Uncompromising Negotiaion vs Baking Cakes
While negotiating, many quickly fall into a defensive and competitive mode. Everyone tries to get what they want and as much of it as possible. There can be situations where you have to negotiate without compromise:
This approach to negotiation has significant disadvantages:
This, competitive approach, assumes that one wants the bigger piece of the pie, accordingly someone gets less. This notion of a fixed size of the pie prevents an open and creative approach to finding solutions.
Negotiation can be quite inefficient because you “have” to make compromises and concessions over and over again in several steps to get one step ahead. Each step yields less and often takes longer from round to round.
In addition, it rarely brings the best possible solution for all parties involved and can cause damage to the partnership.
An alternative for negotiating, especially if you intend to keep the partnership for a long term, is cooperative negotiation. If you do this, you are consciously looking for solutions that are mutually beneficial. If we work together instead of competing, we can make the basic needs and interests of both sides visible and deliberately works towards it.
In such negotiations, it may well be that the pie increases instead of remaining the same size. Such a negotiation requires that one sincerely wants to act for the benefit of all parties and that one prepares well for the negotiation. To help you understand, I would like to bring in the Pause Model from the book “Be a Peacemaker”.
Good preparation and a good understanding of what cooperative negotiation requires is the path to mutual long-term success.
Interested in learning more? Do you have a challenging negotiation coming up? Do you want a sparring partner or a companion for your negotiation?
Then contact me and let’s see if we can bake a bigger cake together.
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