Negotiation – Pushing Buttons

What buttons do you push to get someone to say yes? Paul Godin shows how a Theory of the Negotiation can help identify the other party’s motivators.

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Negotiation – Pushing Buttons

Here’s the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whoOSukJZsY

{Transcript}

One thing that often helps in a negotiation is to let the facts do the heavy lifting for you. We talk about a concept called objective criteria, which is the use of external standards or fair standards that are factual and objective in the sense that they don’t come from either party to the negotiation. If we get into a negotiation and start debating, we can debate our subjective views all day long and may never convince the other side. But what may move them—and help protect you at the same time—is to search for these objective criteria that apply to the situation.

For example, one of the disputes that I mediated involved a dispute between a national sports federation and a number of athletes. The essence of the dispute was about the wording of various policies and procedures. They could have debated all day long about the wording of the existing policies—whether that was appropriate, inappropriate, or the best way to go. Instead, I asked them to look for and bring to the table external measures of what those policies and procedures should look like. Each side went out and found, from other federations and athlete organizations and resources on the web, both domestic and international, samples and precedents for those kinds of documents. Some of them were actually in use; some had been suggested by various organizations that were respected as model policies and procedures. But it gave both sides a starting point for their discussions—a baseline—and allowed them to begin to see what the parameters were in terms of an appropriate range for wording these kinds of policies, for dealing with marketing, for example, or disciplinary procedures.

It kept them from getting upset with one another and ending up in an aggressive debate mode. Instead, they were talking about, “Here are the facts that apply, and these tell us what an appropriate answer should be.” It was a rational, appropriate, productive discussion that ensued. In any negotiation, when you find yourself getting into a debate, always ask yourself: do we have to debate, or is there an answer that we can find from an external, objective source that may help us resolve the dispute—or at least minimize the range of the dispute—so we don’t end up in a fight.