Transcript
Transcript: Unlocking Negotiation Success: Best Practices for Effective Negotiations
[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: Ask a lot of questions. Now you can certainly ask questions about, you know, where are you, where did you come from? Where did you go to school? These are, I think, quite helpful questions to help establish rapport, build a relationship. Fundamentally, a good question in the context of negotiation is when you're asking people about what are their interests, what really matter to them. What are their priorities? What is truly critical versus frankly, what is not so important? These get at the heart of what you need to understand, what are people's interests and priorities and asking lots of questions about them. It's very helpful.
Seasoned negotiators also think about a variety of options and alternatives, more so than I think inexperienced negotiators do. They think of very different ways to solve the same problem. They're very good at communicating. And not only are they good at communicating effectively. They're very good at listening. Listening is an important, but often neglected skill in negotiation. When you ask somebody something and they answer your question, then it can be quite helpful to read it back to them. Or did I truly understand what you said? Let me just tell you what I think you heard. And so it can be a more active process. So it's often referred to as active listening.
[00:01:24 Text on screen: Proposals in Negotiation.]
Glen Whyte: Uh good negotiators know that negotiations are often rather, forgive me, constipated unless somebody makes a proposal. So they make a proposal at or at the appropriate time. They make a proposal because they know that proposals move the process forward. Otherwise it can be just a bunch of blah, blah, blah. At some point, someone's going to make an offer. I think typically it's better that you be the one to make the offer, but somebody should make an offer. And by the way, once you do make an offer, you've got a very simple job as a negotiator. Your job is then be patient and wait. And do not make another offer unless and until you receive a point–by–point response to what you say. What you don't want to do is to start negotiating against yourself.
And people tend to like doing this. Once you make an offer and solicit a counteroffer, often it goes offer counteroffer, counter counteroffer, which can — it's a way that people often are quite comfortable, engaging in a negotiation. Even more sophisticated, I think, is that of putting two or three proposals on the table. I'm not saying proposals that are close to your bottom line, but if you can put, during a negotiation, two or three proposals on the table that have roughly equivalent value to you and are at somewhere around your target, you're now in a position to say to your counterpart, take your pick, choose which one you want, and that's a very collaborative gesture which I think is often received very productively.
Now they may reject all of your proposals. But even if they do that, you can now say, well, I understand you reject all my proposals, would you mind rank ordering the former, which is truly the most distasteful versus the one that is closest to being acceptable? And if they can rank order those proposals, you'll be learning useful information about what truly matters to your counterpart.
[00:03:23 Text on screen: "Post–Settlement" Settlement in Negotiation.]
Glen Whyte: The idea of something called a post–settlement settlement, reflects the fact that just because you got a deal doesn't mean it's a great deal. Most negotiation could be better. And the idea of a post–settlement settlement gives you an opportunity to make it better. And it just means you don't assume you're done when you have a deal or a solution or an outcome. Is it possible, would it be worthwhile to schedule a subsequent meeting to explore the possibility that you can make changes to what we have that would be mutually beneficial? And as long as everybody thinks those changes make sense, why not make those changes?
The idea of a post–settlement settlement, just another way of extracting additional information, and that information tends to flow more easily after there is a solution in place. And then the point of the subsequent meeting, can we make it even better?
[00:04:20 Text on screen: Succeeding in Negotiation.]
Glen Whyte: Negotiation, when done successfully, achieves four things: Enhance relationships, perceptions of having won or done well that exist around the table. You've created a large pie of collective benefit, and you've been successful at claiming, at a minimum, your fair share. Those are considered the traditional hallmarks of an effective negotiation. They're hard to achieve simultaneously, but it's useful for people to understand what it means, what negotiation when done well looks like, because it then gives you — it's like a beacon of light to guide you as you are making all the decisions in the process of a complex negotiation.
[00:05:04 Text on screen: "…to guide you as you are making all the decisions in the process of a complex negotiation.]
[00:05:13 The CSPS logo appears on screen. Text appears on screen: canada.ca/school. The government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
