The Master Negotiator
.comeon series
Published by Dr. Stefan Amin Talab
Stefan Amin Talab
The
Master Negotiator
Behind the scenes
Publishing house
.comeon Master Series
Copyright © 2013 Stefan Amin Talab, .comeon series
Millennium City, Wehlistraße 55/4, 1200 Vienna, Austria
Publishing house number: 3-9502269
Book available as paperback ISBN 978-3-9502269-5-9
All rights reserved.
Graphics: Anna Talab
ISBN 978-3-9502269-6-6
www.masternegotiator.eu
How to Use this Book
Preface
THE MASTER NEGOTIATOR: BEHIND THE SCENES
The Vision of the Negotiation Master as Target for Development
Research on the Master Negotiator
The Vision of the Negotiation Master
The Starting Question
Expectations & Research Findings
The Conclusion
The Strengths from a Bird’s Eye View
Strength 1: Optimal Preparation
Strength 2: Negotiation Master Strategy
Strength 3: Personality
Strength 4: Communication Competency
Strength 5: Target Orientation and Process Knowledge
Strength 6: Convincing Argumentation Techniques
The situation: When is the Master Negotiator useful?
Master Negotiator: inborn or acquired?
The Priorities: A Systematic Picture
The whole is more than the sum of its parts
Which strengths are favourable?
Systematic interplay of strengths: the negotiation flower
Systematic interplay of strengths: the negotiation house
STRENGTH 1: PREPARATION
Main steps in the preparation
The situation analysis
Competition negotiations
Partnership negotiations
Relationship negotiations
Co-ordination negotiations
Assessing negotiation situations
Determining the negotiation strategy
Packing the parachute: The best alternative
Checklist to finding your best alternative
STRENGTH 2: STRATEGY
The search for the strategy
Strategic principles
Strategy follows targeting
Strategy follows personality
Main Strategies and concepts
Relationship focused strategies
Personality type oriented strategies
Communication focused strategies
Creativity and option-focused strategies
Tactical and technique-oriented strategies
Politically inspired negotiation strategies
The principles of U.S. President Nixon
The principles of Machiavelli´s prince
The principles of Robert McNamara
Mixed theories: The Harvard Concept
The Master Strategy
Competition negotiations
Partnership negotiations
Relationship negotiations
Co-ordination negotiations
Summary
STRENGTH 3: APPROACHING PARTNERS
Personality and Styles
The teddy bear
The shark
The ostrich
The cat
The Compromiser
Negotiation Types in their Favourite Environment
Negotiation Partner Profile
The Role of Trust in Negotiations
Interest: The Lighthouse in the Negotiation
Tips to uncover interests
STRENGTH 4: COMMUNICATION
Perception and Communication Traps
The truth is what we perceive it to be
Checklist: Perception traps
Different Communication Levels
Rhetorical Negotiation Techniques
Linguistic traps and ambiguities
Individual language patterns
Killer phrases: employment and handling
Countering verbal attacks in the negotiation
Expressing information positively
Active listening
Reinforcing
Interpretation
Summarising
Verbalising, concretising, paraphrasing
Questioning techniques
The “I am not saying” technique
Visualising
Pausing
Congruence: talking the same language
Authenticity
STRENGTH 5: TARGET ORIENTATION AND PROCESS KNOWLEDGE
Goal Setting and Attainment
Objective formulation
Creativity and Flexibility in Finding Solutions
Focusing on options
Probe interests
Finding proposals
Negotiation Phases
Phase 1: Preparation
Phase 2: Create
Phase 3: Bargaining
Phase 4: Closing
Overview negotiation phases
STRENGTH 6: ARGUMENTATION AND LEGITIMISATION TECHNIQUES
First Offer and Concession Strategy
Anchoring
Tips for the starting offer
Tips for the concession strategy
Argumentation Structure and Five-Step Technique
Five-step technique
Structuring by means of conditional questions
Legitimising arguments
Counter Argumentation and Objection Handling
Tips for common objections
Negotiation Tactics
General chart of negotiation techniques
Countering negotiation tactics
Closing Techniques
Recognising closing signals
The pre-closing question for last changes
The testing question
The trial-closing
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Negotiation Assistance & Coaching
There are countless books on negotiation skills. This book awaits your use. It originates from a study carried out in collaboration with numerous seminar participants and should likewise remain dynamic and support you for many years. Hence, this book is not intended to be read once and then left aside (although I would be happy to you know you have read it in its entirety). Rather, it should be a valuable resource of reference, e.g. when preparing to deal with a specific negotiation type, or when deciding on your strategy. To stress my humanistic mind-set, let me introduce some negotiators who will accompany you throughout this book:
| The Master Negotiator stands by your side, gives tips and advice: | The Researching Negotiator gives facts, thoughts and theory: | |
|
|
|
|
| The Confused Negotiator appears where typical mistakes are being described: | The Courageous Negotiator indicates options to try out: | |
|
|
|
In any case, I would appreciate you writing to me! Please send your comments directly to office@comeon.at or to the publishing house.
