Dr. Margaret Ann Neale is a distinguished professor of management and the director of the Influence and Negotiation Strategies Executive Program at Stanford University. She received an email from her dean that she would need to move from teaching five courses to teaching six each year because he had received information from his boss, the provost, that there needed to be consistency between the number of course contact hours and course credit hours. She was unhappy about moving from five to six courses. So she decided to go and negotiate with the dean. Before doing so, Dr. Neale prepared. She thought hard about why the dean was making the change. What were his interests? She came to the preliminary conclusion that the dean was probably interested in making sure his boss, the provost, was happy. Her interest—the reason or motivation for not wanting to move from 5 to 6 classes—on the other hand, was keeping her work hours the way they were, not increasing them. It turns out that professor Neale taught two types of courses while most professors taught only one. She taught MBA courses and some special courses, which often went over the allotted 3 contact hours per week for the 3 credit hour courses. They often went between 3.5 to 4 credit hours.
In the meeting, she first verified the information she had collected in the preparation stage. It was true that the dean wanted to please the provost. What the dean had done was change the credit hours to match the contact hours. Dr. Neale suggested doing the reverse—changing the contact hours to match the credit hours—and making some of her courses 4 credit hours since she was already giving students an average of 4 contact hours per week, which should be valued at 3 credit hours. With this proposal, she would continue to teach five courses per year. The dean told her he had never even thought about that solution. It met the interests of everybody. Why had the dean not thought about it? He didn’t have the information Dr. Neale had, that her courses were routinely running over. Dr. Neale was the only faculty who got an exception. All the professors in the department got the same email! Why was she the only one to get an exception and not increase her workload? Because 1) She negotiated 2) More than that, she provided him with a solution that met the interests of both.
Dr. Neal says to negotiate effectively, you should do the following:
Assess: Do the benefits outweigh the costs?
Prepare: What are my interests? What are your interests?
Ask: Engage and share unique information.
Package: Bundle alternative proposals.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXFpOWDAhvM (Last Accessed Dec 22, 2019)
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