Some of our toughest negotiations take place far from the formal bargaining table. In fact, they often unfold much closer to the dinner table. When a reader reached out with a question about negotiating with kids, we turned to Katie Shonk of the Program on Negotiation for her perspective.

Q: I avoid using hardball tactics in my professional negotiations because they tend to backfire and escalate conflict. But at home, my wife and I often find ourselves resorting to threats, bribes, and even the occasional bluff to get our three young children (ages seven, five, and three) to cooperate. I also lose my cool more often than I’d like. The kids may comply in the short term, but lasting improvements seem elusive. How can we deal more successfully with our most difficult negotiating counterparts—our kids? Is negotiating with kids really worthwhile?

KS: Kudos to you for recognizing that children respond about as well to hardball tactics and emotional outbursts as grown-ups do—that is, not very well.

By contrast, when parents apply principles of collaborative negotiation thoughtfully, they can foster trust, respect, and creative problem-solving in their children. In fact, research and experience suggest that even very young children can become more cooperative when they have a voice in setting rules and resolving conflicts.

Some parents worry that negotiating with kids means giving up authority. But just as in the business world, negotiation doesn’t require making unwanted concessions. It can—and should—include clear limits and meaningful consequences. “If–then” statements with follow-through (“If you keep playing, then we won’t have time for books”) are not incompatible with negotiation.

By setting firm, consistent boundaries while still listening and engaging, parents protect their own needs—for quiet time, respect, and predictability—and model healthy conflict resolution skills their children can carry into adulthood.

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Strategies for Negotiating with Kids

Based on my own experience negotiating with children, I’ve found the following three strategies particularly helpful.

1. Try an interest-based approach
Professional negotiators know that positions (“I want this”) are often driven by underlying interests (“Here’s why this matters to me”). Identifying those interests opens the door to creative solutions and reduces reliance on power-based tactics such as threats.

An interest-based approach can be especially effective with kids, who are often more emotional, less articulate, and quicker to escalate conflicts than adults.

Consider a familiar scenario: your daughter insists on wearing sandals to preschool in the middle of winter. Rather than demanding compliance, ask questions to uncover her thinking. Suppose she reveals that she wants to dress like her favorite cartoon princess—who, of course, never seems bothered by cold weather.

Now you have the makings of a win-win solution—and maybe even a learning opportunity. You might explain that while snow boots are required outdoors, you’ll bring some snow inside later so she can test whether bare feet really feel comfortable in winter.

2. Reduce stressors
Experienced negotiators know that stress impairs judgment. Tight deadlines, fatigue, and emotional overload all make agreement harder to reach.

The same is true at home. When negotiating with kids, look for ways to reduce predictable stressors that fuel conflict, such as:

• Overtired children (and parents)
• Rushed mornings or bedtime routines
• Repeated decision points at high-pressure moments

This might mean setting earlier bedtimes, planning outfits or lunches in advance, or simplifying choices. Helping an indecisive child pick clothes for the week on Sunday afternoon, for example, can eliminate daily power struggles before school.

3. Show empathy—without giving in
In professional negotiations, a counterpart’s anger can make us so uncomfortable that we offer concessions just to calm things down. At home, children’s emotional outbursts can trigger the same reaction—or push us toward dismissal and discipline.

Instead of minimizing or correcting emotions, try active listening. This means:

• Paraphrasing what your child is expressing
• Asking open-ended questions to clarify
• Naming and validating emotions without judgment

With children, matching their tone—without mocking—can help signal that you’re taking them seriously.

For instance, if your three-year-old melts down because you won’t allow another cookie, rather than reasoning (“You already had two”), try getting down to eye level and saying:
“You’re really upset right now. I can tell you wanted that cookie, and it feels unfair to you.”

Such statements don’t mean you’re changing the rule. They communicate that you’re not afraid of your child’s emotions—and that reassurance alone can often help calm the storm.

What are your own tips for negotiating with kids? Have you faced a particularly challenging situation at home? Leave a comment below—we’d love to hear from you.

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Back in 2014, Nike was the undisputed king of superstar endorsements, dominating the field by paying top talent millions for the right to sell lines of collectible shoes in their names. But sportswear and footwear supplier Under Armour made a bold play to change the landscape. Basketball star Kevin Durant, then of the Oklahoma City Thunder, was reaching the end of his seven-year, $60 million business contract with Nike, and Under Armour, which had only entered the footwear market in 2006, was looking to make a big splash.

