Want to Be a Better Negotiator? Learn to Listen.

Life is full of negotiations. At work, we negotiate contract terms and conditions, flex time and pay raises. At home, we negotiate where to go on vacation, what to order for dinner — and how much screen time is too much screen time.

Given how frequently we negotiate, it’s perhaps surprising that one of the most important skills of effective negotiation is often overlooked or undervalued: listening.

“The stereotype of a great negotiator is skewed,” says Allison Elias, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “People tend to think the more competitive and selfish you are, the better you’ll do. What they overlook is that some of the most astute negotiators actually use listening as part of their competitive strategy.”

Elias teaches courses about communication and negotiation in Darden's MBA and Executive MBA programs, as well as for executive education audiences. But over the years, she found there was little practical guidance on how to listen well in a negotiation.

Until now.

Her new technical note, “Listening: A Negotiator’s Playbook,” introduces a three-phase listening framework designed to make listening teachable and actionable. And it’s not confined to work or business settings — it can be applied to everyday life.

“We tell people in class to listen to the other person,” she says. “But how do you really do that well? What's the purpose? And why should you care?”

The note, she adds, fills a gap in the curriculum. “Renewing my mediation certification recently really emphasized the importance of listening in conflict resolution. And in negotiation too, you cannot be a great negotiator without listening well.”

Elias will be teaching the note in her fourth-quarter elective, “Negotiation.”

Her goal is to get students to think about how intentional one needs to be as a listener.

“When we prepare for negotiation, a lot of times we tend to over-focus on our own interests, our own planning, what we're going to say,” says Elias. “But there could also be real value in preparing to listen, and brainstorming questions to ask the other person to try to understand them better and really listening to their answers.”

Why Negotiators Need to Listen

“Listening is not just a nice thing to do,” says Elias. “It has cognitive and affective benefits.”

In other words, when you’re listening intently, you're learning new information that can help create or claim value in the negotiation. Listening also engenders a positive feeling between the parties and helps with relationship-building. “The consequence is that the other person feels respected,” she says.

Yet often, listening is easier said than done. When asked to describe a good listener, most people jump instead to what makes someone a bad listener, says Elias. They point to traits such as interrupting, responding vaguely or illogically, being distracted and fidgeting.

Being a good listener means more than just avoiding these behaviors.

“High-quality listening requires psychological presence, cognitive attention and emotional responsiveness,” Elias says.

How to listen: A Three-Phase Framework

Phase One: Prepare to observe and absorb.

Elias says one of the biggest obstacles she encounters when she teaches negotiation is a lack of curiosity about the other person’s perspective and world view.

“A lot of times I see people rush through the negotiation too fast, and students will say, ‘If this were real, I would have spent more time on it’,” Elias explains. “But if you're really trying to understand another person, you’re trying to talk to them at length and ask them a lot of questions.”

She adds, “Sometimes we take too narrow of a view of what would be relevant in the negotiation, only focusing on the main issues on the table. If you can develop a curiosity about the other person, you're going to be a better listener and more expansive about what you're considering in the negotiation.”

The first phase of the framework is understanding that gaining leverage in a negotiation can begin before any words are exchanged.

“Effective negotiators prepare well by doing their research,” Elias says. “As they gather information and reflect on what they know, they also embrace the fact that there is a lot that they do not know.”

The core aim of this phase is to create conditions for openness. And to do that, Elias says, you must center yourself to quiet powerful cognitive traps, including confirmation bias.

Skilled negotiators bring an authentic curiosity to the discussion. “Embrace what you do not know,” she adds.

Phase Two: Engage and Interpret Signals

This phase is about being present during the conversation and taking note of various signals, including the dynamics of who’s who in the room.

“As effective listeners enter into a conversation, they take note of nonverbal cues such as the physical positioning of others in the room and their emotional states,” says Elias. “These observations provide additional information, perhaps about what has unfolded previously, to guide a communication strategy.”

Negotiators can absorb valuable information from all of these signals.

Doing so requires listening beyond words, attending to emotions and group dynamics, mirroring and paraphrasing conversations, and asking open-ended questions.

Phase Three: Monitor the Agreement as Partners

Elias says that negotiation courses tend to focus mostly on securing an agreement and neglect what happens next.

“Listening should not end when agreement is reached,” she says.

On the contrary.

“A lot of where value is created is in the phase after an agreement is created,” Elias says. “During the implementation phase, you need to continue to have curiosity, flexibility and awareness of the other person because there might be ways you need to tweak the agreement, or things that you hadn't thought of before that need to be considered.”

You should also broaden your audience as the implementation phase unfolds. “Additional stakeholders who were not parties during the negotiation might emerge as critical to a deal’s success,” she adds.

The key takeaway from this phase is to maintain contact with more parties and remain open to adjustments.

Talk Less. Listen Better.

While listening is one of the most powerful tools a negotiator can bring to the table, we can all benefit from being good listeners. That means listening carefully and purposefully to other people.

Professor Allison Elias is author of the new technical note, “Listening: A Negotiator’s Playbook,” published by Darden Business Publishing (December 2025).