The art of negotiation.
Don’t Interrupt Someone
When someone is interrupted, the tapes are still playing in their head.
It’s so easy to interrupt someone once you understand what they are saying or have your response ready to go. But it’s a terrible habit. Because once you interrupt someone, they aren’t listening to you. They are thinking about finishing the point they wanted to make.
Trust
Trust is the assurance that the other person will protect you. With a little trust, another person will assist you until it becomes too risky for them or a better opportunity arises. The other party will help you even if it hurts them if you have a lot of trust in them.
Trust can carry you further than most other things.
Misperception and Communication
Perhaps the biggest cause of negotiation failure, worldwide, is communication failure. And the single biggest cause of communication failure is misperception.
This means that their perceptions are more important than your proposals, if you want to persuade them.
Most communication failures stem from misperceptions. So before jumping to conclusions, do your research and try to understand the other party as best you can.
Don’t say “calm down”
The more you tell them to calm down, the madder they get. That’s because telling them to calm down devalues the legitimacy of their emotions. And when people feel devalued, they become more emotional.
Good negotiation requires valuing the other party and their needs. Telling someone to calm down fails to recognize the person’s perspective as legitimate, and more often than not, it will do more harm than good.
Be dispassionate
The best negotiators are dispassionate, and continue to ask for information.
Emotion destroys negotiations and limits creativity. Focus is lost. Decision-making is poor. Retaliation often occurs.
Your goal is not to be “right;” it’s to get the outcome you desire. Leave the emotions and ego at the door, and you will make fewer bad decisions. You’ll keep your eye on the prize.
Persistence
With persistence comes self-confidence: the belief that you can do it.
It doesn’t matter how many times the other person says no, disagrees with you, or gives you a hard time. Keep asking, and stay focused on your goals (without making yourself the issue). Persistence, after all, is a focused effort, over time, to meet your goals.
Persistence is key in negotiation. Keep finding ways to get more information and unlock new value levers for both parties. Your persistence will pay off in the long run.
Emotions Have More Value Than Rationality
People do some of the most important things in life not for money or for rational benefits, but for how it makes them feel.
As much as economists want us to believe that people are hyper-rational actors who consider all angles of every decision they make, they’re not. More often than not, we rationalize our decisions after they’ve been made.
Understanding The Other Person
What is the other person feeling? How do they perceive the situation? What are the pictures in their heads?”
Thinking from the other person’s point of view often turns up surprising results.
Your outcomes will improve once you start thinking from the other person’s perspective. What are their needs or fears? How are they approaching the situation? These are critical pieces of information for any successful negotiation.
Negotiation: A Primer
Negotiation is at the heart of human interaction. Negotiation is not a battle. It’s a process of better relating to people in all kinds of circumstances.
Common enemies bring parties closer together and make the negotiations easier.
Some legitimate common enemies in business relationships are loss of profit, loss of time, failure to retain good people, and inability to capitalize on opportunities.
Understanding The Fundamental Attribution Error
We all think that everyone else has the same thought processes, set of experiences, and perceptual framework that we do.
We all imagine that others think as we do. We also attribute people’s behaviors to their identity instead of recognizing the importance of the specific events happening in their lives at the moment.
This fundamental attribution error leads us to make poor judgments about people’s motivations and character.
When Arguing With A Friend
Contextualize the argument, no matter how heated, with the following: “Hey, we’ve been friends for x years—over 1,000 or 2,000 days. Do you really want to toss everything out over one bad day?”
This will help put things in perspective and diffuse the issue.
The Power Of Standards
With hard bargainers, standards are especially effective.
When dealing with difficult people, use standards. It is a fundamental tenet of human psychology that people hate to contradict themselves.
So if you give people a choice between being consistent with their standards—with what they have said and promised previously—and contradicting their standards, people will usually strive to be consistent with their standards.
Frame and Be Incremental
It is much more persuasive to let others make the decision, instead of telling them what the decision should be. You want to lead them to where you want them to go, through framing and by being incremental.
Framing and being incremental are two of the hardest things for people to learn. Most people want to rush ahead, and find it hard to break things up into smaller steps.
Small talk is good
You make small talk. Not just because you read somewhere that it’s smart to make small talk. You do it because you are interested in them. Because you want to try to find a point of connection with other people. It’s a way of approaching life.
Small talk helps open up and deepen connections. Don’t be above it.
Value the other person
A key to getting other people to give you what you want is to value the other party.
People like to give things to others who listen to them, who value them, and who consult with them.
Listen to and value the other party. It will improve your outcomes.
Knowing that people hate to contradict themselves is a key part of understanding the power of standards and why you should leverage them.
The intangibles
In much of business, money is not the most important item of importance to either side, regardless of what they say. The price has to be reasonable, but so much more is required. Intangibles can bridge the gap between seemingly inflexible positions.
It’s rarely just about maximizing the monetary outcome.
The Power Of Relationships
‘Do I trust this person? Before I put my life, and my family’s life, in their hands, without recourse, who are they?’
This is the question that is asked by most of the rest of the world, outside the United States.
The United States focuses more on punishment and contracts than on relationships. And this hampers the United States and its citizens in their negotiations with the rest of the world.
