Negotiate Great Relationships - Concluding Thoughts

Experts love to paraphrase the Italian diplomat Daniele Vare that negotiation is the art of letting them have your way.  While that might sound a bit crafty, there’s a lot of truth to it.  But in most deals there are multiple people involved from each side that all have their own interests they’re looking to have met.  So it’s often difficult to see just how you can let them have your way.  Where to begin with so many interests involved?  We’ve seen this dynamic in almost every negotiation we’ve been involved in, and it can be both frustrating and challenging.

Harvard Professor James Sebenius makes a useful observation here, and one that can save you a lot of grief; that what’s rational for the whole may not be for the parts.  To assess the full set of interests at stake, you have to understand the interests of all the key players in the internal decision process.  In the thick of things it’s easy to focus on the one who speaks the most.  But in virtually every case, there’s an entire subset of often conflicting interests in the background threatening to derail an agreement.

We’ve learned through trial and error that the detractors need direct attention.  Underneath the hostility lies a set of interests that have to be met for agreement to move forward.  And one thing we’ve had to learn is that their real interests are often masked, so digging further down is essential.  Offering empathy for their concerns and asking tons of questions seems to work the best:  Why is it you want that, What exactly are you trying to accomplish, What’s the end goal?  We’ve found this helpful because people have the tendency to get caught up in solving their problem in a particular way, which makes it our job to show how it could be solved in perhaps a better way.  Tunnel vision is human nature, it exists in every discipline, but in negotiations it has to be addressed. 

Professor Sebenius adds along these lines that since agreement represents the simultaneous solution of all sides’ problems, solving their problem is part of solving your problem.  His advice?  And I wish I’d read this years ago, avoid the self-defeating mistake of letting them solve their problem while we solve ours.  Huge mistake.  Almost guaranteed that if you disengage their resistance hardens.  What he says couldn’t be any more accurate.  Stay close to each participant, develop good relationships as much as possible, and incorporate their feedback in the process.

In the end, it’s all about creating long-term relationships, so approach negotiation, and renegotiation, with the attitude of genuinely trying to satisfy each party’s interests.  If you succeed, the financial and psychological benefits are enormous.  Because after it’s all said and done, all any of us have are our relationships, and those can’t be reduced to financial statements or spreadsheets.