Words: 932 Reading time: 3 minutes 6 seconds
It’s most odd. Life calls for negotiation, but some advise that our first tactic should be to avoid it altogether if possible. Well, it’s neither possible, nor desirable – ever. And here are a few reasons why.
Negotiation is everywhere and everyday. It isn’t confined to the realms of industrial disputes and international discord. It is also about the mundane — who does the washing up.
One lady I was discussing this with thought she had avoided any negotiating over the washing up by buying a dishwasher. She had not registered the negotiating it had taken to reach that decision in the first place and the subsequent negotiating over who filled it and who emptied it. Those jobs still needed doing. Negotiation could not be avoided.
Negotiation is not a one-time event. It goes on even when most people think they have finished.
Just imagine that you buy a cabbage from the market. The stallholder was happy with the price, you were happy with the cabbage. That is, until you got it home, cut into it and discovered that some bug had eaten away the inside. At this point you may decide to return to the market and recommence negotiating.
Alternatively, should the cabbage look wholesome you will cook and eat it. Is that the end of the negotiation? Not if you are subsequently violently ill as a result. That would almost certainly affect your negotiating stance.
But suppose, instead, that you really enjoyed your cabbage. You decide to buy another next week. Now a negotiation that was ‘finished’ is affecting future actions. And the enjoyment of your cabbage will affect the price you are likely to pay when next dealing with that vendor. Negotiation over? I don’t think so.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that negotiating over things like pay and conditions is a continuous process; even when no union is involved. Every day that you go to work you are asking yourself, sub-consciously, if the reward is worth the effort.
We negotiate with ourselves. The examples given so far involve another party. That is always the second step. Before we reach it we will have already negotiated with ourselves. Some people appear to be good at this; they are tagged as ‘self-disciplined’. Others appear to be not so good; they are tagged ‘weak-willed’.
As the working presupposition is that every behaviour is motivated by a positive intent how one classifies the eventual outcome from this is unclear. Steve McDermott puts it this way, “if you set out to fail and you succeed, what have you done?”
Practice makes perfect or, as Vince Lombardi had it: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” If we accept that negotiations occur over and over in our lives in an endless stream, then we will get a better outcome each time if we work on improving our performance. That means getting into the water, not sitting on the side.
We get a better result when we do. Although it takes two to create a relationship, it takes only one to change its quality. Could you influence the quality of your relationships and improve the results you get by negotiating? Absolutely; in the right conditions (negotiation) we get better results when we work with other people (negotiation) than when we work against them or when we work alone.
Good negotiation isn’t about winning and losing. If the negotiation is handled well, then both sides come away with more than they started out. If you don’t satisfy the other person’s needs as well as your own, it’s not a good agreement. As former US President Jimmy Carter put it, “Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.”
As bizarre as it may sound, that means that all parties to a negotiation have to be aware of the wants and needs of the other party and work as hard to satisfy those as they work to satisfy their own. Good negotiation is about sitting together on the same side of the table and tackling the problem together. Adversarial negotiation is a poor second cousin by comparison.
Advice that runs “if you give away a concession without asking for something in return, the other side will carry on asking for concessions until you say no...” takes a depressing view of humanity and its relationships.
Would you rather have 10 pence given willingly, or 50 pence given begrudgingly? I thought so. And the same is true of everyone. If you paint your negotiating partner as ruthless and without scruples, then guess what you are going to get?
This goes to the heart of good negotiation and, perhaps, one of the biggest fallacies that so many in the field choose to perpetuate: negotiation is about compromise. It isn’t.
Compromise is the dirtiest word in negotiation, because in negotiation compromise isn’t the goal. It’s the fallback if nothing better can be achieved.
When you start with compromise, you’re tacitly inviting everyone to give up something important in order to reach an agreement. That’s no place to begin, because there are other highly effective ways to approach negotiating that have little to do with compromise.
If you define personal and business negotiating primarily in terms of compromise, you create a pattern that’s all about giving up and horse-trading. That’s not the greatest foundation on which to build any long-term relationship.
So, what is my key tip for negotiating? It comes from Tammy Lenski: “To resolve an argument someone has to be the adult. And if it’s not the other person, it had better be you.”
It’s most odd. Life calls for negotiation, but some advise that our first tactic should be to avoid it altogether if possible. Well, it’s neither possible, nor desirable – ever. And here are a few reasons why.
