* Interests and positions are akin to disease and signs and symptoms in medicine. You want to ultimately treat the disease, not the symptoms.
What is negotiation?
Negotiation is an attempt to influence or persuade a party toward a desired outcome or agreement. At the core, negotiation is influence.
“Negotiation is a discussion between two or more disputants who are trying to work out a solution to their problem.”
Assumptions people make (or myths) about negotiation.
You don’t have to be old, gray haired, or have battle scars to be a negotiator. We all negotiate every day. Negotiation is not for people like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Koffi Anan, etc. Everyone is a negotiator.
Common mistakes people make when negotiating.
* There is only one way to get someone to do something—Give them what they want. Figure out something they want and give it to them and they will do what you want.
* Be determined to do everything possible to reach a peaceful negotiation that is a win-win for everybody.
What do people want? Everybody wants 7 things I call the fundamental human needs. At any one time, some of these needs are satisfied and others are not. Your job is to figure out what needs or desires they have. This is their interest.
* Negotiation is about interpersonal leadership. Leadership is influence. To negotiate well, we must learn how to win friends and influence people. Negotiation is effective relationship management. At its core, negotiation is about how to have relationships with people and manage them effectively. It’s a fundamental life skill that everyone needs.
Leadership is a key factor in negotiation. Effective negotiators are leaders that have the skills to frame issues in ways that foster interest-based negotiation and lead to the formation of coalitions. These leaders are innovative thinkers with the ability to broker and make deals.
Negotiation is influence.
* Negotiation is not coming up with the right answer. It is a joint problem solving.
* Expand the pie. People assume negotiation is about dividing a fixed pie and they want to get a big piece of the pie. However, negotiation is really about expanding the pie. Coming up with creative solutions to create synergy. This is what scarcity vs. abundance mentality.
* Good negotiators must first create a favorable climate in which they can negotiate—an environment that is conducive for negotiation.
An important aspect of negotiation is managing emotions, both yours and theirs. Humans are emotional machines. We are creatures of emotion. Aristotle’s ethos, logos, pathos. Research has shown that our emotions contribute the largest.
* Apply “the customer is always right” principle to negotiation. The other party is the customer. You are sales agent. Every good sales person seeks a win-win agreement. Even though the customer ends up winning, a successful sales person still must “suck up” to the customer’s weaknesses with grace to make the sale that is good for both the sales agent and the customer.
* Negotiations are not one-time events.
* Negotiation is not simply about winning.
* Attack the problem, not the person
Fight Fair:https://cmhc.utexas.edu/fightingfair.html, last accessed 2/24/2020
* The goal of communication is to transfer meaning or understanding to an audience. Our receptors don’t receive meaning or understanding however. That is created as the audience’s brains process and interprets the sensory information that their receptors transmit to their brains. We have meaning in our heads. We can’t communicate it. We communicate something else that is caught by their sensory system, taken to their brains where we hope that they recreate the same exact meaning we had. The failure for them to have the same exact meaning that we intended to communicate could happen at several places. 1) On our part: We may have one meaning in our minds but fail as we translate that meaning into words adequate to create the meaning in others.
2) They could have faulty receptors or processors and so get the wrong meaning or understanding.
The important thing is that the communicator must take the responsibility of helping ensure that the audience that is teachable and receptive gets the meaning that they intended. They have to check the audience for understanding and may have to repeat or say things in different ways. It’s never right to blame the audience for failure to understand if they are willing to understand.
Resources:
https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/negotiation Last Accessed 2/24/2020