Negotiation 101

On this International Women’s Day, we thought we’d discuss an important aspect of women achieving equality in the workplace: negotiation. Statistically, far fewer women negotiate their starting salary before starting a new job than men, for a variety of reasons. And when pregnant, women may feel fettered when negotiating, at a time that it’s likely to be more important than ever.

 

Let’s face it – much negotiation is arbitrary. One party ‘anchors’ their position (“I’ll sell you this pen for £50!”), the other attempts to take a reasonable slice off from the starting position (“let’s say £40”) and the seller comes back by meeting in the middle (“£45 – it’s a deal!”) But how do you know you got a good deal? Have you come away with value?

 

But let’s now use a more relevant example. Imagine this scenario playing out on your return from maternity leave, when negotiating working hours. You: “I need to shift my hours to 8 am to 4 pm to work around childcare arrangements and commuting.” Boss: “But your existing hours are 9 am to 5 pm. Let’s meet in the middle with 8.30 am to 4.30 pm.” In the absence of a business need, such an arbitrary approach wouldn’t work when other factors like nursery drop-offs, commuting and parking are taken into account.

 

Instead of this approach, known as positional bargaining, we need to adopt a principled approach to negotiation. One that’s efficient and effective, producing wise outcomes that benefit each party. It should be noted that while these are the fundamentals, that ought to influence negotiations, people are emotional, so we’ll have a separate article on the psychology of negotiation.

 

The key principles

 

This article focuses on the key principles of negotiation as described in the seminal book Getting to Yes. No manipulation, no priming, no ‘thin slicing’ or other sharp tactics – not in this article, anyway. Here, we focus on the cornerstones for a principled negotiation that benefits all parties involved. This article can’t act as a substitute for the excellent book, but serves as either an introduction to or consolidation of the key principles.

 

The four principles:

 

  • People: Separate the people from the problem

 

  • Interests: Focus on interests, not positions

 

  • Options: Generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do

 

  • Criteria: Insist that the result be based on some objective standard

 

People

 

It’s far too easy to conflate the problem being negotiated with the people carrying out the negotiation, which is counterproductive. The problems tend to centre on perceptions, emotions and communication.

 

  • Perception is one of the biggest barriers. Both theirs, and your own. By way of demonstration, you might consider yourself a considerate manager as you never intrude on your direct report’s privacy and only discuss work-related matters. Your direct report’s perception may be somewhat different, that you’re cold and distant, never asking how things are outside of work. It doesn’t mean your direct report is correct; understanding another point of view isn’t the same as agreeing with it, but it may help you to revise your own views about the merits of a situation and influence your approach.

    Discuss each other’s perceptions in an open and honest way, without blame. Search for opportunities to act inconsistently with their perception, which is one of the most effective ways to change perceptions. An example of someone doing this to the book and in style is Richard Branson. Virgin Blue – now Virgin Australia Airlines – was in the middle of a big dispute with Sydney Airport over terminal allocation – the negotiations were deadlocked. No doubt that each saw the other as the antagonist following vitriol and legal threats. To help break the deadlock, Richard dressed as an Indian Chief with a feather boa and arrived at the airport with a small axe; he was there to bury the hatchet with the CEO of the airport. The dramatic move acting inconsistently with perceptions helped to re-start negotiations and end with what was described as a win-win deal for terminal access.

    If your counterparty isn’t involved in the process, they’re unlikely to approve the product – even if it’s a good product. Give others a stake in the outcome by making sure they participate in the process. Let’s say you’re looking at changing your maternity leave policy – and the people in charge of amending it are all men. Even if the changes are beneficial, if women aren’t included in the process, not only is the message all wrong, but there’ll be a suspicion about their exclusion from the process and a good chance that the policy won’t be as well considered as it could have been.

    Make your proposals consistent with their values, which effectively helps the other party to save face and feel comfortable. Often in a negotiation, the proposal may well be acceptable, but no one likes to appear to back down to the other side, so anything you can do to make it seem as though it’s not a U-turn by them will avoid the feeling or appearance of backing down.

