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Negotiation skills – shooting for the win/win situation
As anyone who watches the TV news or has ever read a history book will know, bad news generally makes for a better story; therefore, throughout history, tales of failed negotiations outnumber stories of success. In business, negotiation skills are, albeit often on a micro level, constantly tested.
But, as Ross Geraghty finds out, the key to short- and long-term success in the biggest to the smallest negotiations is an acceptance by both parties that both parties need to emerge from the negotiation as a winner. Go into a negotiation wanting your opponent to come out happy? That isn’t always easy.
Bad negotiation skills lead to one or both parties being at least disgruntled, causing a simmering resentment which, in time, can flare up into arguments, accusations, and, taking it to the extreme, into violence and even war. Look at the Boston Tea Party; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Miner’s Strike in the UK; the alleged Pakistani ball-tampering affair in cricket; Munich in 1938. All examples of where negotiation failed with results ranging from accusations of racism to war to the threat of nuclear holocaust.
In the business world, decisions with such vast repercussions are, thankfully, rare. However MBA graduates, ambitious professionals by definition, are going to have to make negotiation a constant part of their lives until they reach that coveted Chair of the Board position. From salaries to sales contracts and strategy to team building, negotiation skills are a daily event for business leaders and the advice is to get the basics right as early as possible.
Soft skills
Negotiation is generally considered a ‘soft’ skill, meaning that it isn’t a rigourous academic course as, say, marketing or finance with their strict mathematical models and tried and tested methods. Instead it is something that individuals will all possess to a certain extent and which can, with learning and practise, be developed. And the message from recruiters is becoming clearer that these skills should be developed. In the 2007 QS Recruiter Survey, surveying 500 of the world’s major international MBA recruiters (including Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Motorola), communication and negotiation skills regularly ranked higher in importance than the traditional skillsets such as finance and marketing. “We tend to focus less on academic or technical skills,” says Phillip Cho of Lehman Brothers Singapore, “and place emphasis more on communication, interpersonal skills and leadership traits.”
For Jeff Weiss, Director of Vantage Partners, a consultancy in Boston, negotiation is, in its simplest terms, “An act of persuasion to meet one’s objectives. It’s an ongoing process of influencing people with regard to contracts, or salaries, essentially of getting people to talk to you.”
Trixie Rawlinson, a partner at Impact Factory, a soft skills communication company based in London, agrees. For her, the essential point in the art of any negotiation is informing yourself completely about, “the position from where you start. You have to define what you can’t give away and what you can?”
Rawlinson continues that business negotiations rarely come down to cost; there are other aspects the businessperson can introduce in order to maintain well thought-out costings and retain a healthy profit. “If you’re selling golf balls, know in advance how many a customer needs to buy before you can offer a discount? Often, negotiation is conducted less on the peripherals to cost such as timing or delivery. If you could deliver the golf balls tomorrow, for example, and gift-wrapped than that could work for the buyer, at that cost.”
Rawlinson’s point is that it is essential that both parties emerge from the negotiations as winners. If you enter the negotiation as some kind of battle, in order to defeat your opponent and get the most for your party at the other party’s expense, you are guaranteed to lose in the long-term. Says Craig Coltrane, a media executive in the UK, “I have been in meetings where the other person had the sole objective of ‘winning’ at any cost. He paid little attention to what my needs and interests were. He got the deal but only until I could find someone else to establish a long-term relationship with.”