In a detailed presentation at its Baltimore headquarters, Under Armour offered to pay Durant $265 million to $285 million for a 10-year sponsorship deal that included promises of company stock and the construction of a community center named for his mother. The offer represented almost 10% of Under Armour’s total marketing budget, according to Kyle Stock of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Rapper Jay-Z’s sports agency, Roc Nation Sports, which represents Durant, reportedly gave Nike less than a week to match the offer or walk away, according to the terms of Nike’s business contract with Durant. Calculating that it couldn’t afford to lose Durant to an upstart competitor, Nike agreed to match—despite the fact that it could be looking at a money-losing deal.

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Consider this analysis from Stock: Nike pocketed about $112 million from the sale of its “KD” line (Durant-branded gear) in 2013. The company is said to spend 11% of its sales on “demand creation,” which includes advertising expenditures and payments to athletes. To keep Durant’s average annual payments of $27.5 million per year at 11% of sales of its KD line, Nike would have to book about $250 million in KD revenue annually—roughly double the line’s sales at the time.

In its negotiation with Durant, Nike was faced with a question that haunts buyers in competitive markets: Should you compete for a scarce commodity and risk overpaying in a bidding war or stay out of the race and risk being left behind?

In fact, buyers are rarely limited to such either-or choices. Here are five other options you might exercise to gain an edge—and avoid a bidding war.

5 Ways to win a business contract deal against a more powerful competitor

1. Get a jump on the competition.

Nike appeared to have been caught off guard by Under Armour’s attempt to lure away Kevin Durant. It certainly was surprised—and probably dismayed—by the size of its competitor’s offer.

As the buyer in a business relationship, your power is likely to decrease as the number of competitors rises. Therefore, your primary goal should be to keep negotiations one on one.

You can take several steps to reduce the need to bid against one or more competitors for a contract you hold. First, solidify the relationship by demonstrating your commitment and excellence throughout the life of the deal. Second, begin the renegotiation process well before the contract’s end date. Third, emphasize the unique assets, beyond price, that you bring to the relationship. With any luck, you’ll wrap up a new deal before your competitor has a chance to put forth an enticing offer.

2. Don’t undervalue yourself.

What if your client is proactive about shopping for a better deal, as Durant and his management team were? Imagine, for example, that a longtime customer informs you that it is putting your soon-to-expire contract up for bid in an online auction that will be awarded based on price alone.

In such cases, don’t assume you have to accept your customer’s new process terms, advises Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian in his book Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions (W. W. Norton, 2011).

You might schedule a meeting with your customer and inform her that your company won’t be participating in the auction. Explain that you predict the winner of the auction will have to sacrifice quality to deliver on price. Then open up a conversation about ways you might improve the existing contract for both sides.

As Subramanian notes, your participation in a negotiation has value. Rather than giving that value away, negotiate concessions in exchange for staying in the game.

3. Consider a coalition.

Sometimes in negotiation, you can avoid a bidding war by finding ways to partner with your competition. Of course, antitrust laws bar you from forming alliances that could harm consumers, as Apple learned the hard way when it was found guilty of colluding with five major book publishers to set prices for e-books.

Yet there are perfectly legal ways to head off certain types of competition. In recent years, for example, individual ranchers and farmers have formed “wind associations” that allow them to negotiate leasing rights to their land with wind developers as a group. Rather than competing with one another for deals with single developers, the landowners market their group property rights to numerous companies, sometimes triggering their own bidding wars in the process. Similarly, companies can team up to offer a higher-value package to a prospective client, as in the case of two consulting firms bundling their services.

The lesson: Don’t assume you and your competitors have to be at odds. Consider whether there are legal and ethical ways for you to collaborate on a business contract rather than outbid one another.

4. Negotiate matching rights with care.

Granting a buyer the right to match or improve upon another bidder’s offer within a set period of time can be a win-win move for both buyer and seller, according to Subramanian. Such so-called matching rights, or rights of first refusal, give buyers the opportunity to stay in the game and sellers a chance to explore their options. Once used exclusively in large mergers and acquisitions, matching rights are now incorporated into all types of deals across industries.

