The Intelligent Negotiator (3 page)

Negotiations with family and friends are our most intimate negotiations. They usually require cooperative behavior to achieve mutually beneficial goals and maintain harmony. For example, a married couple might relocate to Chicago because the husband will attend graduate school there. They decide, however, to rent an apartment in a neighboring suburb because the wife prefers to live close to her place of work rather than right in the university community.

Negotiators, whether bargaining with friends or strangers, are apt to use a particular style during their encounters. The following sections define and describe the relative merits of three negotiating styles.

C
OMPETITIVE
-A
DVERSARIAL
S
TYLE

As a participant in dozens of labor negotiations, I have seen company agents open the bargaining with their employees’ representatives with something like this:

M
ANAGEMENT:
We’ve reviewed the situation and conclude that $X is a fair price for your services.

L
ABOR:
That does not come close to the value our people add to your operation.

M
ANAGEMENT:
This is what the services themselves are worth to us, and that is all we intend to pay for them. Take it or leave it.

The management negotiator above is a Competitive-Adversarial negotiator. Competitive-Adversarial negotiators (or “Adversaries”) are win-lose participants who see a fixed pie: the more of the pie that I get, the less you get (and vice versa). Because Adversaries always want to leave the table with the biggest bag of marbles, they are fierce in their bargaining. An Adversary views your gain as his or her loss. This is why Adversaries are so often untrusting and manipulative. For instance, at some point in the negotiation, an adversarial management representative will step forward and raise the employees’ compensation, without giving a clue that he or she plans to do this. The adversary’s strategy is to put the counterpart on the defensive by being hostile, aggressive, and inflexible, and to move toward the other side only when forced to do so. This style of negotiating is also known as power bargaining or hard bargaining.

If you are negotiating with an Adversary, you can expect your counterpart to do the following:

• Begin with low offers and/or high-level demands.
  

• Minimize the disclosure of relevant information.
  

• Focus principally on his or her stated positions rather than reason out solutions with you.
  

• Make minimal concessions.
  

• Employ threats to intimidate you.
  

• Seek to maximize his or her own return at all costs.
  

Adversaries behave competitively with all opponents, seeking optimal results for themselves. With this zero-sum mentality, they miss benefits and opportunities that can be achieved through jointly expanding the pie.

C
OOPERATIVE
-P
ROBLEM
-S
OLVING
S
TYLE

Other company agents use an approach similar to the following:

S
UPPLIER:
I’ve got a problem. I cannot guarantee delivery of your computer chips on March 15th.

A
CCOUNT:
Why is that?

S
UPPLIER:
My production supervisor went into the hospital and won’t be back until next month. I have an interim supervisor and three additional crews to work on this around the clock, but we still might not make the date.

A
CCOUNT:
You let me know well ahead of time, which is somewhat of a help, John. But as you know, this delays our market-ready date. When can you guarantee delivery?

S
UPPLIER:
The 31st.

A
CCOUNT:
I’ve got to talk to a few people and see what I can work out. I’ll get back to you.

Cooperative-Problem-Solving negotiators (or “Cooperators”) are win-win participants who attempt to maximize the return received by both sides in a negotiation. Instead of asking themselves how much of the pie they got, Cooperators realize the importance of asking themselves whether they like what they received. Take the situation above. Both supplier and account fully disclose their concerns and attempt to resolve the problem together. This is a good example of Cooperators conducting themselves in an open, trusting, and objective negotiating manner.

If you are negotiating with a Cooperator, you can expect your counterpart to:

• Begin with realistic opening positions.
  

• Try to maximize the disclosure of information.
  

• Rely on objective criteria to guide the discussions and seek to reason with you.
  

• Rarely resort to threats.
  

• Seek to maximize the joint returns of both parties.
  

Cooperators feel most comfortable when they interact with other Cooperatives, and when interactions are congenial. However, Cooperators often leave themselves open to
being exploited. If Cooperators behave in their usually open and cooperative manner with Adversaries, they’ll fare poorly in negotiations. They give adversarial opponents an edge due to the fact that they disclose more salient information than do manipulative adversaries. If I let a competitive bargaining counterpart know the state of my personal bank account, or what my other options are, he or she will use it to gain leverage during negotiations. To avoid such exploitation, proficient Cooperators behave more competitively when they confront Adversaries. How? By being less generous in both the disclosing of critical information and the making of unreciprocated concessions. This defensive approach enables Cooperators to neutralize the aggressive techniques Adversaries employ against them.

C
OMPETITIVE
-P
ROBLEM
-S
OLVING
S
TYLE

There is a huge disadvantage to using the Adversary and Cooperator styles as your only negotiating patterns. That’s why the most proficient negotiators use the hybrid Competitiv–Problem-Solving style (or “Innovator”) as their primary style. Rich in the flexibility it affords negotiators, the Innovator style, which includes elements of both the Adversary and Cooperator styles where needed, is the most effective strategic method for dealing with different types of negotiators. Here’s an example:

S
UPERVISOR:
New management just reviewed all company employee salaries—most of which have been frozen for three years—with the goal of improving them. We will be making across-the-board salary increases. I can offer you a 20-percent increase in your salary.

