counterparts

The following items are tagged counterparts.

Identify your negotiating style

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

Have you ever wondered if your negotiating style is too tough or too accommodating? Too cooperative or too selfish? You might strive for an ideal balance, but, chances are, your innate and learned tendencies will have a strong impact on how you negotiate. Wise negotiators seek to identify these tendencies and enhance them according to

Sellers: Stay out of legal hot water

Posted by & filed under Sales Negotiations.

When it comes to business negotiations, you probably understand the importance of being as principled as possible to protect your reputation and ward off legal trouble. You probably expect your counterparts to follow the straight and narrow as well. Yet negotiators often have only a fuzzy grasp of which claims and strategies are legal and

A creative approach to breaking impasse

Posted by & filed under Conflict Management.

Suppose that you and your negotiating counterpart become deadlocked after exchanging a series of offers and counteroffers. With each of you anchored on very different positions, you can’t seem to find a solution that pleases you both.

Rather than making one offer at a time, try issuing multiple equivalent simultaneous offers, or MESOs. When you present

Negotiating with people pleasers

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

All of us behave at least somewhat differently in social situations than we do in private, but psychologists have found that some people try extra hard to convey a positive image of themselves to others.

Is a strong need to manage others’ impressions a help or a hindrance in social situations such as negotiation? According to

Negotiating with your children

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

Getting a good night’s sleep and eating a healthy dinner might seem like obvious goals for parents to have for their young children, but kids won’t always agree. When faced with back talk, tantrums, and tears, most parents vacillate between laying down the law and giving in, depending on how irritated or exhausted they are

When not to show your hand

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

In all your negotiations, you must calculate the risks and rewards of sharing information with your counterpart. Here, we consider four types of information that may be best kept under wraps: sensitive or privileged information, information that isn’t yours to share, information that diminishes your power, and information that may fluctuate.
Fearful of being hurt by

How much authority do they have?

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations.

Adapted from “Contracts 101: What Every Negotiator Should Know about Contract and Agency Law” by Guhan Subramanian (professor, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, February 2006.

While hammering out an agreement, a mid-level manager offered a customer a significant price discount. When the discount failed to materialize, the customer

Winning at “Win-Win”

Posted by & filed under Daily, Negotiation Skills.

Lawrence Susskind (Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“Win-win” has become a popular term in the field of negotiation, but many people have mis-perceptions about what it actually means. In this blog post, Professor Lawrence Susskind, a member of PON’s Executive Committee, clarifies that a “win-win” negotiated outcome is

The Challenges of Online Negotiations

Posted by & filed under Daily, Meeting Facilitation.

Adapted from “How to Negotiate When You’re (Literally) Far Apart” by Roderick I. Swaab (professor, INSEAD) and Adam D. Galinsky (professor, Northwestern University), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, February 2007.

Research suggests that e-mail often poses more problems than solutions when it comes to relationships, information exchange, and outcomes.

First, establishing social rapport via e-mail can

When irrationality isn’t the issue

Posted by & filed under Business Negotiations, Daily.

Adapted from “Is Your Counterpart Rational . . . Really?” by Deepak Malhotra (professor, Harvard Business School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, March 2006.

How can you negotiate with someone who seems irrational? First, by questioning whether it is reasonable for you to judge your counterparts as irrational. As it turns out, behavior that negotiators