Because matching rights are often imprecisely worded in contracts, however, they can create new problems. It may be unclear, for example, if a buyer will end the contest when it matches a third party’s bid or if the match will trigger a bidding war.

Similarly, matching rights may limit, or appear to limit, the competition to a single issue: price. This fact can constrain buyers from competing on other issues and sellers from shopping for the best all-around deal.

Finally, when adding matching rights to a business contract, buyers often overlook the importance of having ample time to decide whether to match a competitor’s offer. Sellers and other prospective buyers may take advantage of this fact by making exploding offers with short fuses, notes Subramanian. Roc Nation Sports appears to have used this tactic in its negotiations with Nike on Durant’s behalf.

For all these reasons, don’t blindly accept your lawyer’s boilerplate language on matching rights the next time you sign a contract. Instead, negotiate for terms that will lessen your odds of overbidding if a contest arises down the road.

5. Guard against competitive arousal.

In negotiation, no matter how well we prepare, the desire to “beat” another party may lead us to make irrational decisions that go against our best interests, such as bidding well beyond an item’s value in order to defeat a rival bidder in an auction. This type of competitive arousal is a natural human response that is likely rooted in our fight-or-flight instinct and therefore difficult to overcome, according to Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra.

Fortunately, two safeguards can help us stay focused on what really matters. First, because we are most susceptible to competitive arousal when we’re under time pressure, do what you can to slow down the clock. That means pushing back when a client or competitor tries to get you to make quick decisions about whether to bid higher.

Second, because negotiators feel pressured and become more competitive when they’re performing in front of an audience, work to keep your negotiations private. That might mean negotiating one-on-one rather than as part of a team, asking your boss to stay out of the room, or making a “no leaks” pact with other parties to keep observers, such as the media, from tracking your progress.

In sum, when you’re considering making a significant purchase for yourself or your organization, don’t assume you have less power than the seller just because she has something you want. With advance planning and careful strategy, you can take steps to reduce your competition and increase your odds of walking away with a fairly priced prize.

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When preparing for negotiation, we often overlook the role that our emotions and our counterpart’s emotions might play in the process. Two studies offer insights into aspects of emotions in negotiation: the risks associated with faking emotions and the anxiety that often accompanies making the first offer.

Emotions in Negotiation: The Risks of Emotional Displays

Anger can carry an advantage in negotiation, research has shown. When we display anger, our counterparts tend to view us as powerful and intimidating. Consequently, they make more concessions and lower their demands.

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On the flip side, negotiators who appear happy tend to do worse than others. Because happiness and contentedness appear to signal satisfaction with how a negotiation is going, counterparts tend to demand more of happy negotiators.

Of course, it’s notoriously difficult to accurately read others’ emotions in negotiation. People sometimes work to keep their true feelings under wraps. At other times, they may try to convey an emotion that’s different than what they are actually feeling. Consider the case of a negotiator who, to try to win concessions, pretends to be angered by an offer that exceeds their expectations. How does a negotiator’s perceptions of whether their counterpart’s emotional displays are authentic affect the parties’ outcomes?

Researchers Han-Ying Tng of the Duke‒National University of Singapore (NUS) Graduate Medical School in Singapore and Al K. C. Au of NUS explored this question in two experiments reported in the Negotiation Journal. In one experiment, undergraduates in Singapore were told they would engage in a negotiation simulation with another student via instant messaging. In fact, an experimenter posed as the negotiating partner. Before negotiating, participants were given information that described their counterpart as (1) sincere and frank about their emotions; (2) insincere and manipulative; or (3) unpredictable when engaging with others.

During the online negotiation, participants took turns exchanging offers with their counterpart and received information about the other party’s emotions, namely whether they were angry or happy with how the negotiation was going. When negotiators perceived their counterpart’s emotional display to be authentic, they conceded more to angry counterparts than to happy ones. But when negotiators believed their counterpart’s feelings were not authentic, they made fewer concessions to counterparts who acted angry than to those who acted happy. Negotiators made similar levels of concessions to those whose expressions of anger or happiness were ambiguous.

Using anger as a strategic tool can backfire in negotiation, the results suggest. We might conclude that false displays of happiness, by contrast, can be beneficial. However, because it’s difficult to control how your counterpart will respond to your emotional displays, this strategy could backfire as well.