 

  • Emotions are another barrier. Understand their emotions – and yours too. Consider core concerns – many emotion are driven by five core concerns: autonomy, recognition, affiliation, purpose, respect and identity. Taking one of these: autonomy is one of Cazzana’s key values. It’s the freedom to make our own choices and control our destiny. Threatening any or all of these core concerns will create strong negative emotions. Expressly considering them can provide a good atmosphere for negotiation. Talk about emotions. It may be easiest to begin by discussing your own emotions. Becoming less reactive and more proactive, free from the burden of unexpressed emotions, should help to encourage people to focus on the problem. Allow the other side to vent. Don’t react to emotional outbursts – in the words of the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, our last freedom is to choose how to react in any given situation.

 

  • Communication is the final key ‘people’ barrier to effective negotiation. Remember to speak for a purpose. Sometimes too little communication isn’t the problem, but too much. When emotions are running high and misperceptions are swirling, it may be best to stay quiet. Complete disclosure can also be counterproductive e.g. if you make it clear that you will reach an agreement no matter what with the other side, then they’re likely to take you for a ride, and paradoxically you’re less likely to reach an agreement. If you’re offered a £10,000 pay rise, and then you say that you would’ve accepted £5,000 before the ink is dry on the contract, it could make getting the contract change through trickier, or at least leave the counterparty resentful by making them feel that they went too far in their offer. Before making a big statement, consider what you want to communicate or discover, and know what purpose the communication will serve.

 

Interests

 

An example that nicely illustrates this principle, relates to a lemon. Two women want the lemon. Their position is: “I want the lemon.” After much negotiation in the standard way, it’s likely that the lemon would be split in half.

 

At this point, one woman squeezes the juice and throws away the peel. The other woman grates the peel and throws away the juice.

 

Here, the standard negotiation would lead to both losing out. If they’d focused more on their interests, then one could’ve taken the whole peel (not 50% less) and the other could’ve taken all the juice (again, not 50% less).

 

Whilst in real life both may want the juice or the peel, it’s still essential to delve into the interests of both – the why – in order for an efficient and effective negotiation.

 

In a more topical example, an employee may say she needs to work from home on Mondays, and the boss may say she has to be in the office. Both are positions.

 

The interests for the employee after her maternity may be that her childcare prohibits her from being able to drive into the office and get back again in time to drop off and collect her baby, and she may also want to be around in case of emergency or to breast feed at lunch time.

 

The interests for the boss may be that the team has recurring ‘check in’ meetings on Monday mornings, so that everyone in the team has visibility of what people are working on and how everyone is going.

 

A number of solutions could meet everyone’s interests, for example:

 

  • The adoption of technology such as Skype, allowing face-to-face interaction in that meeting,

  • Shift the meeting to another day of the week,

  • Reduce the frequency of the Monday meetings, which may be an overzealous frequency for the objective,

  • Abandon ‘all team meetings’ as archaic and difficult to administer, and replace with one-to-ones and/or smaller team meetings that more easily fit around schedules,

  • Move the meeting to late-morning and allowing her to drive in for the meeting and leave early.

 

Options

 

An often-overlooked aspect of a negotiation is to come up with as many options as possible for the mutual gain of the parties.

 

The reason it’s often overlooked is our tendency to prematurely judge, which hinders creativity. Looking through the options in the previous example, did any occur to you? Or did you automatically rule out options as you read them as being unfeasible? It would be completely natural if either or both were the case, as inventing then considering lots of options doesn’t come easily.

 

What’s more, we often believe that we should narrow the options available to us at an early stage, when in fact we should be expanding them.

 

Another mistake is to assume that your only concern is your own problem. Not true. If you can figure out what their concerns are, then it’s possible to meet them. Flexible working is a great example. As a new mother after your maternity leave, it’s easily to focus on what you need: greater flexibility to accommodate our interests of childcare, spending time with our children and not ending up needlessly exhausted through commuting every day. But we’re more likely to get what we want if we also consider what our employers want and need, and how to meet those wants and needs, without compromising our own interests.

 

Solutions to our natural weakness in inventing multiple options:

 

  • Separate the act of brainstorming options from the act of judging them: In the example above, with the list of bullet-pointed options, I intentionally didn’t consider their merits. Instead, my goal was to list as many potential solutions as possible, and I’m confident that there are even more potential solutions. At work, there could be an entirely separate meeting to consider options, with all judgment postponed. Only once as many options have been noted should we move onto evaluating the options.

 

  • Search for mutual gains: Don’t assume that if they get less, then you get more. The example with the lemon above is a simple demonstration that mutual gains are possible. The potential for lose-lose exists, as does the potential for win-win.

