When Negotiating – Negotiate eye ball to eye ball for an advantage
| Eye ball to eye ball negotiation a 24/7 subject? When you accept; presenting, influencing, haggling, arguing, and handling conflict and disputes are under the encompassing negotiating umbrella. The answer has to be an unqualified YES. After 30 years of study, research and consulting in a dispute I always advise people to go and see the other side, face to face. Why is this? Because people hide behind emails? In an email, they are very often aggressive and take unprincipled positions. Whereas in a live meeting (rather than a teams/zoom electronic meeting) for some reason they don’t the room, face to face you can build rapport, mirror and match, and choose where you sit. See the body language. With all your senses you can feel how they are facing up to the issues. Then you can say the magic words, “We would like to sort this issue out, I was wondering how can we resolve the situation as a Win-Win”? You must stay silent allowing the other side an opportunity to process your question and respond. If they don’t respond after a long pause, reinforce it with, “We certainly want to find a way to a Win-Win” It reminds me of the saying, “Jaw Jaw not War War” |
| KEEP YOUR COOL – WHEN OTHERS ARE LOSING THEIR COOL Thanks to Geoff the Chief Operating Officer of a former client who wrote to me following last week’s briefing. Geoff wrote,”Last year I was negotiating a settlement with a contractor. on a project. The first negotiator for them, his style was to shout, get red faced, throw papers in the air, stand up have a strop. My default style was and is precisely the opposite. The louder he got, the quieter (but not silent) I got and that wound him up even more. After several meetings, they changed their negotiator and we got the job done. He was still there in the background pulling the strings. Sure we both changed our £ positions but we would be in court now if one side hadn’t changed the style of the negotiator.” |
Derek ‘Mr Negotiator’ Arden
For Win-Win – How to get a winning result from Persuasive Negotiating by Derek.