Transcript
Transcript: Unlocking Negotiation Success: Avoiding Common Mistakes When Negotiating
[00:00:00 Title appears on screen, followed by Glen Whyte seated on a stool in a large, open office space.]
[00:00:07 Text on screen: Glen Whyte, Professor, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, University of Toronto.]
Glen Whyte: There's an error that it's so pervasive, it has a name. It's called a mythical fixed pie. The belief that a negotiation is fundamentally a situation where it is zero sum, win, lose. The pie is fixed in size. And so the assumption is that the only way that I advance my agenda is by preventing you from advancing yours and vice versa. That the situation is, is one of pure competition. There are situations like that. The Leafs versus the Canadiens, pure competition. The way one team wins is to ensure the other side loses. That is sometimes the case in negotiation as well, but only when there is a single issue on the table.
Single issues are intrinsically win–lose in nature, but most real world negotiations are not. Most real world negotiations involve a number of issues, and whenever there's more than one issue that is at stake, there is the possibility that the size of the pie is not fixed, the size of the pie is the variable, that you can make the pie bigger, and better. And the typical way to do that is to look for opportunities to add issues to the discussion, or perhaps split up existing issues. So, try to avoid falling prey to this notion of the mythical fixed pie.
[00:01:27 Text on screen: "There is a real risk in negotiations where the parties play the wrong game."]
Glen Whyte: There is a real risk in negotiations where the parties play the wrong game. And I would describe the wrong game typically as the competitive game, the positional game, the very familiar game of negotiations where my gain is your loss and vice versa. So, it is possible you can play this game and still come up with a reasonable agreement, but only when at the outset there is a very large overlap with respect to what is minimally acceptable. So there's a big target that you could hit and still end up with something through the process.
You cannot play this game, the competitive positional game, when you're faced with an incredibly common challenge in negotiation, where the parties at the outset are at an impasse, where the impasse is legitimate, where there is no overlap at the outset. The way that you resolve the problem in this case, the way you break an impasse, frequently in negotiation, is to take what I would describe as an interest–based option generating strategy, where the orientation is one in the direction of collaboration and cooperation. Where you are being forthcoming and you're sharing as much information as you possibly can.
Another classic is not to sufficiently organize the team and a team that has the right strategy, but is poorly organized is still going to fail. So make sure that not only do you pay attention to the strategy, you also pay attention to the human challenge of organizing the team. Everybody needs to know their role. Everybody needs to be singing from the same song sheet and if you don't pay attention to the team, you're probably going to lose even if the strategy you've chosen is the correct one.
[00:03:13 The CSPS logo appears on screen. Text appears on screen: canada.ca/school. The government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