How does a book come into existence that brings together the experience of thousands of negotiators, from bankers to purchasers to jurists? I am somewhat lucky as a negotiation consultant and mediator. I need not go on a pilgrimage from executive to executive in search of people who would be willing to share their negotiation experiences with me.
Such a study would be immensely time consuming, not to mention the resistance to freely airing experiences with negotiation partners, and to being compared with colleagues and competitors. It requires a lot of courage to face one´s doctrines analyse one´s mistakes and learn from them.
All of the contributors to this book have demonstrated this courageous mind-set, whether in workshops, coaching sessions or seminars. We have done a lot of analysing and reflecting together and scrutinised thousands of negotiations to find out what worked well or needs improvement.
Thank you for your courage, commitment and openness – you made this book possible!
Meetings deteriorate and business opportunities disappear. Longheld relations with colleagues and suppliers dissolve, and negotiators angrily find themselves before conciliation boards.
Widening markets and increasing competition necessitate mutual, beneficial and lasting negotiation results.
The skill of conducting profitable and successful long-term negotiations will continue to be in high demand. From a development-historical point of view: the once dominant hierarchical structures in society and politics left scarce room for negotiations.
But today´s worldwide development towards partneroriented relationships leaves the old patriarchal system behind. Simply consider the common setting of objectives in annual MBO (Management By Objective) employee meetings, the emancipation of women and the resulting changes in partnerships or the way children and parents interact nowadays.
However, plenty of negotiations turn sour every day, in private life as well as in business. Why? They predominantly fail because of the human factor.
Each chapter of this book corresponds to one of the six human factors important in negotiation.
While reading these chapters, memories of your own issues will surface. While revisiting past situations, some reactions will become more understandable.
You will realise that only in the rarest of cases is a technique decisive for success. Furthermore, there are many factors influencing the result, the function of which is described in the “negotiation building” below.
All too often, negotiators are pitted against each other as enemies: their own vanities triumph, battles are fought and exhibition fights taken out. Negotiation partners put power thinking before factual questions, listen only selectively and let themselves be guided by their emotions. In perceived “zero-sum-games” there are only two options: victory or failure. If one gains, the other is bound to lose. That seems all too logical in a business world that cherishes cleverness as an executive ideal, and regards survival of the fittest as the norm.
Exploring the experience of countless workshop participants proves the opposite. For this exact reason, the master negotiator strategies are based on partnership and openness to the needs of the counterpart. This strategy is a far cry from weakness; in fact, it reflects self-interest.
He, who identifies the interests of his negotiation partner, identifies what to heed in order to also satisfy his own interests. Only if he manages to offer something of interest to his negotiation partner, and get something in return, will the outcome be successful, a real “deal“.
This headline is somewhat symptomatic of the contents of the entire book. Possibly you have already designated its significance and correlated it with your expectation of the contents, with all the inherent communication mistakes of selective perception. I plead with you to wait a while before casting judgement.
Possibly you see similarities to the first phase of the negotiation. Negotiators are often eager to put forward their arguments and less eager to listen.
“The vision of the Negotiation Master” could mean: the vision that a third party, e.g. you as the reader, has of a Negotiation Master; or the vision of the Negotiation Master himself.
In our case both meanings are important, and especially the comparison of the two: your vision of the Negotiation Master and his own area of focus.
For this reason, I ask you to take two minutes right now and quickly note on a piece of paper how you imagine the Negotiation Master to be. What does he look like? How is he dressed? Is it a male or female? How old? What is his facial expression? His tone of voice, etc.?