Negotiation is everywhere and everyday. It isn’t confined to the realms of industrial disputes and international discord. It is also about the mundane — who does the washing up.
One lady I was discussing this with thought she had avoided any negotiating over the washing up by buying a dishwasher. She had not registered the negotiating it had taken to reach that decision in the first place and the subsequent negotiating over who filled it and who emptied it. Those jobs still needed doing. Negotiation could not be avoided.
Negotiation is not a one-time event. It goes on even when most people think they have finished.
Just imagine that you buy a cabbage from the market. The stallholder was happy with the price, you were happy with the cabbage. That is, until you got it home, cut into it and discovered that some bug had eaten away the inside. At this point you may decide to return to the market and recommence negotiating.
Alternatively, should the cabbage look wholesome you will cook and eat it. Is that the end of the negotiation? Not if you are subsequently violently ill as a result. That would almost certainly affect your negotiating stance.
But suppose, instead, that you really enjoyed your cabbage. You decide to buy another next week. Now a negotiation that was ‘finished’ is affecting future actions. And the enjoyment of your cabbage will affect the price you are likely to pay when next dealing with that vendor. Negotiation over? I don’t think so.
With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that negotiating over things like pay and conditions is a continuous process; even when no union is involved. Every day that you go to work you are asking yourself, sub-consciously, if the reward is worth the effort.
We negotiate with ourselves. The examples given so far involve another party. That is always the second step. Before we reach it we will have already negotiated with ourselves. Some people appear to be good at this; they are tagged as ‘self-disciplined’. Others appear to be not so good; they are tagged ‘weak-willed’.
As the working presupposition is that every behaviour is motivated by a positive intent how one classifies the eventual outcome from this is unclear. Steve McDermott puts it this way, “if you set out to fail and you succeed, what have you done?”
Practice makes perfect or, as Vince Lombardi had it: “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” If we accept that negotiations occur over and over in our lives in an endless stream, then we will get a better outcome each time if we work on improving our performance. That means getting into the water, not sitting on the side.
We get a better result when we do. Although it takes two to create a relationship, it takes only one to change its quality. Could you influence the quality of your relationships and improve the results you get by negotiating? Absolutely; in the right conditions (negotiation) we get better results when we work with other people (negotiation) than when we work against them or when we work alone.
Good negotiation isn’t about winning and losing. If the negotiation is handled well, then both sides come away with more than they started out. If you don’t satisfy the other person’s needs as well as your own, it’s not a good agreement. As former US President Jimmy Carter put it, “Unless both sides win, no agreement can be permanent.”
As bizarre as it may sound, that means that all parties to a negotiation have to be aware of the wants and needs of the other party and work as hard to satisfy those as they work to satisfy their own. Good negotiation is about sitting together on the same side of the table and tackling the problem together. Adversarial negotiation is a poor second cousin by comparison.
Advice that runs “if you give away a concession without asking for something in return, the other side will carry on asking for concessions until you say no...” takes a depressing view of humanity and its relationships.
Would you rather have 10 pence given willingly, or 50 pence given begrudgingly? I thought so. And the same is true of everyone. If you paint your negotiating partner as ruthless and without scruples, then guess what you are going to get?
This goes to the heart of good negotiation and, perhaps, one of the biggest fallacies that so many in the field choose to perpetuate: negotiation is about compromise. It isn’t.
Compromise is the dirtiest word in negotiation, because in negotiation compromise isn’t the goal. It’s the fallback if nothing better can be achieved.
When you start with compromise, you’re tacitly inviting everyone to give up something important in order to reach an agreement. That’s no place to begin, because there are other highly effective ways to approach negotiating that have little to do with compromise.
If you define personal and business negotiating primarily in terms of compromise, you create a pattern that’s all about giving up and horse-trading. That’s not the greatest foundation on which to build any long-term relationship.
So, what is my key tip for negotiating? It comes from Tammy Lenski: “To resolve an argument someone has to be the adult. And if it’s not the other person, it had better be you.”
2 comments:
Hi Paul,
Excellent piece and a very important point; everything but everything is up for negotiation, so move to an adult state today!
Paul, I always enjoy your words of wisdom at the networking clubs, but this is even better. I shall use negotiation more positively as a result.
Post a Comment