The Naked Negotiator

Great trial lawyers love using questions to entrap witnesses. Questions however can backfire as this amusing story involving an aggressive lawyer shows.

Lawyer: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?

Witness: No.

Lawyer: Did you check for blood pressure?

Witness: No.

Lawyer: Did you check for breathing?

Witness: No.

Lawyer: So, then, is it possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?

Witness: No.

Lawyer: How can you so sure, doctor?

Witness: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar

Lawyer: But could the patient have been alive nevertheless?

Witness: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

The moral, of course, is before you start trying to entrap people with smart questions, you need to anticipate the answers.

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Having written 3 books on negotiation it’s not often I find a book that reframes the way we should look at negotiation.
In Getting More: How You Can Negotiate To Succeed In Work and Life, leading negotiator Stuart Diamond outlines 12 strategies that I combined amount to a fresh way of looking at negotiation.

Here are Diamond’s 12 strategies.

1. Goals Are Paramount: Goals are what you want at the end of the negotiation that you don’t have at the beginning. Many, if not most, people take actions contrary to their goals because they are focused on something else.

2. It’s About Them: You can’t persuade people of anything unless you know the pictures in their heads: their perceptions, sensibilities, needs, how they make commitments, whether they are trustworthy.

3. Make Emotional Payments: The world is irrational. And the mroe important a negotiation is to an individual, the more irrational he or she often becomes.

4. Every Situation Is Different: In a negotiation, there is no one-size-fits-all. Even having the same people on different days in the same negotiation can be a different situation. You must analyze every situation on its own.

5. Incremental Is Best: People often fail because they ask for too much all at once. They take steps that are too big.

6. Trade Things You Value Unequally: All people value things unequally. First find out what each party cares and doesn’t care about, big and small, tangible and intangible, in teh deal or outside the deal, rational and emotional.

7. Find Their Standards: What are their policies, exceptions to policies, precendents, past statements, ways they make decisions? Use these to get more.

8. Be Transparent and Constructive, Not Manipulative: This is one of the biggest differences between Getting More and the conventional wisdom. Don’t decieve people.

9. Always Communicate, State the Obvious, Frame the Vision: Most failed negotiations are cause by bad communication, or none at all.

10. Find the Real Problem and Make It an Opportunity: Few people find or fix the real, underlying problem in negotiations. Ask, “What is really preventing me from meeting my goals?”

11. Embrace Difference: Most people think different is worse, risky, annoying, uncomfortable. But different is actually demonstrably better: more profitable, more creative.

12. Prepare - Make a List and Practice with It: The List is like a pantry, from which you choose items for every meal.

This list however doesn’t do Diamond justice. Read this book then read it again. Highly recommended

Popularity: 14% [?]

In her book, Beyond Deal Making (2010) international negotiation expert and mediator Melanie Billings-Yun outlines her five step GRASP method for negotiating long-term sustainable relationships.

The acronym GRASP is not just a mnemonic device.  By following the GRASP method you can increase the odds of creating a sustainable agreement.

The GRASP Method

Goals: What do I/they want to achieve or avoid?

Routes: How can I best achieve my goals by supporting theirs?

Arguments: What reasons support my/their routes?

Substitutes: How else could I/they accomplish this?

Persuasion: What’s in it for them?

The GRASP method is practical and easy to follow. Beyond Deal Making offers a fresh innovative approach to negotiation.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I am often asked how long it takes someone to make their initial judgment on a person when they first meet them.

I used to answer, “4 minutes.” This reply was based on research on the time it took job interviewers to make up their mind on the suitability of a job applicant. However, I now answer “10 seconds.”

In their remarkable studies, social psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, have shown that we often form positive or negative impressions of people in a mere “blink” or “think slice” of time.

After subjects watched three two-second video clips of professors teaching, their teaching ratings predicted the actual end-of-the-term rating by the professor’s own students.

To get a feel on someone’s energy and warmth, the researchers concluded just six seconds is usually enough.

First impressions matter because, we lock down on our first impression. Once we have made a judgment we tent to look for confirming evidence to reinforce our initial impression — good or bad.

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David Myers,  Professor of Psychology is an expert on the psychology of fear. Psychological science, Myers tells us, has identified four factors that drive up our perceptions of risk.

1. We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear. Thats why we fear snakes and spiders.

2. We fear what we cannot control. We feel more in control when we are driving a car than we do flying an airplane.

3. We fear what is immediate. We are more concerned about the risks of taking off in a plane than the risk of dying from cancer.

4. We fear threats readily available in memory. We easily recall the 9/11 images and they make us hesitant to fly. Our brains are not designed to easily recall the fact that, mile for mile, we are 37 times more likely to die in a passenger car than on a commercial flight.

No wonder our fears drive so many behaviors. Since fear is largely an emotional factor, negotiators need to actively manage emotions. While you cannot directly control what someone feels, you can influence the drivers that fuel negative emotions such as fear.

Popularity: 11% [?]