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

by Stuart Diamond

Here’s a new definition of competitiveness: your ability to meet your goals.

Nash proved mathematically the 1755 theory of Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that when parties collaborate, the overall size of the pie almost always expands, so each party gets more than it could get alone. The typical example is that four hunters can each catch only one rabbit while acting alone, but they can catch a deer together.

Again, write your goals down. Check them often.

YOU—YOUR ATTITUDE, CREDIBILITY, TRANSPARENCY The attitude you bring to a negotiation has a direct impact on the result you get.

The most important asset you have in any human interaction is your credibility. If people don’t believe you, it’s hard to convince them of anything. Your credibility is more important than your expertise, connections, intelligence, assets, and looks.

SMALL STEPS In our imaginations, big, bold moves produce big successes. In the real world, big, bold moves mostly

scare people away: you are trying to go too far, too fast. Small, incremental steps accomplish more. This is especially true if two parties are far apart in a negotiation.

I’m not trying to hit home runs in negotiations. I’m trying to get one extra hit every nine games. It’s a good lesson for negotiation, and a good lesson for life. A few incremental improvements and you will be fabulously more successful.

The tools that work are very small, subtle, and yet very effective.

EVERYTHING IS SITUATIONAL Here is my entire negotiation course in three broad questions. 1. What are my goals? 2. Who are “they”?

3. What will it take to persuade them? Every negotiation, every situation is different. That’s because there are different people in the negotiation. Or the same people on different days. Or a different set of facts and circumstances. Or a different goal. So I need to ask these questions for every situation. The third question depends on the answers to the first two. And this is why you need the List. You choose from the List, and from the various supporting individual tools, based on goals and people. You may act differently in two negotiations on the same subject, with the same facts. That’s because either the goals or the people, or both, are different. There is no one-size-fits-all.

The people involved in a negotiation, and the process they use, comprise more than 90 percent of what is important in a negotiation. The substance, the facts, and the expertise make up less than 10 percent. This is quite counterintuitive for most people.

THE QUESTION OF POWER Let’s continue this conversation. First, let’s define power as your ability to meet your goals over all relevant time frames. In other words, you need enough power to meet your goals, but not more. Power for its own sake is almost always useless; in fact, as I explained earlier, it can be harmful.

IMPLEMENTING THE STRATEGIES AND TOOLS It’s not enough to know the negotiation strategies and tools in this book. You have to be able to use them in real time. If you can’t, they are useless to

you. This is a critical point. The world is full of great negotiation thinkers who have read books, have taken courses, and can have great discussions about negotiations. The world is not full of great negotiators who can execute successful negotiations in real time.

PERSISTENCE A negotiation is over when you say it is, not before. It doesn’t matter how many times the other person says no, or disagrees with you, or gives you a hard time. Keep asking, stay focused on your goals (without making yourself the issue). Persistence, after all, is a focused effort, over time, to meet your goals.

With persistence comes self-confidence: the belief that you can do it. Students describe self-confidence as their number-one benefit from the course.

YOU MUST CONSIDER THE DEEPER MOTIVATION People do some of the most important things in life not for money, not for rational benefits, but for how it makes them feel. The emotional and psychic rewards they get, and the anguish, must be part of the negotiation process.

2 People Are (Almost) Everything

People like to give things to others who listen to them, who value them, who consult with them.

Unless you connect in some way with the people you are negotiating with, you won’t get a deal. Or, if you do get a deal, it won’t be a good one, or it won’t stick.

PICTURES IN THEIR HEADS First, the characteristics and sensibilities of the people sitting across from you dominate every other part of the negotiation. It is not even worth thinking about race, religion, gender, culture, creed, or any other issues until you know the pictures in their heads that day. If you each bring three people to a negotiation on Monday, and you bring a fourth person on Tuesday, it’s a completely different negotiation. Even with the same six people, someone may have had a bad commute that morning, someone else may not be feeling well, someone’s kid might be sick, someone might be distracted by something else.

So the first thing you have to do is take the emotional and situational temperature of the people sitting across from you, even if you know them very well. Even if you are married to them.

Most people think that the negotiation is about substance: I’m a financial expert, I’m a medical doctor, I’m an environmental lawyer, I’m an energy expert, I’m a mechanic. But studies show that less than 10 percent of the reason why people reach agreement has anything to do with the substance. More than 50 percent has to do with the people—do they like each other, do they trust each other, will they hear what each other has to say? Just over a third has to do with the process they use. That is, do they decide to explore each other’s needs (rational and emotional)? Do they agree on an agenda? Do they make genuine commitments to each other?

THE HUMAN CONNECTION Focusing on the people will get you much more. Even in a transactional situation, people are five times as likely to help you if you treat them as individuals. The numbers are staggering: 90 percent versus about 15 percent willing to help.

Focus on the people in front of you, and what you and the other party can do now. What is in your power to do? It is a very empowering way to think about a negotiation. You discard all the frustrating stuff over which you have no control, and deal with the things you can affect. It helps set priorities. It helps get things done.

THIRD PARTIES

There are almost always at least three people in a negotiation—even if only two people are present. The third party, or parties, are those people, real and imagined, that the principals think they must defer to in some way. They may be ghosts and goblins of their past. They may be people whom a principal told about the negotiation—a spouse, colleagues, friends—in front of whom the principals need to save face. It may be a boss. The point is, you need to account for these people to achieve your goals and get more.

