Skills of Negotiation

Course overview

Secure 10% off per delegate for May 2026's Skills of Negotiation course by emailing [email protected]. This offer ends 30 April 2026 and is subject to availability, so book today to avoid missing out. 

This two-and-a-half-day course equips participants with a practical, deal focused negotiation toolkit tailored for private equity and venture capital environments. Through a blend of case studies, role-play exercises, and insights drawn from real world deal dynamics, delegates learn how to prepare, structure, and execute negotiations with clarity, confidence, and strategic intent.

The course emphasises the behavioural and communication skills that differentiate high performing deal professionals, helping delegates understand the motivations, pressures, and decision-making drivers of counterparties, including founders, management teams, co-investors, advisers, and lenders. By the end, participants are better able to create value, manage tension, and reach agreements that support long-term partnership.

Key topics include

• What is negotiation?
  • Competitive or collaborative?
  • Recognising different approaches
• Behaviours of effective negotiators
  • Identifying behaviours of good and bad negotiators
  • Assessing your own style
  • Personal objectives
• Multiparty negotiation case study
• Planning to negotiate
• Persuasion levers
• Conflict resolution
• Control skills (questioning, listening, silence)
• Dealing with certainty vs ambiguity
• Simulation

What will delegates take away?

• Prepare and plan effectively for negotiations, using frameworks.
• Recognise behavioural dynamics, including reading signals, managing emotions, and understanding the interests behind stated positions. 
• Communicate and influence with impact, using questioning, listening, and framing techniques. 
• Navigate multi-party negotiations.
• Manage challenging conversations.
• Reflect on personal negotiation style, identifying strengths and development areas to improve performance in real deal contexts.

Benefits to employers

• More effective deal teams equipped with structured, consistent negotiation approaches that lead to better commercial outcomes. 
• Stronger founder and management relationships, improving trust, alignment, and long-term value creation potential. 
• Reduced deal friction, with teams able to pre-empt issues, manage complexity, and maintain momentum through critical stages. 
• Improved cross-functional collaboration, especially with portfolio teams, legal advisers, and operating partners. 
• Risk aware negotiation, ensuring teams understand not only the value upside but the governance, people, and reputational implications of negotiation choices.

FAQs about this course

Course Directors

Janet Izatt

Course Director

Janet is a Partner at MaguireIzatt, a management consulting firm which helps business achieve sustainable growth through their commercial - buying, selling and supplier management - activities. She has over 20 years’ experience in sales, procurement and contract management practice in both the public and private sectors across industries and functions. She regularly delivers leadership, negotiation, commercial skills, strategy and innovation and supplier management programmes to a wide range of organisations. She has been a UK Private Capital Course Director for many years for both in-house and open programme delivery of the Skills of Negotiation programme along with developing and delivering more bespoke programmes for UK Private Capital members.

Her clients have included British American Tobacco, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Parcelforce Worldwide, Research Council UK Shared Services Centre Ltd, Environment Agency, Royal Mail, London Underground, Transport for London, Direct Line, SKF, ERIKS and Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. She has worked extensively across functions and levels always receiving warm praise and highly positive feedback for her ability to engage workshops participants through her flexible and interactive style and her ability to help people make connections and link messages and information to their own world.

She has PhD from Warwick Business School (WBS) for her behavioural science research on public tender bid evaluation and an MBA from Lancaster University. She has taught on undergraduate and postgraduate modules at WBS for the marketing and operations groups. Her research interests are in judgement and decision marketing in business-to-government (B2G) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. 

Rob Maguire

Course Director

Rob is a Partner at MaguireIzatt. He is a highly experienced management consultant with 30 years of extensive purchasing, sales and business experience across a wide range of industries and sectors. He has built a successful consulting business specializing in procurement, sales and commercial management which has seen continued year on year growth for the past 15 years.

Prior to establishing his own business Robert worked for management consulting firms PwC and EY and held senior operational roles in leading international firms including household product company ReckittBenckiser where he was European Purchasing Managerpower tools company Black & Decker; and automotive companies Rover Group and BMW.

Course testimonial

CPD accreditation

This course is CPD accredited by the CPD Certification Service for 18 hours. By attending this course, you will receive a digital certificate from Diplomasafe. This certificate allows you to share and save your new CPD accredited qualification on LinkedIn, adding instantly verifiable credentials and strengthening your professional profile.

Code of Conduct - Attendance at L&D courses

UK Private Capital is committed to bringing members together in a professional environment to collaborate and network. We have established this code of conduct to provide guidelines to participants, and to ensure that all participants understand what behaviour is expected of them at our training courses.

View Code of Conduct