Negotiations class pushes students to hone bargaining skills

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Negotiations class pushes students to hone bargaining skills
At the polar ends of a spectrum, there are two types of negotiators: the Turkish rug merchant and the Italian mob boss. Vice President and General Counsel Robert Norton recommends that you be neither. Pexels.

At the polar ends of a spectrum, there are two types of negotiators: the Turkish rug merchant and the Italian mob boss. Vice President and General Counsel Robert Norton recommends that you be neither.

“You should be somewhere in the middle,” said senior Anna Eby, who’s taking Norton’s negotiations class this semester. She said she thought she was too “nice” to be a negotiator, but she’s learning that the best negotiators add value — both for themselves and for the other parties.

Norton has taught the two-credit negotiation class at Hillsdale for a few years now, and he said his goal is to teach students a skill even most lawyers are missing.

“I decided to teach it because I believe it is an essential skill that few people ever receive any training in,” Norton said in an email. “Only a fraction of practicing attorneys ever receive any training in it. It was less than 10 percent the last time that I heard a statistic.”

Eby said she took the class because she thought of herself as a bad negotiator.

“I kind of went into the class thinking that I was an awful negotiator because my view of negotiations was that just kind of like, ‘I’ll give you 10 dollars for this.’ ‘No, 15.’ ‘No, 12.’ Then you finally agree at something in the middle,” Eby said. “I’m finding out that it’s much more about what kind of value you can add to people and how you can create value for yourself. And everybody’s happier in the end.”

For the first assignment of the semester, Norton asks students to take a small item and trade it for something more valuable. Last semester, it was glow-in-the-dark fish bait. This semester, it was Valentine’s chocolate and Starbursts.

“It wasn’t even good chocolate either,” Eby said. “It was shaped like a dog.”

Norton challenges the students to use their networks, their knowledge, any means at their disposal, to trade the trinkets for something worthwhile to them. His only rule: don’t lie.

Eby won the challenge this year, turning her candy into a $403 value. She drew a diagram of the many negotiations it took for her to arrive at the end, and it took up almost a whole sheet of notebook paper. She traded for everything from food to a guided tour, landing assets such as wine, a piece of commissioned artwork, 30 minutes of puppy time in the student union, and a group trip to Central Hall. Eby said she was probably overcompensating, but it worked out well.

“I really got into this. I was kind of terrified because I was like, ‘I’m going to do awful on this,’ so I think I just really overcompensated. And I tried really hard, and I did a lot better than I thought I was going to,” she said. “I talked to like every person I know and tried to trade something to them. I used social media to advertise.”

Norton has been teaching negotiations classes for almost 30 years, but he said he’s still learning too.

“It is has been 27 years since my first negotiation class, and I realize that I still have much to learn and improve upon,” he said. “I hope that students come away more confident in their negotiating skills and looking for opportunities to achieve great results for themselves, their families and the organizations they care most about.”

Rachel Solomito ’17, who also took the class, said she would recommend it to other students.

“This is a normal part of life, people negotiate all the time,” she said. “Even relationships with other people, there’s a soft negotiation there. It’s everywhere, and I think it’s probably good to take the class to be exposed to the fact that it is everywhere.”