Skip to main content
Search

Negotiating with regulators

Published on March 31, 2026   7 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi, I'm Susan Raines, and today we're going to talk about negotiating with regulators.
0:07
A key takeaway is that proaction beats reaction every time. I learned these tips from many years of working with intergovernmental water issues. Water is an issue that spans borders, so it might be an international negotiation, interstate negotiation, and then within a boundary, it also involves local, county or regional, as well as national bodies, civic groups, etc. Sometimes, even real estate and business interests. We really want to talk about how do we negotiate and manage these issues across these very contentious groups. I have been a professor of conflict management for 23 years. I'm now a diplomat, also working on international negotiations and issues, and I look forward to covering this material with you.
0:59
Stop and think for a minute about who regulates your work. Whether you work in a restaurant or you work in a multinational financial firm, wherever you work, there are people and organizations that regulate you, everything from something like a Department of Labor, environmental regulations, things like import and export laws, worker safety, tax agencies, of course, can't get away from that. Stop and think about, even make a list of what are the organizations that regulate and impact your work. We hope, of course, not to hear from them unless something goes wrong. But the reality is, we need to work together, especially if we're doing something innovative and big, like building a new factory, expanding a plant, introducing a new product into the market. Any of these things are going to require a lot of interaction with regulators. We want to be proactive in building and maintaining those relationships, so that when problems arise, we can call that person we know and say, "Hey, can you help work this with me, work through it. Can you advise me? How can we become in compliance, if we are out of compliance? Can we have more time?" Those are the things that we can do when we have connections and build relationships during the good times to call on during the bad times.

Quiz available with full talk access. Request Free Trial or Login.

Show
Hide

Negotiating with regulators

Embed in course/own notes