Negotiation and people management skills play a pivotal role in the daily grind of deputy collectors and during special projects or operations requiring them to assemble, lead and empower a diverse and robust task force.

Keeping in view, the need for officers to hone and sharpen their negotiation and people management skills, RCVP Naronha Academy organized a training session.

The session was a part of the foundational training program for more than 30 deputy collectors. Naveen Krishna Rai, writer of “Life Management” book and senior manager, government affairs, IIM Indore, was the resource person for the session.The session familiarized the officers with the vital aspects of negotiation and people management. It explored a diverse set of management theories and models describing and prescribing the approaches of negotiation and managing people within and outside their team, department and organization and understanding how people make their decisions.

Elaborating upon how people make decisions, the underlying imperatives to understand people better were deliberated upon, which states that people have their self-beliefs.

People tend to resist information that is contradictory to the self-belief.

With the help of prospect theory, participants were told that people value gains and losses differently, placing more weight on perceived gains vs perceived losses. An individual will often pick the option of having perceived games.

Talking about negotiation, Rai told the participants about different styles, stages and strategies of negotiation.

Talking in detail about the various stages of negotiation, he told the participants that while preparing for any negotiation, one should think and understand what is the "best alternative to a negotiated agreement" available to them in case that negotiation fails, and they should not accept any offer lower than the value of that available alternative.