In an excerpt from his new book, "Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People," Shell provides a seven-point checklist to help you hone your negotiating skills.
From: Inc. Magazine, May 1999 | By: G. Richard Shell
Business 101
Hone your negotiating skills--with a checklist matched to your personality type
At the Wharton School, we teach people that effective negotiation is 10% technique and 90% attitude. What follows are two performance checklists from my recent book to help you prepare for your next negotiation. One list is for people who are basically cooperative. The other is for those who are more competitive.
Seven Tools for Highly Cooperative People
If you are basically a cooperative, reasonable person, you need to become more assertive, confident, and prudent in negotiations to become more effective. It is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to gear up for a potentially confrontational negotiating situation.
Here are seven specific tools to improve your bargaining performance.
1. Avoid concentrating too much on your bottom line. Spend extra time preparing your goals and developing high expectations. As a cooperative person, you often worry about other people's needs first. You focus on your bottom line and try to do just a little better than that. And guess what? Your bottom line is exactly what you get. People who expect more get more. Refocus your thinking on your goals and expectations. Consider carefully what you want and why you want it.
2. Develop a specific alternative as a fallback if the negotiation fails. Too often, cooperative people leave themselves without choices at the bargaining table. They have no alternatives planned if negotiations fail. But there always is an alternative. Find out what it is, and bring it with you to the bargaining table. You will feel more confident. Take note: if you can't walk away, you can't say no.
3. Get an agent and delegate the negotiation task. If you are up against competitive negotiators, you will be at a disadvantage. Find a more competitively oriented person to act as your agent or at least join your team. That is not an admission of failure or lack of skill. It is prudent and wise.
4. Bargain on behalf of someone or something else, not yourself. Even competitive people feel weaker when they are negotiating on their own behalf. Cooperative people think they are being selfish to insist on things coming out their way.
Fine. Think about other people and causes--your family, your staff, even your future "retired self"--that are depending on you to act as their agent and "bring home the bacon" in this negotiation. Then bargain on their behalf.
5. Create an audience. People negotiate more assertively when other people are watching them. That is why labor negotiators are so tough--they know the union rank and file are watching their every move. Tell someone you know about the negotiation. Explain your goals and how you intend to proceed. Promise to report the results.
6. Say, "You'll have to do better than that because..." Cooperative people are programmed to say "yes" to almost any plausible proposal someone else makes. To improve, you need to practice pushing back a little when others make a bargaining move.
A simple phrase that works is "You'll have to do better than that because..." (fill in a reason). The better the reason, the better you will feel about it, but any truthful reason will do. Many people will respond favorably if you make a request in a reasonable tone of voice and accompany it with a "because" statement.
7. Insist on commitments, not just agreements. Cooperative people trust others more than is good for them, and they think an agreement is all that is needed to ensure that performance will take place as promised. Don't be so trusting. Agreements are fine if you have a solid basis for believing that the other party's word is its bond. But be sure you have that foundation before risking all the work you have invested in a negotiation. If you don't know the people on the other side well or you suspect that they may be untrustworthy, set up the agreement so they have something to lose if they fail to perform.
Seven Tools for Highly Competitive People
If you are basically a competitive, but still reasonable, person, you need more than anything to become more aware of other people and their legitimate needs. How can you do that? It is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to overcome your inherent suspicion of others' motives. And it is difficult to resist temptation when you are dealing with a cooperative person who is naïvely handing things to you.
Here are seven specific tools you can use to improve your bargaining performance.
1. Think win-win, not just win. Win-win is a beguiling but dangerous idea for many accommodating and cooperative people. They use it to rationalize making concessions. But for competitive people, it is an excellent reminder that the other party matters. Go for deals in which both sides do better but you do the best of all.
2. Ask more questions than you think you should. Competitive people like to get enough information to see where an advantage might lie, then pounce and try to exploit the opening. Don't be in such a hurry. Other people have a variety of needs; they do not always want the same things you do. If you can understand what is really important to them, they will give you more of what is important to you.
3. Rely on standards. Reasonable people respond well to arguments based on their standards and norms. Don't be too quick to use a leverage-based approach to negotiation when a standards-based approach will work just as well. Reasoned arguments also work better than power plays when future relationships are important.
4. Hire a relationship manager. You will do better when the relationship matters if you delegate the relationship-management aspect of the deal to someone who is better with people than you are. That is not a sign of failure; it is prudent and wise.
5. Be scrupulously reliable. Keep your word. You may have a tendency to cut corners when you see victory just ahead. But other people notice if you break your promises, even over little things. And they have memories like elephants.
6. Don't haggle when you can negotiate. You are tempted to haggle over every issue and try to win each one. That is a sure way to leave money on the table in complex negotiations. Instead, try what the negotiating scholars call "integrative bargaining" in complex situations: Identify the issues, fears, and risks that are most important to the other party and address his or her interests and priorities in exchange for accommodations on the things you want most. Package your trade-offs using the "if...then" formulation well known to negotiation experts: if you give us what we want on issues A and B, then we might consider concessions on issues X and Y.
7. Always acknowledge the other party. Protect his or her self-esteem. People are proud. They like to hear you say they have some leverage, even when they do not.
Don't gloat when you are the more powerful party. Treat people on the other side with appropriate respect. That does not cost much, and they will appreciate it. Someday they will have the leverage, and they will remember you more kindly.
G. Richard Shell is a professor of legal studies and management at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also director of the Wharton Executive Negotiation Workshop.
From Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, by G. Richard Shell. © G. Richard Shell, 1999. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. The book will be arriving at bookstores this month. To order it directly, call 800-253-6476.