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NEGOTIATION
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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unilaterally withdrawn.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.