Defining a training objective is imperative for personal skill development. In order to change a negotiation style, one must identify what it should be changed to. We need a vision of a role model Negotiation Master.
This vision is strongly determined by personal experience. If I ask you for your “best negotiating experience”,a few negotiations will probably come to mind. Should you consider the different partners, irrespective of if it was your boss, a real estate salesperson, or auntie Elisabeth, you will find similarities.
This is exactly what I asked thousands of workshop participants. We dug into their experience of countless negotiations and analysed them. My specific questions were like the ones I stated above. People of all different backgrounds, ages and genders have similarly been analysing their vision of the Master Negotiator.
I expected to see big differences in the characteristics of the Master Negotiator, depending on the respective group and area of practice. I expected to find that Master Negotiator bankers would be strong with numbers, Master Negotiator technicians would excel at emphasising detailed descriptions, etc.
However, this was not the case. Quite surprisingly, the ideal characteristics were quite similar. Of course, the situations were different according to background and position. But their skills were more or less identical. As the results were pinned up, I started gathering the areas of strength for the Master Negotiator:
Firstly, regardless of the area people deal with, the recipe for success, the magic mixture of characteristics that make up the Master Negotiator stays fairly similar.
Secondly, all of the different characteristics are essential, not only one or a few. In particular, argumentation competency is only one of several needed strengths. All schools that limit their focus to this area miss out on 5/6 of the needed skills.
Thirdly, in order to improve negotiation results, the areas to concentrate on are clear: Preparation, Communication, Personality, Target and Process Knowledge, Strategies and Techniques and Argumentation Skills.
Fourthly, this approach allows us to structure every varied negotiation strategy.
A short overview of the strength areas will be followed by a detailed description in the corresponding chapters of this book.
Always go into negotiations well prepared. This includes both informational preparation, i.e. factual knowledge and an understanding of your respective competencies, as well as the preparation of wishes, limitations and interests of the partner.
Different strategies strongly shape the behaviour and the success of the negotiation. The particular strategy should be chosen after defining the relationship as short or long term and assessing the potential for conflict.
The Master Negotiator has a very specific attitude in the negotiation process and radiates this toward his negotiation partners. Interestingly, his attitude was generally described as respectful and not, as one would assume, extremely competitive and inflexible. The facts speak clearly here: particularly good results were reached when little energy was spent on tactics. Conversely, employing tactics consistently worsened negotiation results and slowed the process down.
The Master Negotiator also understands the intricacies of different negotiation environments and adapts his behaviour accordingly.
Communication competency was named as a central characteristic of the Master Negotiator. This refers to the skilful use of general communication techniques, e.g. usage of metaphors and analogies, active listening and clear cut expression.
The Negotiation Master remains aware of his destination from the very start to the end of the process. At the same time, he keeps an eye on the objectives of his partners and he becomes very inventive in reaching these objectives.
Last, but not least, the best negotiation results are also secured by developing and pursuing successful negotiation strategies. This includes withstanding pressure and not giving advantages away blithely.
For our purpose of improving negotiation results, the following definition shall be used1: A negotiation is an interaction in order to influence the behaviour of at least one other person, whereby different interests are reconciled and brought about in the developing process. This definition shows that the term can be widely applied. In other words: We often negotiate without conscious realisation. The side discussion in the company kitchen to arrange who buys coffee when is a negotiation, just like the phone conversation with your partner to decide on the evening’s entertainment.
Whenever diverging interests need to arrive at a common conclusion, whether it be sales prices, a holiday venue or a company takeover, people have to be influenced in order to push interests through. To clarify, this does not mean to the detriment of the other side nor suggest unconscious influence.
The alternatives would be avoidance of the entire conflict or the assertion of one´s interests without negotiation. In those cases there is no need to employ the strengths discussed in this book.
The principles and rules described here are advantageous in all negotiation situations, though in different intensities depending upon the environment. This book intends to support you in all these situations, especially the most difficult ones.
What makes a negotiation "difficult"? Multiple parties? Different mother tongues? Sums exceeding € 200.000?
You probably suspect from the way the question is posed (like so many of my participants before you), that it is impossible to delineate an objective description. Hence we want to recognise the fact: The negotiation is difficult whenever it is perceived as such by the negotiator.
