My Question
A successful negotiation requires the negotiations on communication, relationship and substance to be developed in parallel. When long term relationship is the most important value at stake – such as with partners, family, relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners as well as a team – more effort and discipline is required to keep the three negotiations aligned. Which are the techniques to use in this scenario for a successful negotiation?
I got interested about this topic after attending the Negotiation course entertained by Horacio Falcao during my MBA at INSEAD. I understood how negotiation is pervasive in our day to day life and that most of our interactions with people around us are actually negotiations. For this reason, it is important to entertain good negotiations not only in our professional life, but also with the close relationships that we cultivate every day. In addition, negotiation and relationship building are tight together and they influence each other: it is not trivial to have successful negotiations with the people we love and respect.
Having experienced the difficulties of negotiating in my day to day life with my partner and my family, I decided to dedicate time and effort in studying the impact of long term relationship on negotiations and, hopefully, have a better life together with the people I love.
This paper will be divided in the following chapters:
- Acknowledgment
- Introduction to Value Negotiation: what is negotiation and win-lose vs win-win approach.
- Building Relationship as we Negotiate: six basic elements
- Negotiation and Relationship: what is different with a pre-existing relationship
- How to protect the Relationship and Negotiate: a framework for the six elements
- What I learned
What I Learned
I learned that, negotiations are in almost every interaction that we have with the others. When we are interacting – and so negotiating – with someone with whom we are cultivating a long term relationship, we are playing in a fragile equilibrium in which emotions need to be constantly controlled and balanced with rationality. If the equilibrium is preserved, each interaction helps in building and strengthening the relationship, and the two partners can achieve what two strangers cannot, and so unlock additional value for them. Unfortunately, if the equilibrium is broken during an interaction, the effect on the result of the current negotiation can be catastrophic and also the relationship can be affected.
But balancing emotion with rationality is just the beginning. Because each one of us is different in term of wiliness to share resources, and because life can put us in situations which can appear to our eyes as competitions, we have to introduce additional techniques to avoid to break the equilibrium.
These techniques are communication and persuasion. With the first one, we avoid to decide on assumptions that can be disappointed, and the tool here is the Always-Consulting-Before-Deciding approach. With the second one, we re-frame the competition in a joint problem-solving situation, avoiding to identify the issue with the person and working together at the same side of the table.
While I am aware that applying these techniques requires a lot of energy and solid discipline, I hope that the knowledge that (almost) every problem has a root cause that can be fought, will help me to have better relationships and at the same time create more value for both my partners – professional and personal – and me.