Everyone is a negotiator whether you like it or not. Right from when we learned how to speak, we have been negotiating. As a child (son), when you tell your mom you don’t want to eat broccoli that you would rather eat green beans, and she agrees, you have negotiated. When we discuss an increase in our allowance with our parents or an increase in our salary with our employer(s) and so on. All these are times then we have negotiated.
Negotiation is part of our everyday life, and we do it either consciously or unconsciously. We need to do it in order to get what we want from others. No one likes being dictated to, everyone likes to have a say in matters that affects them, so negotiation comes naturally as a solution. Negotiation is carried out by two parties (although sometimes more than two parties can be involved in negotiation) in order to reach an agreement where some common interest of both parties can be met. So we have two types of negotiators or maybe more, but I’ll stick with the common two and that is the “Soft Negotiator" and the “Hard Negotiator.”
The soft negotiators want the negotiation to be a success, so they always prioritize that and end up giving more of their interest for the sake of the negotiation and most times they end up feeling bitter about the negotiation. The hard negotiators on the other hand bring an aggressive style to the negotiation and of course, they always want to win, so they end up exploiting the soft negotiators. Both the soft and hard negotiators aren’t negotiating well because as one is giving up more, the other is gaining too much.
There is a better way to negotiate and this involves focusing on what benefits both parties and not what each side has to gain, that is finding a common ground, “A mutual benefit”
A mutual benefit
Take the example of the child and mom that I stated in the first paragraph, the mom wants her child to be properly nourished by eating broccoli, but the child doesn’t like taking broccoli, although he wants to be properly nourished. If the negotiation was focused on what each of them wanted, there would be a back and forth argument until one of them gives in. if the child ends up giving in, he might end up feeling bitter and exploited. On the other hand, if the mom gives in, she will also feel like a bad parent afterwards.
The best way to approach this situation would have been to look at what can benefit both of them. The alternative which is green beans will give both mom and son what they want. If the child eats green beans instead of broccoli, he will get what he wants which is not eating broccoli, likewise the mother will also get what she wants by ensuring her child gets the essential nutrients needed for his body as the nutrient broccoli gives to the body is similar to the nutrient green beans give.
There are certain guidelines that you need to follow in order to have a successful negotiation. I will be discussing them under headings.
Don’t overstretch your interest
When negotiating, do not ask for more than you should. Let’s look at the following analogy. A customer in the market wants to purchase a piece of fish from a market trader. The customer knows quite well that the fish should be within the range of $3.5 — $4 and of course the market trader knows what the fish is worth. The following conversations ensued
Scenario 1
Customer: how much is this piece of fish
Trader: How much do you want to pay?
Customer: let me have it for $2
Trader: that is really low, I just got this fish today, it is still fresh. I will let you have it for $7
Customer: that is very pricey, I am willing to go as high as $2.5. I promised my sin we would have fish today
Trader: no ma’am, you can get this type of fish for that price. I have others you can get for $2.5
Customer: No! this is the one I want
Trader: You can have it for $5.
Customer: let me have it for $3
The above scenario can have quite a different number of endings. The customer might end up not buying the fish, the customer might buy the fish for a price higher than $4, or might not buy the fish at all. If any of these happens to be the eventual outcome, then someone would have had to give up more than they should why? Because they overstretched their interest. Now let us do this again.
Scenario 2
Customer: how much is this piece of fish
Trader: $4 ma’am
Customer: let me have it for $3.5
Trader: that is on the low, I just got this fish today, it is still fresh. I will let you have it for $3.75
Customer: Okay, that is fair enough. Bag it.
Now can you see the difference between the first and second scenario? The first was about overstretching interest. No one wanted to go into the acceptable range first. Both the customer and the trader wanted to exploit themselves and that resulted in a failed negotiation. Even if they eventually got into the acceptable range, they had wasted a lot of time going back and forth.
When I started this article, I didn’t know it would get this long, so I will have to split it into two or maybe three. I’ll publish the continuation to this tomorrow where I will be talking about the other guidelines.
Happy reading.
Original Article written by me
I never think about everyday life as a negotiations, until I read this and it was right. Even waking up in the morning, you have this negotiation between choosing what to do; to get up or just lay and sleep:D