more about negotiation principles? We recommend reading Getting to yes, the basis for the Harvard Negotiation Principles. You can also read Philipp’s career column Salary and contract negotiations, originally published in Nachrichten aus der Chemie.
This course can be used in the context of gender and diversity: For PhD students and postdocs: how can we play this playing field more successfully? For PIs: How can we change the playing field towards fairer negotiations, and do we want this at all? Other workshops with relevance to gender and diversity are: Staff selection, biases and stereotypes and Intercultural communication and awareness.
This course can be extended into the field of Conflict management to give the full 2-day workshop “Conflict management”.
Interested in the topic, but less time available? You might be interested in our talk Harvard Negotiation Principles.