It is obvious that negotiations are perceived as difficult if one of the negotiators tries to pursue his sole interests with a winlose strategy. The situation also becomes difficult if clearly “irrational” demands are put forward that can only be explained emotionally.
In the long term, when taking numerous and varied situations into consideration, it becomes apparent that it is not one or the other technique which determines a negotiation, but a basic understanding of the psychological background of negotiation relationships.
The following concepts form the starting point for the next chapters:
“But doesn’t it have to be in my genes?” or “You´ve got to have it in your blood!” are commonly heard lines.
To answer the above question, I want to relate the telling experience of one of my workshop participants.
He had a habit of finishing difficult negotiations over the phone, when his side had no further room to manoeuvre, with the words: “Call back when you´ve come to your senses,“ or similar finishing lines.
He did the very same thing in one of our training negotiations which triggered the following feedback from his training partner: “I would never call back. Even if I wanted to accept your last offer – never would I admit to it and lose face in this way.” My participant took that feedback to heart. Years later I had the joy of meeting him in a continuation course. There he revealed to me that his negotiation relationships had been universally improved by this little change and had led to augmented closures. “I learned to keep the door open instead of slamming it.”
We will see later in this book that U.S. president Nixon came to the same conclusion in his commandments of negotiation and leadership. In commandment 7 of his principles he concludes, “Always leave your adversary a face-saving line of retreat.”
Another seminar group arrived at their conclusion while analyzing different types of negotiators and the optimal environments that enhance their respective strengths. It became obvious: Most employees that had left the company because they could not or did not want to accept the changes of the telecommunication business belonged to two specific negotiator types. The entire industry became geared to the short term after the liberation of the European Union markets. The “teddy bear” and “compromiser” negotiator types were less successful when compared to the “shark”.
The rigid external influences emphasised being able to say “no”, applying techniques and using elbows in negotiations. When the general environment requires these techniques to be employed with ever increasing frequency, it also becomes necessary to rethink one’s principles. It is difficult to withstand the continual conflict of one’s principles with the applied negotiation strategy.
Another question is if a reorientation is possible at all. There are skills that depend on the basic personality and its approach and simply cannot be trained. Some participants, for example, declared that it wouldn’t be “their thing” to play around. Their approach was to state their case clearly and they expected that from others as well.
Still others told me that they were incapable of simply saying “no” because they expected resulting disadvantages in the future relationship.
These examples illustrate two sides of the story. Though seemingly difficult, people can alter their negotiation skills; sometimes even a single finding can change important behaviour. On the other hand, there are factors that are difficult or impossible to change. These areas include attitude, moral values and their associated communication practices, choice of objectives and argumentation lines.
Having determined the pivotal strengths of the Negotiation Master, this question follows: “Which of the mentioned characteristics, methods and techniques is the most important? How do the different areas interrelate?”
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there is no unequivocal answer to this question.
Rather, it is like the customer asking about the “most important” part of the car. The gears are important, but what would a car be without brakes? It is impossible to differentiate one quintessential characteristic of a good car.
A particularly well developed skill can improve the overall performance only if the other sub-areas are sound. If, for example, a negotiator is well prepared, he will still fail to get very far if his communication style is inconclusive.
Additionally, consider this: A good all-terrain vehicle will not necessarily be a good racing car. The same holds true for the negotiation strategy and the interrelationship of the skills. Certain situations and settings require distinct strengths.
In this book the most helpful characteristics, process knowledge and techniques are carved out.
Since the values of the skills mentioned depend on the environment, the question arises: Which strength should one concentrate on? Targets or communication, areas of strength or weakness?
In principle, all areas are important. Focusing on one or the other strength is only possible if one has the room to manoeuvre in forwarding or retracting an engagement.
You can compare yourself with the equalizer of a sound machine. Depending on whether you want to play classical music or hard rock, you can adjust the bass and treble volumes whereby their relation to each other is more important than the position itself. Perhaps you prefer one type of music and use this setting more often. However, if you had to play a different music genre and could not change the equalizer settings, this would produce a deficient sound, wouldn’t it? That is the situation of the negotiator. He should be functional in variable situations even if he doesn´t find all of these roles particularly enjoyable.
I want to clarify the interrelation of the different areas. An overall picture comes into view if we assign the six strengths to three main categories:
