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NEGOTIATION

166

CHAPTER 7

• Not asking sufficient questions to clarify:

The better you understand your

counterpart’s motives, the better you can offer something that will deliver

against his needs. Clarification questions, which may seem superfluous,

play a crucial role in enabling you to wrap up a package. Moreover, they also

give your counterpart the impression that you care about his needs, thereby

generating the necessary atmosphere for win-win.

• Withholding information and limiting trust:

If your counterpart suspects

that you are withholding information or not disclosing fully, trust will be

unilaterally withdrawn. Awin-win thus becomes impossible. It would, however,

be naïve to demand full and complete transparency from either side. The

rule should be: ‘The truth, nothing but the truth; but not necessarily the whole

truth immediately.’

• Showing an unwillingness to move:

This renders the win-win impossible

and increases the probability of deadlock.

• Not establishing common ground:

The negotiation consequently centres

on disparities rather than convergence. Both your standpoint and your

counterpart’s will move apart as the negotiation progresses, again making

the win-win very difficult to achieve.

• Arguing, blaming or attacking:

Early in this chapter, emphasis was placed

on focusing on the other party’s interests, not their adopted positions. Personal

attacks are often the result of zeroing in on adopted positions and it must

always be remembered that a counterpart may deliberately start off with a

relatively extreme standpoint simply to gain power at an early stage. This

adopted position does not negate his/her underlying needs. Your job is not

to be drawn into an emotional fight, but to work past the adopted position to

uncover underlying desires and needs.

• The negotiation becomes a tennis match:

The swapping of demands

between the parties resembles a tennis match along the lines of ‘I can only

give you X if you give me Y’: ‘Well, if I give you Y, I want Z in return’; ‘No, giving

you Z means I will need A to compensate’. This is clearly going nowhere,

and stalemate is almost pre-programmed. It can be avoided by simply calling

a spade a spade, rather than an earth-inverting gardening implement. Say

something like: ‘Ok, we’re getting into a tennis match now. Why don’t we

think more in terms of packages than individual points?’

• One issue is negotiated at a time:

A negotiation is not generally about

individual points, but rather about finding a total package that is acceptable

but not necessarily perfect to both parties. Focusing on individual points slows

the process down and blinds us to the big picture. We should remember, at

all times, to focus on the totality of what we are trying to achieve and not on

recording what concessions have been traded.