by Daniel B. Griffith
Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock
When it’s time to negotiate, are you prepared? Do you have a game plan, or do you simply sit down and start talking? In Step 1 for Negotiation Success: Identifying Your Needs, I addressed considerations for analyzing your negotiation situation and defining your interests before you negotiate. In this article, I focus on planning your strategy and approach to optimize your chances for success. Consider both articles as you prepare to negotiate your next opportunity.
Understand the Other Party
The previous article encouraged you to evaluate your interests and needs and to determine the point at which it is better to walk away than to accept an inferior deal. You must do the same for the other party. While you can’t know these issues precisely, you can make educated guesses.
Yet, it’s not all guesswork. For example, when negotiating a job, you generally have information available to determine what a fair deal looks like. If you’ve done your research, you have a good understanding of the general salary range. You also know your worth relative to this range based on your experience and other job-related factors. You should expect the other party (in this case, your prospective employer) to also negotiate within this range. Accordingly, consider what reservations they may have about your background and experience. What pushback might you expect and how might you respond to convince them of your value, and, therefore, a higher salary?
What else should you know about the person or entity with whom you are negotiating? What is the organization’s mission, goals, priorities, and reputation? What characteristics are they looking for to support their mission and culture and to help them be successful? Knowing as much as possible beforehand helps you prepare, present yourself as the ideal candidate, and address perceived deficits.
When considering the person with whom you are negotiating, whether a future relationship (such as with a hiring manager) or a current relationship (such as with your boss), what do you understand about their pressures, needs, and goals? How will you persuade them to accept your position in a way that makes it seem like their idea – and that makes their life easier? In a current relationship, what personality quirks, pet peeves, and communication style do you need to work with to meet them where they’re at? What difficulties have you experienced in your relationship, and how will you present yourself differently to address legitimate concerns?
Select Your Negotiation Strategy
Strategy refers to the overarching approach you take in your negotiation. Using a collaborative, interest-based approach is generally best compared to an adversarial, win-lose approach that can negatively impact relationships. Will you face resistance and a difficult personality, or can you anticipate a friendly, conversational tone? Plan for a collaborative engagement, but be prepared in the event the other party is adversarial.
Negotiating collaboratively means remaining ethical, even when confronted with a negotiator who is slow to make concessions, manipulative, or deliberately difficult and aggressive. But this does not mean you have to cave. Rather, in planning your strategy, consider how you may respond to demonstrate low tolerance for game-playing and insist on fair standards and appropriate ground rules, or no deal.
Many employment situations, particularly involving hiring and salary decisions, will involve a cooperative, healthy give-and-take process. You must nonetheless plan how to approach the conversation and make requests to maximize your outcomes and avoid being lulled into complacency just because the other party seems “nice.”
Plan Your Tactics, Defense, and Presentation
Tactics are the actions and steps you’ll take to implement your negotiation strategy.
Do you have an agenda regarding how you will facilitate the conversation? Can you start informally with chit-chat, or do you need to get down to business? Do you need to lay out specific protocols or ground rules and come to agreement on negotiation procedures, or can these details be assumed based on the context or what you know about the other person?
Do you have an ordered list of issues you want to raise, such as starting with less important issues and progressing to more important issues (or vice versa)? Is agreement on certain issues upfront needed and dependent on others, or can each issue be negotiated independently without impacting others? Will early agreement on some issues lock you into accepting other issues under less favorable conditions?
What you know about the other party will now be put to the test. With respect to each issue, what defenses have you prepared as challenges are raised? You’ve done your research, but will you need to share specific data, statistics, and proofs from reliable sources? Will you need to do a presentation or show graphs and charts? More sophisticated negotiations may require this level of detail, whereas a good command of the facts and data is probably sufficient for most situations.
Also, what are you prepared to do in response to behavioral issues? What specific communication strategies will be necessary to address aggressive, angry, argumentative, and other negative behaviors? What triggers can you anticipate? What tools have you considered to help you respond so that you won’t be taken and can get negotiations back on track?
Prepare for Agreement or to Walk Away
Thorough preparation increases chances for an amicable agreement. Be sure you both understand fully what you’ve committed to and reduce agreements to writing, if necessary. Also include provisions for monitoring your agreement and returning to negotiations to make corrections, as needed.
But what if negotiations fail? What will it mean if you walk away? If it’s a job, you won’t have to engage with the other party tomorrow. If you are negotiating with someone in a current relationship, you’ll need to decide what your future actions will be. Will you simply live with it? Will you reduce your effort? Will you pursue workarounds or consult higher-ups? To the extent feasible, before walking away, consider what you will communicate to the other party about consequences if negotiations are unsuccessful. These aren’t threats, but reality checks that may persuade them to return to negotiation to see if agreement is possible after all.
There is a lot to consider in negotiation. Recall my message in the previous article: we are all negotiators every day. The more you view every interaction as a negotiation, the more you will consciously utilize negotiation strategies and techniques and experience success.
