A Practical Guide to Negotiation E-Book

Gavin Presman

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 238

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Praise for Negotiation: How to Craft Agreements that Give Everyone More

‘In today’s business world, many people forget the simple message of this book: that collaboration is a useful and successful strategy for success. I particularly like the practical advice and step-by-step guides to applying this strategy in all areas of your life where you need to seek agreement. If there is one book about negotiation I can thoroughly recommend you have on your shelf, it’s this one.’

Kathleen Saxton, Founder and CEO, The Lighthouse Company

‘Gavin’s is a special gift. If you have spent time with him, you will want to spend time with this book. If this is your first exposure to his talent, you are in for a treat.’

Marc Nohr, CEO, Fold7, former FT Columnist and Founder of Kitcatt Nohr

‘It’s great to read such an honest, practical and enjoyable guide to the art of negotiation. I’ve been using this type of material with my own clients for many years, so I know how helpful it will be for anyone who needs to negotiate to get results. It’s definitely something I would recommend to any salesperson, buyer or manager in any field.’

Mike Morton, Leadership and Influence Trainer

‘Gavin’s book is transformational because it provides the solid steps needed for effective negotiation in a simple format that allows people to use it. I’ve been sharing the practical stories, tools and techniques with my coachees and training participants, and can see how effective this approach is in real life.’

Steven Fine, Master Practitioner, Lumina Learning

‘In every area of our business, negotiation skills play a vital role. It’s great to see a book that shares our culture of long-term cooperation, and also gives the reader practical skills they can apply to create better agreements. I will recommend that everyone in my team reads this book; if you want your teams to be more successful, I suggest you recommend that they read it too.’

Naren Patel, CEO, Primesight

NEGOTIATION

Gavin Presman

NEGOTIATION

HOW TO CRAFT AGREEMENTS THAT GIVE EVERYONE MORE…

Published in the UK in 2016 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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London WC1B 3DA or their agents

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ISBN: 978-184831-937-0

Text copyright © 2016 Gavin Presman

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Adobe Caslon by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

About the Author

Gavin runs a personal and professional training venture, Inspire, which he launched in 2002. His clients range from leading media and technology businesses, including Microsoft, Guardian Media Group and Twitter, to creative businesses, including Global Radio, Bauer, the How To Academy and We Are Social. He regularly delivers negotiation and influence training across the world, through Inspire, Lumina Learning and DOOR International. A graduate of the One Thought Professional Institute, he runs coaching and training in the business world with Inspiring Insight, and works with pupils and teachers to bring resilience and insight into schools through the Innate Health Centre. He is also the chair of governors at Eden Primary, a new free school he helped found, and a mentor at The House of St Barnabas Employment Academy.

Gavin is the son of a teacher/politician/preacher (and stand-in rabbi) and a City lawyer. Evenings in the Presman household involved little TV and much debate, and Gavin learned from his father the importance of understanding all sides of an argument, from his mother how to use a good story, and from his grandfather how to make a good deal. His Booba didn’t teach him much in the field of negotiation, but made a sensational chicken soup.

This book is dedicated to my best friend, my amazing wife Jools, who with her support made it possible.

Angel, without you I am nothing, and to me you are everything.

Contents

Foreword by Bruce Daisley, VP Europe, Twitter

Introduction – Why Good Negotiation Practice Leads to Better Personal and Professional Relationships

  1.  Giving Structure to Your Negotiation Strategy

  2.  Step One – Preparing Yourself for Collaborative Negotiation

  3.  Step Two – Preparing a Plan

  4.  Step Three – Understanding Your Partner’s Point of View

  5.  Step Four – Discussing

  6.  Step Five – Proposing

  7.  Step Six – Bargaining

  8.  Step Seven – Agreeing

  9.  Understanding the Human Operating System

10.  Understanding Personality Traits for Better Negotiations

11.  Using the Seven Steps at Home

12.  Avoiding Common Gambits Some Negotiators Use

Conclusion – Can You Really Get More by Giving More?

Recommended Reading

Index

Foreword

by Bruce Daisley, VP Europe, Twitter

If you’ve never faced a tricky negotiation in your life, then you’re in a very small – and very lucky – minority. Strangely, for something so everyday, most of us feel daunted and unprepared for these encounters. The prospect of a negotiation can be one of the most anxious anticipations in our lives – we dread the very idea. It seems to represent only the opportunity to lose out. Additionally, we read negotiation as confrontation. And the ‘fight or flight’ part of our brain wants to scarper for the hills.

