Transcript
Transcript: Unlocking Negotiation Success: Defining Negotiation
[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: So let me, let me talk a little bit about what is negotiation. It's a pretty long list. But things like — not just making deals — people negotiate, but they also make decisions in negotiation. They, solve problems, build consensus, allocating resources, making budgets. There's a lot of tasks that people use negotiating to perform, although they often aren't thought about as being sort of classical challenges in negotiation. Negotiation is something we use not just professionally, but personally. From deciding who does the dishes or takes out the trash to where are we going to live? I've got a job offer in another city and so on. So they can be quite intense and high stakes.
Negotiation is not just a process by which to get a price on a used car. It's also a foundational leadership skill. It's what leaders, the skill that leaders mainly use to make a difference and make an impact. And if you aspire to make a difference in the world, these are likely the skills you're going to have to rely on to make that kind of positive difference.
[00:01:09 Text on screen: "…these are likely the skills you're going to have to rely on to make that kind of positive difference."]
[00:01:16 Text on screen: Single vs. Multi–Party Issue Negotiation.]
Glen Whyte: The most fundamental challenge in negotiation is when two parties are trying to resolve a single issue. Can't get any more simple than that. Single issue negotiations are primarily competitive in the sense that the only way you get more, if there's just one issue at stake, is to ensure your counterpart gets less. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, at one end, you've got two parties, one issue. At the other, you've got many parties and many issues.
So contrast the archetypal used car negotiation, two parties trying to resolve the issue of price. Versus a global climate change accord involving 200 parties, thousands of issues. This is a different species of activity. And then you've got the various gradations between. If you've got two parties, one issue, what about two parties, many issues?
It's very useful to think about the challenge you're being, you're faced with across those dimensions, because that will give you some insight into where you need to go in terms of thinking about how you want to process the upcoming difficulty. The sort of tactics and strategies that might lead to success are not the same sort of tactics and strategies you'll need to think about when you're involved in the context of dealing with many parties and many issues. They're almost different species of activities.
[00:02:47 The CSPS logo appears on screen. Text appears on screen: canada.ca/school. The government of Canada logo appears on screen.]
