As an engineer, heading into a meeting with your clients, suppliers, contractors, or colleagues can feel daunting. 

But as your career progresses into more senior project and leadership roles, these stakeholder negotiations become far more frequent and important. 

Alison Jardie is a professional facilitator and coach, psychologist, and leadership expert. She has more than 20 years’ experience working with groups and individuals, across both the government and the private sector. 

Here are her top tips on how you can build the skills to negotiate confidently and successfully. 

As you move from an “individual contributor” to a leader, there are some changes to how you need to work. 

You are no longer solely responsible for simply delivering your own work. 

Instead, you have to coordinate, communicate, negotiate and develop your team, so they can deliver their work.  

This means you spend more time working on people issues than your own technical tasks, which can be overwhelming if you haven’t understood the shift from individual contributor to leader.  

Why is negotiation a vital skill for engineering leaders and project managers?  

Negotiations are how solutions get agreed to, and how problems get solved effectively with buy-in. They are how options are debated and massaged to work for both parties. They even may influence how bills get paid! 

One challenge that engineers and project managers often need to work on is finding the right balance between either forcefully driving for the perfect outcome, or being too quiet and allowing others to dominate. 

Finding your own strengths in negotiation goes a long way toward building confidence and presence as a leader.  

What are some situations where an engineering leader or project manager needs to deploy their negotiation skills?  

Navigating through scope changes, variations and delays are typical examples that come up for project managers, who are often balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders with competing demands.   

In general, any decisions where opinions vary can benefit from negotiation skills, as well as situations where you are seeking a favourable outcomes such as salary reviews, distribution of team workload, buying or selling goods and services, and agreeing a course of action during change.  

What are  the benefits of having strong negotiating skills?  

Building your negotiation skills means you can approach conversations with confidence, and you are more likely to plan and prepare effectively.  

You can also spot different negotiation styles in others, which gives you clues on what approach might be most effective.  

This will help you achieve a better outcome in the many daily conversations with team members, contractors and stakeholders, as well as those trickier situations where the stakes are high.   

As a side note, these skills are terrific for home and personal use as well as work!  

Why is psychology so central to the negotiation process?  

Ultimately, the better we are at building trust and understanding the drivers of the other party, the better you can work with others to find a win-win solution.   

The skills you need to develop to do this include rapport building, listening, emotional intelligence, understanding personal styles. You also need to be willing to flex and engage in genuine dialogue.  

They are things that can be obstructed by human behaviours such as ego, assumptions, a drive to be right, and a drive to win.   

What tips or advice do you have for engineers who are entering a negotiation?  

Adopt a mindset of curiosity to understand the perspective of the other party and decide up front whether the ongoing relationship is worth investing in, then take the time to listen.  

There is a better solution and long-term outcome when you can collaborate for mutual gain.  

If you’re looking to sharpen your negotiation skills, don’t miss Alison’s upcoming course on Negotiation Skills and Influencing Strategies.