Our lives are brim-full of stories of negotiation. A friend of mine told me how he was ostracized on his week-long dream holiday in the Caribbean when fellow holiday-makers heard he had ‘got it cheap’. This is the visceral fear of bargaining situations – we dread them even when they don’t involve us. Many of us harbour a fear that our inexpert talents mean that others are getting more out of deals than we are. All of this makes negotiating feel such high stakes.

The remarkable thing about something that can provoke such sleepless nights, is that learning to negotiate better is one of simplest skills that we can begin to master. And literally one of the most rewarding. It’s why I was delighted when Gavin Presman – one of my career mentors – decided to write this book. Negotiation is an art that has been honed over centuries. An art that merges an understanding of everything from the human psyche to game theory. But it’s also something that can quickly demonstrate our lack of experience. Gavin’s approach is concise, clear and easy to use – and it’s no surprise that he was asked to commit it to print.

In his use of simple, real-life examples, Gavin stands on the shoulders of giants – bringing in the expertise of some of the zestiest intellects, while making their work easy to understand. The truth about negotiation is that there are no new secret formulas needed. We just need to pay homage to the minds who went before us. Gavin has harvested their labours and imparts them in a way that’s easy to use.

Having been trained by Gavin and having learned from him in the past, this book has been a brilliantly stimulating reminder of how a handful of simple techniques can transform what we achieve when properly prepared. Gavin has created the go-to book for everyone.

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 most important thing is that you start figuring out how to apply these principles and practising the negotiation techniques. To assist you, each chapter contains a range of practical exercises, examples and summaries. If you follow #CollaborativeNegotiation on Twitter, you will be able to share your experiences and learn from others who are trying out these ideas in the field.

While I wrote this book alone, the ideas in this book did not occur to me without a little help from others. I have been inspired by many experts in this field, from Zig Ziglar to Stephen Covey to Alan Pease. Over the years I have been privileged to be personally trained by some of the world’s greatest – Werner Erhard, Richard Bandler, Paul McKenna and Sandra Proctor, to name a few. I have shared training platforms and worked alongside some of the UK’s finest trainers, including Mike Morton, Paul Kenny, Stewart Desson and Steven Fine, and have recently been privileged to work for and with both Steven Smith, co-author of Catalyst and Egonomics and the Partners In Leadership Team, whose exceptional work on accountability makes such a difference to the organizations they serve. The ideas they have shared with me have helped form my thinking and, so, without them this book would not have been possible.

Yet some of my biggest lessons have come from those I have chosen not to name: those I never want to meet again, those I walked away from and those who lost the opportunity of working with me, and with others, because of their determination to focus solely on themselves. I have also omitted the names of certain estate agents (you know who you are). I thank them for showing me what not to do.

CHAPTER 1

Giving Structure to Your Negotiation Strategy

When approaching a negotiation, the truth is that most of us jump into bargaining far too quickly. There’s little chance for relationship building, neither party gets the best deal it could have got, and both parties are likely to walk away unsatisfied.

This is why structure is so important in negotiation: learning to plan a negotiation and take it step by step means that you don’t rush in and miss opportunities. Understanding where we are in the structure helps us to navigate more effectively to ensure we feel confident that both parties are in the right place to get what they want and what they need from every deal.

Time plays an important role in how you structure your negotiation; you need to take your own and others’ timeframes and deadlines into account, as well as recognizing any differences between realistic and desired time-frames. For example, if you are negotiating about a house purchase, you will want to make a deal before someone else does; if you are negotiating another kind of sale, both you and the other party may want key exchanges (the money or the product) in a specified time. Having a structure will help you to navigate through these time-frames without getting lost, and without your partner becoming frustrated or disappointed.

In this book, you’ll work through the system I have taught for over twenty years. It’s structured around seven key steps and is used by negotiation experts in all walks of life from property and retail to politics and peacemaking. The key change from the classic structure expounded by Gavin Kennedy in his 1997 book, Kennedy on Negotiation, is that here you see seven steps, whereas Kennedy proposed eight steps that he summarized into four. At two companies I work with, Inspire and DOOR International, we use a seven-step process which separates your preparation into three distinct stages, allowing you the opportunity to prepare effectively before moving on to four deal-making stages. This extra time spent on preparation always yields dividends in the long term.

The seven steps to effective, collaborative negotiation are:

PREPARE YOURSELF MENTALLYPREPARE A PLANPREPARE TO COLLABORATEDISCUSSPROPOSEBARGAINAGREE.

In this chapter, we cover the importance of following a process, and introduce how to use the seven-step process. Chapters 2–8 will take each step in turn, showing you how to apply the steps practically in your negotiations. The later chapters then go into greater depth about negotiating with people – understanding your own and others’ personalities, negotiating at home and in your personal life, and dealing with tricky negotiators.

