Model United Nations & Negotiation Skills

While my experience in Toastmasters at AU has been extremely helpful in improving my speaking skills, it is not my first foray into communications. When I was an undergraduate at Wright State University in Ohio, I participated in another great organization: Model United Nations. In many ways, it helped me learn to communicate long before I had ever heard of Toastmasters.

Model UN is an organization where each person represents a country to solve an international problem. Each delegate addresses the entire committee to make the case for his country’s policies, then negotiates with the other countries until a policy agreement can be reached.

I enjoyed this organization because it taught me one of the most valuable skills in business communications: The art of negotiation and diplomacy. This is especially difficult when the person with whom you are negotiating may not have the same goals in mind. My favorite topics to address were international security issues, precisely because they were the most contentious and most likely to spark intense negotiations among the delegates.

In many other situations, good negotiation skills can result in major successes that may not have been possible otherwise. I found that one of the most important elements of negotiation is the one that people seem to forget the most often: respect. People are much more likely to compromise if they feel that you understand their point of view and respect their goals. While respect may not always be enough to resolve complex differences, it goes a long way. The business world is governed by a different set of priorities than international politics, but this rule applies to both. While this may seem obvious, I have seen this rule of negotiation broken more than any other during my time in Model UN. The results are predictable. As soon as you view your negotiation partners as opponents to be defeated instead of potentially valuable allies, they are much more likely to dig in their heels and refuse to compromise. When instead you start from a view of mutual respect and cooperation, you are much more likely to get more of what you want.

-Jon