It’s hard to believably show emotions you aren’t feeling. If your counterpart catches on that you’re faking, you could reach worse results than you would have if you had behaved authentically. It’s just one more argument in favor of behaving in accordance with your own ethical standards in negotiation.

Emotions in Negotiation: Anxiety and First Offers

The question of when to make the first offer in negotiations looms large. “Anchoring” talks with an initial offer can be risky when you know little about the zone of possible agreement, or ZOPA. However, many studies have found that negotiators who do their research claim the lion’s share of the value by making the first offer.

Yet for some negotiators, this advantage may be overshadowed by the anxiety of putting the first offer on the table, researchers Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University, Shirli Kopelman of the University of Michigan, and JeAnna Lanza Abbott of the University of Houston found in their research. In two experiments, the team had pairs of participants engage in price negotiations. The negotiator who made the first offer performed better financially than the negotiator who did not; however, the negotiator making the first offer also experienced greater anxiety, rooted in the concern that their counterpart would take advantage of them. As a result of this anxiety, those who made the first offer were less satisfied with their outcomes than those who did not—though their results were superior.

Anxiety-prone negotiators shouldn’t conclude that they should wait for the other side to move first. By engaging in role-playing, the researchers suggest, negotiators can practice making the first offer in a safe setting and should be able to quell their nerves.

In some cases, anxiety about making a first offer in negotiation may arise from the concern that the other party knows more about the value of what’s being negotiated than they do. For example, a consultant bidding on an assignment might not feel confident in their assessment of what the client might pay. The consultant might be able to reduce their uncertainty—and their anxiety—by doing some research online or in their network about what the client would be likely to pay.

We can often lessen our anxiety about making the first offer by arming ourselves with better information. If our research doesn’t turn up much, that might indicate you should let the other side make the first offer—lest you end up underbidding yourself.

What lessons have you learned from your experiences with emotions in negotiation?

When you enter a job negotiation, what goals are foremost on your mind? If you’re like most people, you are primarily preoccupied with making a great impression and winning the job. Acing the interviews can seem like the only thing that matters, especially if you’ve been out of work or desperate to escape a miserable job. Yet, most job negotiation advice misses some very important considerations.

But consider the results of a Gallup survey of 230,000 employees in 142 countries, which found that only 13% of respondents felt engaged by their jobs. This statistic suggests that many people are capable of getting a job, but not necessarily one that they will find enjoyable and fulfilling in the long run.

To negotiate for employment that we find more than just tolerable, we must overcome three common traps: (1) mispredicting what we will truly value in life; (2) holding ourselves back in job negotiations; and (3) failing to recognize our relative bargaining position.

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4 Pieces of job negotiation advice that will lead to better outcomes

1. Don’t overlook what you truly value.
Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman notes that during recruiting season on the school’s campus each spring, he overhears lots of discussions in the student center about interviews and job offers. Students might share information about starting salaries, the name of the firm, the city where the job is located, their work responsibilities, the amount of travel involved, and so on.

What type of information do you think is most likely to travel through the MBA grapevine? According to Bazerman, data that conveys the most prestige, such as a high salary or an offer from a top consulting firm, will probably get the most attention. The impressed reactions of one’s peers to a job’s high-status attributes will enhance its appeal to the job candidate.

Meanwhile, less flashy characteristics of the job, such as the freedom to pursue one’s interests or the length of one’s commute, may recede into the background.

Because of their close focus on status, according to Bazerman, many Harvard MBA students end up accepting high-paying jobs with prestigious firms—only to quit soon after and take jobs that are more rewarding on levels that ultimately matter more to them, such as a shorter commute or more interesting responsibilities.

It’s not just newly minted MBAs who fall prey to the so-called vividness bias, or the tendency to focus too closely on vivid information and overlook dull but equally valuable information. As Bazerman writes in his book The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (Simon & Schuster, 2014), we are all susceptible to overlooking key information that would improve our satisfaction with the outcome of our negotiations.

How can you get a better sense of what you value? One piece of job negotiation advice is to create a scoring system. A scoring system allows you to weigh different issues, determine how much you value each one, and compare them more accurately. A good scoring system is complete (it identifies all the important issues), measurable (it provides a common metric for comparing qualitatively different issues), and useful (it offers a shorthand for understanding what’s at stake and what you value), according to Professor Don A. Moore of the University of California at Berkeley.

