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Eric Barton
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso talks with German Chancellor
Angela Merkel during EU negotiations (AFP/Getty)
A married couple walked into Donald Cole s marriage counselling office with a
quandary.
The husband liked to stop after work for a margarita at a local bar. He always
drank just one, at a place where the drink was cheaper than your average pint.
He didn t arrive home drunk and wasn t spending a lot of money the tradition
felt like no big deal to him.
Be a Negotiation Pro
Use these five steps to prepare for your next negotiation at any job level.
Understand your opponent s motivation. This will help you figure out how to get
the other person to middle ground, or to adopt your side.
Determine a technique you ll use. Will it be collaboration or accommodation?
Don t devolve into competitive bargaining; an I-win-you-lose approach rarely
works.
Study local customs. If you are in a new country or a new company, first
observe. If no decisions are made without the CEO s buy-in, recognise your
meeting with a lower-level manager won t end with a resolution and adjust
accordingly.
Practice, practice, practice. Good negotiators often got there by practicing
with a spouse or colleague. Find someone who will stand in for the other side
and try out your techniques.
Be humble. Even the best negotiators sometimes fail to sway the other side.
Knowing you ll occasionally lose will stop discussions devolving into personal
attacks.
But the wife s father had been an alcoholic, so to her, the booze on his breath
was a sign of the potential alcohol abuse that could come. And the husband had
grown up with a controlling father, so he saw his wife s request to stop his
after-work routine as, well, too controlling. The couple was at an impasse.
Cole, a therapist in Texas, began the negotiations as he always does. He asked
the couple to imagine things from the other side. Picture what it would be like
to have grown up with an alcoholic father and then living with a husband who
wants to drink every night. Visualise growing up with little freedom and
consider, then, how you might feel about doing as you please as an adult.
It really is an aha moment, Cole said. Sometimes, for some couples,
realising the motivations of your spouse and knowing that they re very deep and
tied to some emotion is enough to start the negotiation process.
Understanding the motivation of the other side is exactly how negotiations
ought to begin in business, too. Increasingly, managers at all levels are now
expected to know how to negotiate not only new contracts, but also with the
people who work for them.
It wasn t always this way. A generation ago, people in senior management were
expected to make all the decisions and had little reason to collaborate with
anyone, said William Ury, an expert negotiator who has mediated everything from
labour strikes to ending a Venezuelan civil war.
Now, companies want lower-level employees to bring ideas to their managers and
influence the way business is done and that means leaders need to be able to
negotiate with their subordinates.
If you can listen, you can put yourself in a position to understand the other
side, Ury said..
This is easier in some cultures than others. Many people in South America and
Asia put high value on relationships and will sometimes expect both sides to
first understand each other personally before real dialogue can begin. In
northern Europe, meanwhile, there is often an expectation of efficiency in
talks, and little value is placed on what s perceived as chitchat. And in the
US, a time is money culture leads to impatient reactions during negotiations.
The art of persuasion
The first step to becoming a better negotiator is simple: read up on
techniques, said Robert C Bordone, a Harvard University law professor and
director of the school s Negotiation and Mediation Clinic. Then, plan for
different types of negotiations by practicing which strategy you ll use.
Often times, people kind of blunder their way through negotiations. They may
have good strategic plans and great business models and just assume people will
get in line, Bordone said.
But the key to successful negotiation that is, getting the other side to
accept your proposal or at least come to a compromise is not always about
having the best idea. Often it is about knowing how to get the other side to
see it that way.
That takes practice. Bordone said the art of negotiation is no different than
playing a musical instrument or sport. Just like practicing a tennis serve with
a skilled player on the other side of the net will improve your game,
negotiators get better by finding someone to use as a sounding-board and
testing out different strategies to get the other side to say yes.
For Ury, he became an international expert on negotiation by concentrating on
every skill needed to negotiate, one by one. He gave himself goals, one month
it was working on his ability to listen. Another, it was about finding common
ground. Ury also designed a place to practice. He convinced a friend who was a
judge to let him mediate small claims lawsuits, simple disputes over small
amounts of money.
If we want to get what we want, whether it s with our employees or board
members or with our spouse, we need to be able to negotiate our needs, Ury
said.
In some countries, negotiation success will also be governed by small cultural
gestures, said Robert Tobias, director of American University s Key Executive
Leadership Programs in Washington, DC. In China, tables ought to be set far
apart to show deference to each side. In Italy, where intimacy is valued,
business is more likely to get done when both sides are within arm s reach.
It s often the little things that will decide whether you are successful at
negotiating, Tobias said. One slight at the beginning of the negotiation may
drastically influence the outcome.
In the case of the couple from Texas, Cole told them to come up with a series
of options until the husband and wife could find middle ground. In the end,
they decided the husband would invite the wife along for his margaritas.
In marriage counselling, it s rarely about who s right and who s wrong, said
Cole, who uses a method of counselling focused on managing, not eliminating,
conflict developed by The Gottman Institute. It s more about seeing it through
the other person s eyes.
That s worth remembering next time you walk into a negotiation. You might not
have an argument that s more right, but hopefully you ll be the one who s far
more prepared.