You’re going to have to embrace regular, thoughtful conflict as the basis of effective negotiation – and of life.
For a mirror to be effective, you’ve got to let it sit there and do its work. It needs a bit of.
People who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle; it’s a process of discovery. The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.
The F-word – “Fair” – is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.
The implication of any well-designed calibrated question is that you want what the other guy wants but you need his intelligence to overcome the problem. This really appeals to very aggressive or egotistical counterparts.
Negotiation is the heart of collaboration. It is what makes conflict potentially meaningful and productive for all parties.
Human beings the world over are so used to being pursued for the commitment “yes” as a condition to find out more that they have become masters at giving the counterfeit “yes.” That’s what the people facing Joe Businessman are doing, dangling the counterfeit “yes” so they can hear more. Whether you call it “buy-in” or “engagement” or something else, good negotiators know that their job isn’t to put on a great performance but to gently guide their counterpart to discover their goal as his own.
As an old Washington Post editor named Robert Estabrook once said, “He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.
I want to emphasize how important it is to maintain a collaborative relationship even when you’re setting boundaries. Your response must always be expressed in the form of strong, yet empathic, limit-setting boundaries – that is, tough love – not as hatred or violence. Anger and other strong emotions can on rare occasions be effective. But only as calculated acts, never a personal attack.
If you can’t control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence the emotions of another party?
Asking for help in this manner, after you’ve already been engaged in a dialogue, is an incredibly powerful negotiating technique for transforming encounters from confrontational showdowns into joint problem-solving sessions. And calibrated questions are the best tool.
As long as she stayed cool, they would hear it as a problem to be solved.
Blunt assertion is actually counterproductive most of the time.
Once you’re clear on what your bottom line is, you have to be willing to walk away.
That’s right” is better than “yes.” Strive for it. Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs.
Your response must always be expressed in the form of strong, yet empathic, limit-setting boundaries – that is, tough love – not as hatred or violence.
In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody,1 UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian created the 7-38-55 rule. That is, only 7 percent of a message is based on the words while 38 percent comes from the tone of voice and 55 percent from the speaker’s body language and face.
If this book accomplishes only one thing, I hope it gets you over that fear of conflict and encourages you to navigate it with empathy.
But when someone displays a passion for what we’ve always wanted and conveys a purposeful plan of how to get there, we allow our perceptions of what’s possible to change. We’re all hungry for a map to joy, and when someone is courageous enough to draw it for us, we naturally follow.
People generally fear conflict, so they avoid useful arguments out of fear that the tone will escalate into personal attacks they cannot handle. People in close relationships often avoid making their own interests known and instead compromise across the board to avoid being perceived as greedy or self-interested. They fold, they grow bitter, and they grow apart. We’ve all heard of marriages that ended in divorce and the couple never fought.
One of the easiest ways to bend your counterpart’s reality to your point of view is by pivoting to nonmonetary terms. After you’ve anchored them high, you can make your offer seem reasonable by offering things that aren’t important to you but could be important to them. Or if their offer is low you could ask for things that matter more to you than them. Since this is sometimes difficult, what we often do is throw out examples to start the brainstorming process.