S
UBORDINATE:
I do appreciate that raise, and frankly I’m glad that management is thinking about all the employees. I don’t think the 20-percent raise takes into account my added job responsibilities, since the scope of my position has increased by 40 percent during the last year.

S
UPERVISOR:
I don’t have enough money in the budget for such an increase this year, but I will see what I can do about raising your salary commensurate with all your new responsibilities for next year. For now, I think I might be able to give you a 25-percent increase, plus a better title and some stock.

S
UBORDINATE:
That would be acceptable.

When you negotiate as an Innovator, you will:

• Begin with a strategic opening position, a principled offer that sets the tone for the discussion, using a number of techniques that I will teach you in later chapters of this book.
  

• Match your counterpart’s style on what and how much information you will disclose.
  

• Rely on objective criteria to guide the discussions, and seek to reason with your counterpart.
  

• Try to obtain highly beneficial results for yourself, while at the same time striving to maximize
  opponent
  return, whenever possible.
  

Which Styles Are Most Effective?

Professor Gerald Williams of Brigham Young University has carefully explored the different negotiating styles of
practicing lawyers.
¹
He has found that approximately two-thirds of attorneys are considered by their peers to be Cooperators, one-quarter are described as Adversaries, and the remaining individuals are viewed as difficult to classify. These findings are surprising when one considers the inherently competitive traits attributed to most attorneys. Similar findings are obtained with respect to people who negotiate in the business world.

Professor Williams asked the individuals responding to his survey to indicate which lawyers they considered to be proficient negotiators, average negotiators, or ineffective negotiators. While 59 percent of Cooperators were considered effective bargainers, only 25 percent of Adversarial negotiators were considered proficient. His findings with respect to less capable negotiators were even more striking. While only 3 percent of Cooperators were characterized as ineffective, 33 percent of Adversaries were given this low rating. In a more recent study of a similar nature, Professor Andrea Schneider found that over half of Adversaries are now considered ineffective negotiators by their peers.
²

Many people picture aggressive, tough, and even abrasive people who seek to destroy their opponents by any means available to achieve their goals (adversarial style) as the most successful negotiators. When we contemplate this image from a detached perspective, however, we can appreciate how incorrect this picture is. If someone were to come to your home or workplace to negotiate, announced with overt behavior that he or she planned to clean you out, and exacerbated the situation with gratuitous insults, would you roll over and give the person everything he or she demanded? You would be likely to counter this overtly competitive style with competitive behavior of your own to avoid exploitation. This explains why Cooperators behave more competitively when they encounter
openly competitive Adversaries. They begin with less generous opening offers, are less forthcoming with critical information, and try to avoid unreciprocated concessions. In short, they neutralize the competitive conduct of Adversarial opponents.

Adversarial negotiators do
not
obtain more beneficial results than Cooperators. In fact, overtly adversarial bargainers are likely to obtain worse results. Their aggressive behavior discourages many opponents and often leads to non-settlement in situations in which mutually beneficial agreements could otherwise have been achieved. In addition, their competitive conduct reduces the opportunity for cooperative bargaining that would ensure an optimal distribution of the items being exchanged, leading to inefficient agreements.

In the many years I have practiced law and taught negotiating skills, I have not found Cooperators any less effective than Adversaries. The idea that people must be uncooperative, selfish, manipulative, and even abrasive to obtain beneficial results is clearly incorrect. To achieve good bargaining terms, individuals simply have to possess the ability to say “no” forcefully and believably. They can do this courteously and quietly, and be as effective as those who do so more demonstrably. This is why Innovators who use the best characteristics of Cooperators and Adversaries tend to be successful.

What Successful Negotiators Do

Proficient negotiators try to obtain beneficial results for themselves, but seek to accomplish this in a congenial manner. Whatever their philosophy or approach, Intelligent Negotiators prepare thoroughly by taking the following steps:

1. Know yourself:
   Know your bottom line and what your goals are.
   

2. Know your counterpart:
   Research your counterpart’s resources, motivations, and situations well enough to estimate his or her bottom line and aspirations.
   

Skilled bargainers then use this information to maximize their return, but also strive to maximize opponent return, when this can be accomplished at minimal cost to themselves. Why?

1. They need to satisfy their bargaining counterparts’ interests sufficiently to induce them to enter agreements.
   

2. They know that other parties may experience buyer’s remorse and try to back out of the deal if they ultimately regret the terms.
   

3. They recognize that they will often have future dealings with their present bargaining counterparts.
   

People who think they were treated poorly are likely to seek revenge in future encounters with those who treated them unfavorably. On the other hand, negotiators who feel they were given fair deals are likely to be more generous in future dealings with those they remember favorably.

What Successful Negotiators Never Do

The best negotiators never take the process personally. They appreciate the fact that their counterparts are
merely trying to get good results for themselves and are not intentionally attempting to hurt them. A good negotiator interprets a comment such as “That is an insultingly low offer” as a judgment on the offer, not on the person who made it. It is difficult to maintain this attitude when a prospective house buyer elaborates on design flaws of the home you’ve lived in for ten years, but a good negotiator remembers that assessing the value of items to be exchanged is part of the bargaining process.