To develop your scoring system, begin by listing each issue relevant to a given job offer on a spreadsheet, such as salary, health insurance, location, and so on. You can add issues to your scoring system as talks unfold. Next, list the possible options within each issue, such as two, three, and four weeks of vacation. Finally, establish a point system that can help you determine how much you value various issues. For example, you might assign 50 points to two weeks of vacation, 75 to three weeks, and 100 to four weeks. If you receive multiple job offers, follow this process for each one, then add up the points and think about whether the outcome reflects your true desires.

Avoid sharing details about your job prospects with others until after you have used a scoring system to determine what matters most to you, Bazerman advises. When you do get feedback from someone, consider whether the reaction tells you anything new. If not, you can feel satisfied with your decision.

2. Stay out of your own way.
We also have a somewhat self-destructive tendency to hold ourselves back in job negotiations. Consider the infamous salary negotiations of Ira Glass, the creator and host of the long-running public-radio show This American Life. In 2013, the board of WBEZ, the show’s producer, raised Glass’s salary from $170,000 to $278,000 to reward his achievements. Glass felt “weird” about the big bump in pay, he told Cara Buckley of the New York Times—so weird that he asked the board to lower his salary to $146,000 (less than the starting point of the negotiation), and later asked them to lower it again. Though Glass says he still earns “a lot of money,” he has been booking speaking engagements around the edges of his 60- to 70-hour workweek to help cover his and his wife’s living expenses in New York City. Why would Glass negotiate his salary down rather than up? He apparently felt self-conscious about earning a high salary from a not-for-profit organization funded by grants and listener donations.

Negotiation is difficult enough without creating extra roadblocks for ourselves. But as this anecdote suggests, that’s exactly what many of us do. This tendency can be particularly strong in hiring negotiations, where we often feel vulnerable and insecure about our worth.

To negotiate more effectively, we have to recognize how we “get in our own way,” write Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and Jessica L. Porter in their new book Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins Into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015). Pitfalls include failing to recognize opportunities to negotiate, focusing on our own weaknesses, and making the first concessions in our own heads, before we have even given other parties a chance to voice their positions. That’s what Glass did: He bargained with himself without giving WBEZ a voice.

Bargaining ourselves down starts with self-doubt about our value to the hiring organization. Before a job negotiation begins, we consider what we want, what we think we can get, and whether we’re willing to fight for it. We think that the employer has all the cards—that they are in the driver’s seat and our only choices are to acquiesce or reject an offer outright. We might decide that we won’t ask for plum assignments for fear of seeming pushy. Or we might decide in advance not to negotiate salary because we want to negotiate hard on another issue, rather than looking for ways to negotiate about multiple issues that are important to us. Kolb and Porter’s job negotiation advice is to ignore the internal dialogues are where the first concessions in the negotiation are made.

3. Take the long view

Rather than focusing on the job you’re applying for, think about how that job will set you up for your next job and the one after that, recommends Negotiation Briefings editorial board member David Lax of Lax Sebenius, LLC. This shift in mind-set will motivate you to negotiate for the tools you need to learn and thrive, such as resources, a support staff, and an appropriate title. You might negotiate for more administrative support that will enhance your productivity to the benefit of yourself and the organization, for example. The employer should, at the very least, be indifferent to spending money on your salary versus on support or benefits you would value more.

When we fail to recognize our own value, we are vulnerable to accepting less than we’re entitled to and even to giving back what the organization believes we deserve, as Glass did. It’s important to be fair to your employer, but you also need to be fair to yourself.

In addition, our beliefs about what will satisfy someone are not necessarily correct. Glass’s employer, for example, might have preferred that he accept a raise that would enable him to focus fully on his work without the need to overtax himself with side jobs.

Kolb and Porter suggest additional job negotiation advice that will help you position yourself to be a more effective self-advocate. Begin by gathering information so that you will feel that what you are asking for is defensible. Prepare to explain the value you would bring to the organization. Develop alternatives to the current negotiation to increase your flexibility at the table, and remember that the other party’s alternatives may be less attractive than yours. In addition, examine your vulnerabilities and plan ahead to compensate for them. For example, if you are insecure about a gap in your work history, think about the important things you were doing during that time and prepare to share them with enthusiasm.

