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10 Tips for a Successful Negotiation
January 14, 2010
Do your employees' negotiation skills leave something to be desired? When their negotiations leave you wondering where you went wrong as a trainer, it may be time to help them think about the art of negotiation from a different perspective.
"Negotiation is the process of connecting with another person or persons, resolving your differences, and coming up with solutions that will allow you to collaborate profitably and satisfyingly beyond the signing of the deal," says former research director and lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Melanie Billings-Yun, author of "Beyond Dealmaking: Five Steps to Negotiating Profitable Relationships."
"Every relationship, regardless of depth, requires words, attitudes, and behavior that express a positive connection," says Billings-Yun, now a Professor of International Management at Portland State University. She contends the goal of negotiation is to reach an agreement to work with another party in the future, under conditions that enable both sides to prosper.
Billings-Yun says "traditional deal-based negotiation is transactional. It's about the deal, and the terms of the deal. Get a signature, and you're done. With its emphasis on winning and losing, transactional negotiation is frequently compared to a game (of wits) or battle (of nerves). But there is a crucial difference between reaching an agreement and competing in a game or fighting a battle: games and battles don't require cooperation once they are concluded."
Billings-Yun points out in the book that "anyone can have greater immediate satisfaction and longer long-term rewards by building gratifying relationships."
Here are her ten tips for a successful negotiation:
• Respect, friendliness, a sense that you like the other person as a human being, not merely as a means or obstacle to your end.
• Fairness in distributing and carrying out both responsibilities and benefits.
• Honest, open, and positive communication.
• Care and concern for the other person's well-being, both within and beyond the immediate transaction.
• Empathy and understanding.
• Collaborative efforts toward mutual success.
• Reciprocity, returning favors, responding to trust with trust
• Open-mindedness, flexibility, and willingness to adapt to different ideas and changes.
• Appropriate commitment at each stage of the relationship.
• Dependability, maintaining your understanding, and following through with your promises.
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