Presman A Practical Guide to Negotiation

Create Winning Agreements
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84831-938-7
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Reihe: Practical Guide Series

Think negotiation is a boardroom battlefield? Think again. We all need to negotiate in our professional and personal lives, but negotiation doesn't have to be a fight to get what you want. In fact, you'll create better deals and better relationships through collaboration. In Negotiation, Gavin Presman shares his ethical and mutually-beneficial approach, showing you how to prepare for and engage in every negotiation to achieve better results for yourself and others - whether you're drawing up a contract with a new client, buying a house or, often the trickiest of all, settling family disagreements. With step-by-step guidance, illustrative examples and checklists to refer back to, this is a practical and empowering guide that will improve the negotiating skills of any reader, enhancing personal and professional relationships in the process.

Gavin Presman delivers negotiation, sales and influence training with his company, Inspire, and at the How To Academy in London. He is a master practitioner of NLP, the European lead trainer for Microsoft's Catalyst programme, and the chair of governors at Eden Primary - a free school he helped found.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Presman, Gavin

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Why Good Negotiation Practice Leads to Better Personal and Professional Relationships

When I started out in business, if I lost, or lost out, in a negotiation, whatever the context and no matter how much I attempted to post-rationalize, it always felt personal. I had usually expended considerable emotional energy to get myself through it, and the ramifications often continued to haunt me long after I had picked myself up and brushed myself off.

The outcomes of our negotiations, both at work and in our personal lives, have wide-ranging implications. Missed opportunities to negotiate or mismanaged negotiations mean we, and often others, lose out. We can lose out financially, we can lose confidence, and we can lose the respect of others. Sometimes this is because we do not even spot an opportunity to negotiate; sometimes our lack of technique makes us uncomfortable, embarrassed and intimidated, and we rush the negotiation process to get it over with. Among my course attendees, even senior and highly experienced businessmen and businesswomen say they often find negotiation stressful and outcomes dissatisfying.

My own turning point in improving my negotiation skills occurred when someone got the better of me, I took it hard, and it became apparent that I had been played by an expert. I determined to learn from the experience and to take every possible step to avoid repeating my mistakes. This lesson didn’t happen in a boardroom, or a customer’s office, but in my mother’s kitchen, and I wasn’t learning from my elders, but rather from Millie, my six-year-old niece. Millie was my bridge to adulthood. I cried when she was born, in the realisation that I had crossed a generational line, but despite our age gap we shared a lot of fun and I soon learned that she was pretty sharp, even at the tender age of six.

I was looking after her at my Mum’s for the first time. Keen and eager to please, I had the whole afternoon to play the perfect uncle – best friend, sage and teacher. By 5pm I had done everything Millie wanted all afternoon: I had ridden with her on the two-man reclining bicycles in the park, for another half-an-hour after the point when my legs wanted to go home and rest. I had bought her ice cream and crisps, and I had pieced together puzzles. I was exhausted, but the pleasure of having accomplished my mission far outweighed my fatigue, and I buoyantly gathered Millie’s belongings ready to escort her home.

‘Come on, Millie. It’s time to see Mummy now, so let’s put your shoes on –’

‘No,’ she said, with a single turn of the head.

‘Ha, ha. Come on now. Let’s put these nice red shoes on. We’d better get going or –’

‘No shoes.’

‘But –’

‘Too tight,’ she said, without any explanation as to why they hadn’t been too tight an hour before.

I tried waiting for a few minutes … then pleading. Then I tried appealing to her good nature, reminding her of my previous favours, but, as with so many clients I’ve encountered, previous favours hold no currency once eclipsed by a new and greater need.

I tried getting tough, but Millie wasn’t taking any bullying from her best uncle, and she knew how to play me. Seeing her bottom lip quiver I switched mode.

‘Look, let’s try to figure out a way to get home happy,’ I said, putting the shoes down on the middle of the table between us. ‘Okay then, so … what shall we do?’

I was employing a technique imparted to me by one of my mentors, John Tulley, a man of humility and understanding who taught me much about how to work with difficult people in difficult times. John always said the magic of asking the other party what to do lay in the handing over of the power, thereby creating a space for cooperation. I had used this to great effect at work. Whether it would be as effective on a six-year-old remained to be seen, but at this point I was prepared to try everything to avert Millie’s tears.

I looked at the shoes and waited for Millie to respond. She looked at the shoes, satisfied she was getting her way. Then her eyes scanned the room before fixing on something behind me. She held her stare and grinned, and when I turned around to follow her stare I saw a glass jar filled with homemade chocolate-chip cookies, baked by my mother, probably for the specific purpose of bribing her grandchildren on their regular visits. I kicked myself for not having thought of this earlier.

‘Oh, I see. So, if I give you one of Savta’s cookies, you will put your shoes on?’

This was a basic rule of negotiation, which I used in business all the time. Find something the other party wants that you can give them at low cost to you, to conclude your deal. I was so relieved that Millie was agreeing to comply I forgot to employ another key rule.

I gave Millie the cookie, and when she had finished it, I smiled.

‘Right! Let’s get your shoes on.’

‘No,’ she said with a shake of her head.

‘Hey, what about our deal?!’

Millie just leaned back in her chair and counted out two fingers.

‘Two shoes, two cookies,’ I said, tutting to myself as I remembered an essential rule of negotiation: ‘get first, then give’. Always.

To this day I don’t know whether Millie had this planned out or just took advantage of my weak position when she realized she was in control of the game. To her that’s what it was – a game she immediately recognized, but which I had been slow to recognize, even though I played it every day at work.

At this point I knew it was time to invoke the ‘phrase that pays’ and frame the agreement conditionally and contextually, requiring Millie to make the first move.

‘OK, Millie, if you put your shoes on, then I will give you another cookie.’

Simply framing the agreement with ‘If you …, then I …’ is a world apart from framing it with ‘I will …, if you …’, a difference I will explain in detail in Chapter 8 on bargaining.

So, Millie put her shoes on and got her extra cookie, and we enjoyed a quiet walk back to my sister’s – at least until Millie was sick all over her shoes.

From that day, I have put the key principles of negotiating to full use at every opportunity in all areas of my life, and now I teach others to do the same. Rather than panicking or taking things personally, I now find negotiating comes naturally to me and feels as much fun as it no doubt felt to Millie the day she got one over on me. I hope that by using the principles in this book you will enjoy it too.

In the following chapters I will explain the negotiation system that I teach on my courses at Inspire and the How To Academy. It is a system that can be used by anyone in any area of life, professional or personal, to make the experience of negotiating stress-free, amicable and rewarding. I developed it by taking the lessons I have learned over 25 years of personal and professional research into negotiating and business psychology, and by adapting them for today’s collaborative business culture. The principles are illustrated using examples and are accompanied by check-lists that enable you to start using these strategies straightaway. Whether you are a property broker or pet walker, you sell for a living or buy, or you want to influence your boss, your best friend or your customers, this book will help you to prepare for and engage in every negotiation and agreement. It will help you to make negotiating a more fulfilling and valuable experience for you.

My late English teacher, Mr Stewart, used to say: ‘When you think about others first, you serve yourself best.’ Take this into account when you negotiate, because people sense selfishness in others very quickly, and it creates mistrust. When we cooperate we create trust and partnerships that can bear fruit well beyond the narrow issues of the day.

So, this is a book that is based on an ethical approach to negotiation: one that favours cooperation over competition, and which is designed to help you craft agreements that give everyone more. If you are looking for tools or techniques that will help you coerce others into agreements designed solely to satisfy your own needs, then this isn’t the right place for you. My experience has shown me that the most effective negotiators don’t just use ‘give and take’ as a strategy to get more for themselves, they understand it as the fundamental principle behind effective negotiations. They obsess, therefore, not about what they can get for themselves, but about what they can craft together that will make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. What this means is that they believe that doing a deal and using the resources of both parties creatively will benefit both parties more than not doing a deal. While this approach demands more preparation, more time, and sometimes more effort, it yields more results in the short and the long term.

This book can be read cover to cover as you move from basic to more advanced sections. Or you may want to dip straight into the more advanced sections to find help with a specific challenge, person or outcome. You may want to do both, read it through, and then return occasionally, when specific negotiations call for you to apply these lessons in a critical way.

The...