PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATIONS
D
o you frequently conduct negotiations? Whether you know it or not, we all negotiate on a daily basis. If you are involved in a personal relationship, then you have done some fancy
negotiating. Your negotiation involved your needs and a completely diff erent set of needs from others that have been met to a mutually-agreeable degree (perhaps after some heated give-and-take discussions). If you don’t think a simple relationship needs some negotiating principles, then you might want to compare your negotiation to international arms control negotiations. Take the discussion that you had with your partner and substitute “building long-range, land-based ballistic missiles” where your partner accused you of spending too much time hanging out with your friends. It will amaze you how much the dynamics of your relationship problems resemble the intensity of most international arms control negotiations. What goes on with your personal relationship goes on
at work, where relationships revolve around cash, power and prestige. You negotiate with your boss for a raise or promotion. You negotiate with your co-workers to divide up duties, to line up backing on ideas and for a host of other needs. Wherever there is a relationship between two people, there is negotiation, so you might as well learn how to negotiate well.
HOW TO PREPARE FOR A SUCCESSFUL NEGOTIATION
Going to a negotiating session without preparing is like trying to fi nd buried treasure with no clues and no map. You have no direction, no promising avenues to explore, and no clear idea what the treasure might actually be. You’re bound to run into some unpleasant surprises. Try mapping out a course of action by asking yourself these questions well ahead of time: • What are the areas of common ground that I share with the person across the table?
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• What is the other person’s background? • What kinds of needs and wants does he/she have that I should think about?
• In what mode is this negotiation going to operate? • Are you facing a ruthlessly competitive opponent who just wants to win at your expense?
• Are you dealing with someone who wants to fi nd an equitable solution?
• What is my opening package? • What am I trying to get? • At what point do I walk away?
FIVE COMMON NEGOTIATION MISTAKES
1. Don’t enter into a negotiation with unreasonably high demands and hoping for a fast compromise. When we have unreasonably high demands during negotiations, failure in negotiating will often occur. For example, two men haggle over an orange, each wanting the whole thing. Finally, they compromise and split the orange. Each of them gets half the orange instead of the whole as they initially wanted. What neither man realized is that one only wanted the juice of the orange whereas the other only wanted the skin. By compromising on artifi cially high needs, the men never took enough time to fi nd a creative solution that would have helped them both equally.
2. Don’t express disapproval or close the door on an unfavorable option too fast. We rarely know all there is to know about a given situation. By closing the door on an option too soon, we might never discover a piece of information that could suddenly make the situation worthwhile. Additionally, things change. What might not have worked last week might be subjected to a whole new set of variables that could make the situation profi table for us this week. Quick disapproval not only can cheat us out of a transaction, it can also provoke an undesired reaction from the person on the other side of the table. If we present a closed-minded image to the other person, that person is going to see little use in any further discussion or exploration with us.
DOMmagazine
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