“Advanced Business Negotiation” series with Accenture Baltics.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn in July, 2025.

It started with Agnese Strazda then at Riga Business School, Liene Klavina and Zanda Arnava at Accenture Baltics having an idea last year to upgrade Accenture Baltic Team Leaders, Project Managers and other leading specialists toolbox with a state-of-the-art business negotiation skillset.

Several months, 35 training sessions and 100+ participants later on June 16 we celebrated the graduation of Group 7. Each group had five training sessions as part of “Advanced Business Negotiation” course, covering the main building blocks of contemporary negotiation skills development curriculum through role-play, discussion and case-analysis:

– strategy, styles (competitive vs. collaborative) and building blocks of negotiation
– effective negotiation tactics, based on understanding human psychology and neurobiology
– difficult negotiations with difficult partners
– remote and hybrid negotiation skills
– cross-cultural negotiation, applications of AI etc.

The scale of this training programme as well as the trust awarded to me was unprecedented – up-skilling a whole layer of leading specialists, managers and leaders in an organisation. I have rarely seen negotiation skills being so appreciated by clients and it makes sense that Accenture Baltics should do it – they deal with world class clients, with world-class digital transformation projects, high stakes and complex negotiation situations.

It may seem paradoxical (probably isn’t) that it is a digital company that appreciates the need for upgrading human social and self-management skills to deal with the challenges of the modern day.

After all, negotiation is about humans dealing with humans, flawed, imperfect, but fascinating.

The two most rewarding things? One – the extent to which we learned from each other. Two – the progress and success in understanding and performing better at negotiation displayed by the participants during the course. There is some truth to the stereotype that some techie types can be quite, well, techy and introvert, but everyone can improve their grasp of structural and relational aspects of negotiation to their and their negotiation partners’ benefit.

This kind of investment tends to pay for itself, pretty fast.