The following items are tagged negotiator.
Sometimes negotiators get off on the wrong foot. Maybe you and your partner had a different understanding of your meeting time, or one of you makes a statement that the other misinterprets. Such awkward moves at the beginning of an interaction can lead one party to question the other side’s motives.
In a recent article, Robert Lount, Chen-Bo Zhong, J. Keith Murnighan, and Niro Sivanathan, all of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, examined trust building in negotiation.
Researchers have argued that negotiators learn more from cases and real-world experiences when they can take away an abstract version of the lesson. Such abstractions come from analogies developed across two or more different negotiation contexts, say Leigh Thompson and Dedre Gentner of Northwestern University and Jeffrey Loewenstein of the University of Texas, who propose that such analogical reasoning be incorporated into negotiation training.
But researchers Simone Moran and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben Gurion University and Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School argue that teaching people more general negotiation principles – such as “value can be created” – enables a more successful transfer to a broader range of new negotiation tasks than focused analogies.
In a Harvard Business Review article, P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski describe the value of improving your cultural intelligence, or the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and adapt to them. Some people are naturally skilled at determining whether a person’s behavior is unique to him or determined by his culture. For others, this process requires more effort. Regardless, this ability is important for successful international negotiations.
Earley and Mosakowski illustrate this point through a domestic and an international example. Peter, a Los Angeles-based sales manager for Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, was transferred to the company’s Indianopolis headquarters. In L.A., Peter’s confrontational, high-pressure style was the norm and effectively motivated his sales staff. In Indianopolis, his new team disliked his hard charging ways and avoided the challenges he set for them.
Encourage information sharing.
Avoid a gender backlash effect.
“Lessons in Diplomacy: Building a Successful Negotiating Career,” our cover story, presents lessons that Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, recipient of the Great Negotiator Award 2012 from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School, shared from over the course of his long, successful career as a lawyer, campaign manager, and diplomat.
How is it that mediators – who themselves lack any power to impose a solution – nevertheless often lead bitter disputants to agreement? Substantive expertise helps, as does keen analytic skill.
According to a recent survey by Northwestern University law professor Stephen Goldberg, veteran mediators believe that establishing rapport is more important than employing specific techniques and tactics.
Effective negotiators seek opportunities to create value. By making tradeoffs across issues, parties can obtain greater value on the issues that are most important to them. But how can you be sure you’re making the right offer?
Victoria Husted Medvec and Adam D. Galinsky of Northwestern University argued that, in negotiations involving many issues, you can create a great deal of value by making multiple equivalent simultaneous offers or MESOs. This strategy entails identifying several proposals that you value equally and presenting them to the other side.By making multiple offers, the theory goes, you appear more flexible, collect information about the other side’s preferences based on which offer she likes best, and increase the odds of reaching agreement.
In her book, The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, Leigh Thompson cites four widely held myths that bar negotiators from improving their skills. This analysis is worth the attention of anyone who wants to move beyond platitudes to a deeper understanding of negotiation.
Myth 1: Great negotiators are born.
While we’re all born with varying abilities for almost any skill that can be imagined, our social environment and education have a tremendous impact on what we achieve. Negotiations professors recognize that executives enter the classroom with different capabilities. They also understand that all students can gain confidence and competence. The belief that one is either born a great negotiator, or not, can stand in the way of learning.
Decision makers often overlook others’ viewpoints. When we do take others’ thinking into account, we tend to assume that they know as much as we do. For this reason, marketing experts are generally worse than non-expert consumers at predicting the beliefs, values, and tastes of consumers.
Similarly, individuals who correctly solve a problem overestimate the percentage of their peers who will be just as successful solving the same problem.
During his years as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, one of James A. Baker, III’s, goals was to encourage the free-market reforms that Communist Party of the Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had launched in the late 1980s. One day during his tenure, a high-level Bush Administration commented in the press that Gorbachev’s efforts were sure to fail. Baker called Bush to complain.
“I said, you can’t have other people pontificating about these major foreign policy matters when this is one of our goals, and it’s totally contrary to our policy,” he said. “So they cut the knees off of this particular individual, and we didn’t hear that anymore.”
Does negotiation research promote the creation of joint gain at the expense of relationship building? Jared R. Curhan, Margaret A. Neale, and Lee D. Ross suggest the field is guilty as charged.
To illustrate, the researchers apply author O. Henry’s classic tale “The Gift of the Magi” to negotiation. The short story describes a poor but loving husband and wife who want to give each other the perfect Christmas gift. Della sells her beautiful long hair to buy Jim a platinum chain for his prize possession, a gold watch. Meanwhile, Jim sells his watch to buy a set of tortoise shell hair combs for his wife’s hair.
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