Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life

by Stuart Diamond

The next three steps (12, 13, 14) will help you improve your decision-making process in choosing the best options and prioritizing your approaches. Can you reduce the other party’s perceived risk by making your proposal more incremental—that is, suggest a series of smaller steps? Which third parties are important, both to support the deal or to avoid? Can you frame or package the information in ways that are more persuasive to the other person? Something that gives them a vision? For example, “No Child Left Behind.” Or, “party for smarty,” the child gets more party time for good grades. Step 15, the last item in Quadrant III, is essentially walking away (BATNA). You will rarely need to use it. If you need to walk away, you should have discovered this at steps 5 or 11. So before you use step 16 and throw away your 15 steps of work, go back through what you wrote down and see if you forgot something, or made a mistake somewhere. But it’s there in case you have to use it. As noted throughout this book, the use of power in a negotiation is fraught with risk. Seeing a negotiation in terms of gaining power over the other side sets up a conflict situation. If they perceive you as trying to grab power over them, they may well have an emotional response—as in “I don’t care if I undermine the negotiation, I’m going to get even with you.” Once you play the power card, the relationship is usually over.