If you've only ever considered negotiation to be the kind where I win and you lose,
what can you do to help re-conceive of a negotiation and
turn a typically distributive negotiation into an integrative one?
The answer is a little bit counterintuitive.
And it involves adding more issues.
Why is that the answer?
Well, if a distributive negotiation involves
one time relationships with typically only one indivisible element,
everything that I get is something that you don't get.
And an integrative negotiation has multiple issues in
long term relationships where there's trade offs for values or interests.
By adding issues, you can find things that might match
the values and interests of each party and leave each party happier, you create value.
Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine,
who bought a new car for herself for one of her major birthdays.
It was the first new car she'd ever owned and she was so excited about it.
And I went to visit her and as was I was on the airplane I was thinking,
"Oh remember to ask her about her new car because she's so happy about this."
And I get off the airplane,
and she lives in a really hot place and it was hot.
And we're walking out of the airport and I say,
"Am I going to get to see your new car?"
And she says, "Oh yes."
And we get to her car,
and we have to open the doors with the heat rolling out because this car is black and
it's been sitting in the airport parking lot and the heat is rolling out of it.
And I say, "Gosh,
you live in a really hot place.
Why did you choose a black car? "
She said, "Oh well,
actually I was listening to all the lessons about
negotiation you told me and I'm so pleased with myself."
She said, "First, I did a lot of homework.
One of the things that I found out when I did my homework is that where I live,
car dealers pay inventory tax quarterly
on all the cars sitting on their lot on the last day of the quarter.
So I went on the last day of the quarter and I said to the gentleman,
'I have cash and I take my car away today.'"
She just added an element right there by making it clear
that she could take one more car off his lot before he had to pay tax on it.
And then being a friendly sort.
She's walking around and of course he's
a car salesman so he's chatting her up and she says,
"My, you have a lot of black cars. "
And he says, "Oh you can't believe it.
The dealer just sends us cargo loads of cars, they're closed containers.
We never get to choose the color,
and so I end up with all these black cars.
She said, "Could you show me a silver car please."
So they're walking around and they're chatting and she's chatting him up and she's
a friendly sort and she discovers a number of things along the way.
And eventually she's looking at a silver car and it's a pretty basic car and she said,
"What could you do for me if I was willing to take a black car?"
Well, she ended up, long story short,
with a black car that was loaded,
for the same price as the pretty basic silver car.
It had the leather seats,
it had the moon roof,
it had the upgraded this and that.
And as they were coming to the close of her deal,
one of the things that she had chatted about in the course of all their chatting,
was that on Wednesdays for inexplicable reasons their shop wasn't very busy.
So as they were coming to the close of their negotiation and
coming to total final price she said,
"You know, my husband really has a thing about
the audio system and he's going to buy some really specialized system.
If I brought it on a Wednesday could you throw in the installation for free for me?"
So she's introduced already taking the car off his hands on the last day of the quarter,
taking a black car when he has a surplus of black cars,
and now she's thrown in an issue about the fact,
that since he has air capacity in his shop on Wednesdays,
no skin off his nose to put in the audio system for free,
all of which he agreed to.
Along the way she'd mentioned that she belongs to a club
and she'd be happy to mention how pleasant he was to deal with.
So she added the prospect of referrals.
She added issues all the way along the way,
and they both left happy.
That's the perfect mark of a negotiation,
where you've added issues and both parties leave happy.
That's a way to be effective,
to be persuasive and to be a leader.
I had a conversation with a client a couple of months ago.
And you know we submitted a proposal to do
some work for the client and they came back over e-mail I think.
And had some constructive criticism around our pricing,
and the number of resources that we had on the project and all of that.
So, in preparation for this negotiation,
I was thinking through OK,
you know, how do we push back on the price negotiation?
How do we come in prepared to talk about you
know the number of resources that we need on the project and all of that?
And so you know I was all ready to go, ready to negotiate.
You know I had all my talking points down.
And so we sit down with the client and before jumping straight into the negotiation,
just asked a couple of key questions to try and figure out
why he felt like the price you know was out of whack,
and the resource count was out of whack.
And the more we talked,
the more it turned out that really what he cared about,
was making sure that the project was done on time and without flaws.
And so in his mind the way to do that was
through you know increasing the number of resources,
changing the economics of the proposal.
But by asking questions,
we figured out what his actual goal was and
we were able to more productively work towards, OK now.
Now that we understand where you're trying to get to,
and what your concerns are,
let's figure out how we actually do that.
And maybe it's the pricing, maybe it's not.
But at least now we're working from the same starting point.
And it turned out that he actually didn't care that much about the price.
And so we ended up not having to change our pricing proposal.
But we adjusted the amount of leadership on the project to
make sure that we didn't have flaws throughout the engagement.
And we adjusted some more of the dynamics around how
the team worked with the client to make sure that they were able to reach our goals.
But if we hadn't have done that, if we hadn't started
the conversation off with effective questioning,
and an interest in understanding you know the sort of where they were coming from,
we probably would have just reduced our price and changed the economics without ever
figuring out why we were doing it.
C. K. GunsalusDirector of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