Very few people ignore the opinions of third parties who are important to them. When you need to influence someone, and you don’t think you have enough influence by yourself, think about who else is important to the other person and whom you may have an easier time influencing.

VALUING THE OTHER PARTY

A key to getting other people to give you what you want is to value the other party.

Understanding the pictures in the head of the other party is a theme to which I will return over and over again. It is the single most important thing you can do in trying to persuade another person. If you try to understand the pictures in their heads, you have a starting point to changing their minds.

You need to think about all daily encounters as negotiations, and practice to the point where you can focus on the other party quickly. In other words, they must genuinely feel that the negotiation is about them and their needs and perceptions, not yours.

Making a personal connection means you have to focus on other people, not just yourself, bringing them into a conversation with you.

FINDING AND ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR POWER By valuing others, you are also acknowledging their power.

Finding and acknowledging the other person’s power also means finding the decision-maker. Or the person with direct influence over the decision-maker. How many of you have wasted hours of your lives negotiating with the wrong person? Everyone.

TRUST

Clearly, trust is a major people issue. The benefits of trust are huge: faster deals, more deals, bigger results. Not having it is costly.

Let’s define trust. Trust is a feeling of security that the other person will protect you. With some trust, another person will help you until it’s too risky for them or a better opportunity comes along. With a lot of trust, the other party will sometimes help you even if it harms them. It is very important to understand the trust dynamic. The major component of trust is honesty—being straight with people. Trust does not mean that both sides agree with each other, or are always pleasant to

each other. It does mean, however, that the parties believe each other. Your credibility, as I mentioned earlier, is the most important negotiation tool you have.

NEGOTIATING WITHOUT TRUST As we know, the world is often an untrustworthy place. How do you negotiate in situations where there is a lack of trust? After all, untrustworthy people pay money, too. The fact is, although trust is best, you don’t need it for successful negotiations. This is a big point and most people miss it: trust is not the major requirement for a successful negotiation. Something much

more fundamental is needed. What is needed is a commitment. Trust is only one way to get a commitment. Contracts, third parties, and incentives are other ways to obtain commitments. The important thing is, you need to get a commitment in the way they make commitments, not in the way you make commitments. Your word is your bond? Who cares? Is their word their bond? Don’t just assume that because you make a commitment one way, they will make a commitment the same way. You should spend as much energy on getting commitments that you are sure really commit them as you spend in setting your goals.

In the six years that we dealt with them, they never broke any term of the agreement. Did I trust them? I didn’t even know them! So here is a key. In the absence of trust, you need a mechanical substitute to give them an incentive not to cheat. It can be a monetary structure as above. It can be money in escrow or potential negative opinions by third parties. It can be the net present value of future profits from the deal.

As the singer Tina Turner once said, “What’s love got to do with it?” In a negotiation, trust is nice, but not necessary.

I like former president Ronald Reagan’s comment about the Soviet Union: “Trust, but verify.” It’s an old Russian proverb. Here is a list of things for you to keep in mind: • If they have a lot more information than you do, you are vulnerable. Be incremental and don’t make commitments until you have more information or a lot of trust. • Collect lots of information (“due diligence”) on them. Ask them for details. See if all the information matches up. Check and test everything. Use trusted third parties to help. • Do they evade your questions or change the subject? The more secretive they are, the more risk there is that they are hiding something. • If it would be more profitable for them to cheat than be honest, change the incentives. For example, compensate them for performance (value) they provide over time.

Don’t provide your assets (inventions, time, buildings) without explicit protections. • Make guarantees of truthfulness part of any agreement. Tell them: “It will give me comfort and cost you nothing if what you say is true.” If they balk, watch out! • Put in your agreement the consequences of breaking the agreement. • Meet in person; it’s harder to hide things. In some cultures, many parties will not negotiate except in person, where the parties can observe each other. • If you feel uncomfortable that something has been left unsaid, ask them, “Is there anything else I should know?” Trust your instincts. Is the other person nervous? Looking guilty? Trying too hard? Looking away (unless it’s cultural)? Keeping long silences? Declining to make commitments? These are not conclusive evidence of dishonesty. But they should raise questions

that cause you to go slower, ask more questions, be more incremental. Getting more also means not getting less. Take the trouble to follow these guidelines. Don’t be sorry later.

3 The Biggest Cause of Negotiation Failure MISPERCEPTION AND MISCOMMUNICATION

Perhaps the biggest cause of negotiation failure, worldwide, is communication failure. And the single biggest cause of communication failure is misperception. Two people look at the same picture, but each sees a different part. And as is too often the case in the world, they will “kill” each other fighting over different parts of the same picture.

THE PERCEPTION GAP This is a much more serious problem than most people think it is. They are not disagreeing with you because they’re stubborn or stupid or unreasonable. They are disagreeing with you because what you see so clearly is not there for them at all. It’s never been there. So in order to persuade them, you have to know exactly what the pictures in their heads are. And then you have to paint them an entire alternative universe, one brushstroke at a time. If you don’t do that, they will fight you for a thousand years. Often, the things you hold so firmly and dearly are invisible to the other party—they don’t exist.