Want to Be a Better Negotiator? Understand Your Adversary
If you go into a negotiation just hoping to do your best, you won’t.
By Jeremy Simon
You may not realize it, but negotiation is something you’re already doing on a daily basis, says Gaylen Paulson, management senior lecturer and associate dean at the McCombs School of Business. Often, negotiation happens informally, from the back-and-forth needed to set deadlines at work to convincing your children to eat their vegetables at home.
And because negotiation is something everyone does every day, anyone can benefit from improving their skills. The key, though, is being willing to see other possibilities.
“The challenge is that when I’ve got needs, I tend to get fixated and focused on those needs,” Paulson says. “And what I really need to do is to live in the other person’s world more effectively.”
When it comes to influencing and negotiating, you need to understand what a “yes” looks like for the other person and why they would agree to a deal with you. “
“Think about their needs more, and your needs will actually get met.” — Gaylen Paulson
The next time you step up to the negotiating (or dinner) table, Paulson recommends applying the following three strategies:
Perspective-taking.
By remaining focused solely on your own needs and objectives, you’ll end up with less, Paulson warns. To counter this tendency, he urges negotiators to explore the other person’s world by asking lots of questions. Paulson notes that one out of every four or five things that come out of an expert negotiator’s mouth is a question. Compare that to an average person engaged in the process who tends to communicate largely in the form of arguments.
Seek complexity.
Simple isn’t necessarily best for negotiations. That’s because complex problems are unlikely to have a single “right” solution. “Usually, there are better opportunities to be had if we start to dig a little bit,” Paulson says.
Of course, this leads to the negotiator’s dilemma: “If I share information with you, we might do something really cool and creative,” he says. “But if I share information with you, you might use that to exploit me.” The best way around this is to have alternatives ready. You’re more open to discussion if you can walk away from the table.
Be firm, but be flexible.
Negotiators should come prepared with concrete, high aspirations. They should also be prepared to explain and justify why they settled on their specific objective. “If you can come in and say ‘Here’s what I’m looking for and here’s why,’ you’re in a powerful spot,” Paulson says. But he still urges negotiators to remain flexible about how that goal can be reached.
“The only way business gets done,” says Paulson, “is if you both feel comfortable saying ‘yes.’”
In this video, Paulson takes Texas Enterprise Speaker Series attendees through a real-world negotiation scenario and explains why some participants fared better than others. He explains the case study step-by-step for online viewers.
Originally published at www.texasenterprise.utexas.edu on Sept. 27, 2016.
