What is Negotiation?

You negotiate every day — you just don't always call it that.

Negotiating a salary. Deciding where to eat with friends. Convincing a professor to extend a deadline. Splitting household chores. Each involves two or more parties with different preferences trying to reach an agreement.

Negotiation is any process where parties with differing interests communicate to reach a mutually acceptable outcome. The key word is mutually — if one side simply imposes their will, that's not negotiation. It's coercion.

Two Approaches

Distributive negotiation (zero-sum): One side's gain is the other's loss. Haggling over a car price is distributive — every dollar the buyer saves, the seller loses.

Integrative negotiation (value-creating): Both sides can gain by finding creative solutions that address each party's underlying interests. This is the approach taught at Harvard's Program on Negotiation and the one used by professional diplomats.

Most real negotiations have elements of both. Even in a salary negotiation (seemingly distributive), you might create value by negotiating on multiple dimensions: base pay, signing bonus, vacation days, remote work flexibility, title. What costs the employer little might matter a lot to you, and vice versa.

Distributive vs. Integrative at a Glance

Most real negotiations are a blend. A skilled negotiator creates value first through integrative moves, then claims a fair share of it through distributive ones. Treating a multi-issue deal as if it were a single-number haggle is one of the most common and costly beginner mistakes.

Worked Example: The Multi-Issue Job Offer

Maya receives a job offer with a base salary of $80,000. Purely distributive thinking says: push the number up. Instead, she maps four issues she cares about and estimates what each costs the employer:

• Base salary — she wants $90k; every dollar costs the company a dollar and strains its salary bands.
• Signing bonus — one-time, drawn from a separate budget, easy to approve.
• Remote days — worth a lot to Maya (a long commute), costs the company almost nothing.
• Start date — she wants four extra weeks; the company actually prefers a later start anyway.

Maya proposes: $85k base, a $6k signing bonus, three remote days, and a start one month out. The company accepts happily. The concessions that mattered most to Maya were cheap for them, while they protected their pay structure. Both sides end up better off than in a pure $90k-or-nothing fight. That is integrative negotiation in miniature: expand the set of issues, then trade across them by relative value.