 

  • Make their decision easy: Without an option that appeals to the other party, it’s unlikely there’ll be an agreement at all.

 

Criteria

 

It’s important that fair criteria apply in a negotiation. The two key approaches:

 

  • Fair standards: there’ll usually be more than one objective criterion available as the basis of an agreement, but at a minimum the criteria should be independent of each party’s will. For example, if your car is written off in an accident, the insurance company may take into account a number of variables, including:

 

o   The original cost of the car less depreciation

o   What the car would have sold for before the accident given its actual condition, mileage, number of owners, service history and other variables

o   The standard ‘book value’ for that year and model of car

 

Criteria adopted ought to be legitimate and practical. For example, if you’re involved in a boundary dispute where the land is separated by a river, it may make more sense for the boundary to be delineated by the river than by e.g. 1 foot to the side of it.

 

  • Fair procedures: for example, a child cuts a cake and the other child chooses which portion to take. Even if the outcome may arguably not be fair, the procedure is fair.

 

BATNA

 

Be aware of your BATNA – namely, your ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement.’ Consider your return to work after your maternity leave. Let’s say with your pregnancy, you’re now looking to sell your house and move into a bigger space that’s in better condition. What’s your bottom line for the sale? Rather than taking an arbitrary sale price as your bottom line, which risks being set too low or too high, expressly consider all of your options:

 

  • Keep the house on the market longer

  • Rent it out while your family rents or buys somewhere bigger

  • Pay for an extension and stay

  • Renovate the house to increase its value or make it more appealing, then re-market for sale

  • Go to auction

  • Let someone live there rent-free on the condition they renovate it

  • Tear it down and turn it into offices

 

Some of these options may not work. Some might. It’s essential to at least consider the alternative to reaching an agreement, here with a prospective buyer. If we don’t carefully consider our BATNA, then we’re negotiating with our eyes closed, which is like driving with our eyes closed – pretty dangerous! The more familiar you are with your BATNA, the stronger and more informed your position will be. It’s easy to consider negotiating power as being inextricably linked to the scale of an organisation or a person’s wealth or connections. But really, the relative negotiating power between two parties depends on how attractive to each of the option of no agreement at all. If you were to walk into a job interview and negotiate a salary with multiple job offers already received or feeling pretty content with your existing job, then you’re automatically in a stronger position, because you know your BATNA.

 

It’s also worth bearing in mind that an attractive BATNA will often need considered thought and to be developed; it won’t usually just be waiting for you. To do so, invent as many options as possible if no agreement is reached. Then improve some of the best ideas, converting them into practical alternatives. Then tentatively select one of the alternatives that you consider to be the strongest.

 

It’s equally worthwhile considering the other side’s BATNA. The more you can learn about their alternatives, the better placed you’ll be to negotiate. If they overestimate the strength of their BATNA, then you’re able to help guide them through whether their expectations are realistic.

 

Paradoxically, by considering all of our options – even if it includes walking away from a deal – we’re more likely to reach a deal in the first place, and certainly more likely to reach a decent deal.

 

Maternity

 

Negotiating is more critical than ever during and after your pregnancy. It’s incredibly important to stand up for yourself and your family, to preserve your income and career while protecting your family life.

 

You’ll likely want to negotiate your flexible working pattern, performance review, pay rise, bonus, training, your keeping in touch days and even arrangements and accommodations while pregnant – for example, a dedicated parking space close to the office to avoid a long walk from an overspill carpark carrying a heavy laptop bag.

 

If at all possible, we’d suggest discussing many of these subjects at least on a high level before you go on maternity leave, while you still have a strong relationship with your employer and full confidence – which, of course, hopefully won’t be affected while on maternity leave and away from the office, but may be. Once you’ve discussed how work will approach all of these issues, it’s often worth a quick follow-up email to confirm everything in writing, as it’s not only pregnant women who suffer from ‘baby brain’ in our experience…‘boss brain’ is also a risk.

 

Quick tip: We’ve discussed some key principles about the mechanics of negotiation here. Equally important is your delivery – including your sense of intention when negotiating. Our ‘Confidence’ series explores the constituent parts, and the ‘Speech’ element is particularly important in the negotiation process, which we cover in our next blog.

 

Cazzana provides luxury maternity workwear and career advice before, during and after pregnancy to empower existing and future female leaders. 

 

Amy Chesson