4. Be aware of your relative bargaining power.
Job seekers, and women in particular, have been so inundated with the message that they fail to negotiate forcefully for themselves that they face the risk of overcompensating. Take the now-infamous story, related on the blog Philosophy Smoker, of an anonymous academic who said she had received an offer for a tenure-track position as a philosophy professor from a small liberal-arts college after a round of interviews. The woman responded to the offer by e-mail, sending a list of numerous requests—for a salary increase, a semester of maternity leave, a pre-tenure sabbatical, and so on. Rather than continuing the negotiation, the college revoked the job offer, saying it appeared the candidate was looking to work for a research university rather than a teaching-focused college.

The woman was dismayed and confused by her negotiation failure. But her principal mistake was an obvious one: She failed to recognize the strength of her bargaining position relative to that of the college, says Kolb. In the job market for philosophy professors, a hiring college is clearly in the better bargaining position. It likely has received applications from hundreds of qualified candidates. Meanwhile, the average job candidate might be lucky to get even one interview. Consequently, a job candidate who presents a list of requests or demands is giving the hiring college a good reason to end the negotiation and turn to other candidates.

The philosophy candidate’s list was also risky because it had a common theme—requests for time off from teaching—
that may have given the impression she wouldn’t be a hardworking teacher. Negotiating via e-mail is also usually a mistake in such situations, as it tends to be less collaborative.

Savvy job seekers remember to treat the negotiation as the beginning of a long-term relationship. You can get that relationship off on the right foot by looking for opportunities to give the employer what it wants even as you seek to get what you want.
Begin by using your network to gather information, advises Kolb. The philosophy job candidate, for example, could have consulted with her fellow graduate students or an online group about how much leeway she might have in negotiating her job offer. Then, rather than e-mailing a list of requests, she should have called her contact at the college (or, if possible, met in person) and started asking questions, advises Kolb. For example, she might have asked about the college’s early-career sabbatical policy. What criteria do they use to award it? Then she could have looked for ways to make an early sabbatical palatable to the college, again by asking questions. She could have asked if she could teach extra courses before taking the leave, for example, or give undergraduate students opportunities to get involved with her research while on sabbatical.

Prioritizing is key, as well. Referring back to your scoring system, think about the issues that matter most to you. Focus on two or three of them during your negotiations rather than overwhelming the other side with a list of demands. Less important issues can wait until after you’ve been on the job for a while and proven your value to the organization.

Do you have any job negotiation advice you would add to this? Let us know in the comments.

Q: I avoid using hardball tactics in my professional negotiations, since they often backfire and escalate conflict. But at home, my wife and I often find ourselves resorting to threats, bribes, and lies to get our three young children (ages seven, five, and three) to cooperate, and I lose my cool more often than I’d like. Our kids may comply in the short term, but lasting improvements seem elusive. How can we deal more successfully with our most difficult negotiating counterparts—our kids?

A: Kudos to you for noticing that children respond about as well to hardball tactics and emotional outbursts as grown-ups do. By contrast, when parents use principles of collaborative negotiation judiciously, they foster trust, respect, and creative thinking in their kids. In fact, children as young as toddlers can become more cooperative when they’ve played a role in negotiating rules and resolving conflicts.

Some people object that parents who negotiate with their kids risk forfeiting too much power. But, as in the business world, negotiation doesn’t require us to make unwanted concessions, and it can still include “consequences” (if-then warnings with follow-through, such as “If you keep playing, then we won’t have time for books”). Moreover, by setting clear, consistent limits in negotiations with our kids, we protect our own needs (for respect, quiet time, and so on) and, in so doing, model healthy behavior.

Though my own negotiations with my four-year-old have achieved mixed results, I have found the following three strategies to be helpful:

1. Try an interest-based approach.
Professional negotiators understand the importance of exploring the interests that underlie a counterpart’s request or demand. When we identify what the other party values most, we open the door to trades that can create value and often head off the need for a power-based approach (that is, hardball tactics such as threats).

An interest-based approach may be especially useful when we’re dealing with children, who are generally more emotional, less rational, and less articulate than adults, and thus more prone to escalating a dispute beyond all reason. For example, if your daughter wants to wear sandals to preschool in the middle of winter, rather than demanding that she put on her boots immediately, try asking questions aimed at understanding her thinking. Suppose she reveals that she wants to emulate her favorite cartoon princess, who’s impervious to cold. Now you have an opening for a win-win deal, and maybe a science experiment, too. You could explain that although she must wear her snow boots outside, you will bring some snow inside for her to play with after school.