The first step is to prepare mentally: thinking through what outcome you want from the deal and how you can collaborate with the other party to achieve it. Second, you can begin to prepare a list of what you may be able to offer in any bargaining scenario. Third, you step into your partner’s shoes and prepare from their perspective. These three steps together ensure that you enter any discussion well prepared. Following this, you sit down to have a discussion with the other party (step four), giving you sufficient information to prepare a proposal (step five) that will enable you to bargain (step six) and finally to agree a mutually beneficial outcome (step seven).

Using this structure will support you to craft agreements that work for both parties, will keep you focused on mutual gain, and will prevent you from pushing for, or accepting, agreements that work for only one party or the other. This book is all about crafting agreements that work better for all parties, but why? It’s worth considering why it’s so important to structure your agreements to achieve this mutual benefit.

THINK ABOUT IT

Let’s take a classic hostage scenario. Imagine a few of your colleagues have been taken hostage in your office building. As yet the scene is unclear, but all we know is that your boss and a few of the senior leaders are being held in the canteen. What’s the first thing you do? How can you move forward and keep control of the negotiation to achieve a successful outcome for all? I have asked this question hundreds of times in training rooms across the globe and the results demonstrate interesting tendencies we have as negotiators.

How did you answer the question? Did you try to open a line of dialogue with the hostage takers? Did you look at what you might offer to try to end the standoff? When I’ve asked this question before, many reply that they would try to open a line of communication to establish what the hostage takers’ needs are and start building a dialogue. While it seems like the right answer, it’s not what the professionals do in real life. Discussion in any negotiation should come after careful preparation. Jumping into discussion without thinking through all the variables can lead to challenging outcomes – particularly in our hostage situation. Without understanding all the variables and exploring both sides’ needs, and the needs of the other parties in any agreement, you enter the negotiation less likely to skilfully craft an agreement that works for all.

Before you bargain with anyone, carefully analyse the situation you have in front of yourself. Understand your own position clearly, and imagine the other parties’ position too. Also, spend time discussing your assumptions with the other parties, so you can work in partnership to create an agreement that works for all.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO NEGOTIATE?

One interesting thing about the hostage scenario is that it poses a fundamental question of whether or not you should negotiate at all. Many of our governments declare that they will not negotiate with terrorists, and it’s an understandable position. Negotiation suggests partnering to achieve common goals, but it might not always be possible to find common goals or identify what a win–win outcome would look like.

WIN–WIN

In our daily lives, we sometimes face dealing with people with whom we really don’t want to partner. If you are negotiating with someone you really don’t trust or care for, you are going to have a problem getting to win–win. It may not be possible to negotiate. Remember that this book is about how we achieve better relationships with suppliers and partners, as much as it is about the practical tools we use to make deals. Later in the book, we’ll look at examples of deals that didn’t come through and will discuss knowing when to walk away instead of negotiating a bad outcome.

There is a body of academic research that points to the importance of preparation, both mental and physical, in achieving desired outcomes. Teams of behavioural scientists have been conducting negotiation scenarios with test subjects, testing the impact that preparation has on outcomes. The Negotiation Journal and the Harvard Negotiation Research Project (HNRP) cite numerous studies that all suggest the same thing: the more options you have, and the more prepared you are, the better the result is likely to be. The methodology recommended in this book is further supported by research in the Journal of Economic Psychology that points towards a clear link between preparation, mental conditioning and results.

Bruce Patton, Roger Fisher and William Ury have conducted research over many years into both the structure and practice of effective negotiations. This work forms the basis of one of the classic negotiation books, Getting to Yes. It’s worth looking a little at what their research demonstrates. The first thing we can take away is the evidence that negotiators who prepare by writing out clear objectives, and those who commit their thinking to paper, rather than simply having objectives in mind, generally fare better in most negotiation scenarios. Further to this, there seems to be evidence that the more detailed the preparation, the better the results. Why this is the case is not always clear, but my experience suggests that time spent in the planning stage always yields results in increased understanding later on in the negotiation.

DISTINGUISHING NEGOTIATION FROM HAGGLING

When the subject of what I do for a living comes up, new friends are keen to tell me about their latest exploits haggling in the market. This is because it is a common misconception that haggling and negotiation are the same thing – although they very clearly are not. While I love the opportunity to haggle and bargain if the common business culture accepts it, they are miles away from the negotiation strategy and practice we are discussing in this book. It’s important to define the difference, so we can be clear when we can and can’t genuinely negotiate.