How Are Your Negotiating Skills?
Sunday, March 30th, 2003 Auto Liability PropertyAs a risk manager, are you getting your fair share? Of budget dollars? Of insurer premium concessions? Of coverage on that disputed property claim? Of pay raises in your own job? If your bargaining skills are not honed, there is a good chance that you may be shortchanging yourself. An often-overlooked risk management tool is negotiating. To paraphrase the ad line of a popular negotiating training program, in life and in risk management, you don’t always get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate! Yet, ironically, negotiating is a soft skill that is notoriously hard to acquire. Many risk managers with superb quantitative talents might do better investing in a negotiating course than a CRM or ARM program. (Better still, do them all.) Especially in hard insurance markets with high prices and low coverage limits, risk managers can add value to their companies by upgrading their negotiating savvy.
