Self – Appraisal Paper

Self – Appraisal Paper

Introduction:

The Managerial Negotiation course has allowed me to introspect, analyze my skills as a negotiator and discover my shortcomings. The course also allowed me to analyze the strengths and weakness of my peers, and understand how negotiations take places in a multicultural environment.  

In this self – appraisal paper, I seek to navigate through the entire course: I first discuss my strengths and weakness (my introspection from the past and my understanding of self during the class), followed by the peer tactics that I admire during negotiations and my learnings from the classroom sessions. I, then, analyze my progression as a competitor by comparing a real-life experience with an in-class negotiation and end the paper with my learnings from the course and the future negotiator I aspire to be.

My Self – Appraisal: 

Strengths: During the self-appraisal, I, as a negotiator, found myself to quickly shift gears whenever the situation demanded me to do so. In all of my negotiations, I initially started off as a fierce negotiator, making my intent clear to the other party that I wanted most off the pie – in doing so, I ensured that my offer was heard and my arguments paid enough attention. However, with time, I mellowed down and focussed on collaboration, so that, the other negotiator appreciated that I was trying to ensure joint value instead of “pie-grabbing exercise”.

[ I discovered this strength through my personal experiences too -  In India, I negotiated for a condo that I intended to rent. I started off by making sure that the owner knew my budget was fixed, but gradually moved to making compromises by making her understand that I would take good care of the place.]

My competitive personality was aided by my intuitive and analytical thinking. During any negotiation, either in-class exercise or real-life, I ran back off the envelope calculations to understand my reservation point. The calculated reservation point and knowing my BATNA allowed me to walk away from the table, understanding that the deal added no value.  

[ Once in my professional experiences, during a job-switch negotiation, I knew that the BATNA was to keep working for the same firm I was employed with.  I decided to wait for my appraisal instead of switching to a new firm because the salary offered by the new firm was below my reservation point.]

Weakness: I discovered this during the in-class exercises that I wasn’t as data – driven in negotiations as most of my colleagues were. I initially perceived this as a good thing because I tended to focus more on negotiations than unnecessary numbers. However, the perception changed when I started working in team negotiations and realized that the evidence helped us ground our discussions more strongly.