2. Reduce stressors.
Business negotiators learn to take steps to encourage rational decision making at the bargaining table—for example, by relaxing deadlines and devoting ample time to preparation. Similarly, as parents, we can reduce stressors that exacerbate conflict with our kids, such as fatigue and tight time frames. This might mean setting earlier bedtimes (for kids and parents alike) and finding ways to short-circuit ongoing struggles, such as helping an indecisive child choose his clothes for the week on Sunday afternoon rather than just before school each day.

3. Show empathy.
In our professional negotiations, a counterpart’s anger can make us so uncomfortable that we offer concessions just to appease her. Similarly, a child’s display of anger or frustration pushes our hot buttons. We tend to respond by expressing disapproval or downplaying his emotions, reactions that leave him feeling ashamed or misunderstood. We may also be tempted to cave in to unreasonable demands.

Instead, try using the principles of active listening to understand your children’s strong emotions better. Active listening involves paraphrasing what someone is saying without judgment, asking open-ended questions aimed at clarifying her reasoning, and identifying and acknowledging her underlying emotions. With kids in particular, mimicking their tone may convey that you take them seriously.

For example, if your three-year-old is having a meltdown because you won’t let him have another cookie, instead of trying to reason with him (“You already had two”), get down to his eye level and say, “You are really upset right now! I can tell that you really wanted that cookie! It sounds like you think I’m being unfair.” Such empathic statements, which convey that you’re not frightened by your children’s emotions, can be enormously reassuring to them.

Katherine Shonk
Editor, Negotiation Briefings
Program on Negotiation
Harvard Law School

This past June, a long-standing family feud erupted in public when Arthur S. Demoulas, an owner of the New England low-price grocery chain Market Basket, fired his cousin Arthur T. Demoulas, also an owner, from his position as the company’s CEO. Many of the company’s 25,000 employees, who had received good wages, bonuses, and profit sharing under Arthur T., began protesting the ouster, and customers soon showed their support with a boycott. As the protests dragged on for weeks, Market Basket shelves emptied, and the company started losing millions of dollars. Among some of his supporters, Arthur T. was elevated to folk-hero status.

On August 27, at the prodding of the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, independent directors from the chain’s board were able to mediate a resolution between the family’s two warring factions. Arthur S. and his allies agreed to have Arthur T. reinstated as CEO and to sell their 50.5% stake in the company to him and his allies for $1.6 billion.

To many, it was an inspiring story of employees and customers taking a stand against a perceived injustice. To others, this version of the dispute was just a facade. In a September Forbes magazine exposé, Hollie Slade reports that the employee uprising was not spontaneous but “orchestrated from the top.” Employees who contributed $500 to fund the campaign to reinstate Arthur T. were reimbursed via a bonus, according to Slade. Forbes also portrayed Arthur T.’s ouster not as a power grab but as a responsible reaction to a CEO who habitually concealed financial information, rejected oversight of his decisions, and spent company money improperly.

Writing in protest
Whether the movement to bring back the company’s popular leader was calculated or spontaneous, misguided or on the mark, the saga serves as an illustration—cautionary or motivational, depending on your perspective—of what can happen when a private dispute goes public.

A similar story is unfolding in the book world, where authors have begun to organize against Amazon in its dispute with publisher Hachette Book Group. In reaction to Hachette’s refusal to accept lower prices for e-books and make other concessions, Amazon has penalized Hachette and its authors, taking measures to decrease their sales by slowing down the delivery times of Hachette books and selling them at list price, for example.

Hundreds of writers, including literary lions such as Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, have joined Authors United,
a coalition that has taken out media ads condemning Amazon’s actions. Authors United has a bigger goal: It plans to pressure the Department of Justice to investigate the online retailer for antitrust violations.

Leveraging public opinion
When a dispute seems irreconcilable, the temptation to battle it out in the court of public opinion can be strong. But it would be a mistake to do so before exhausting your full range of dispute-resolution options. In many cases, a good mediator should be able to help you and your counterpart overcome your entrenched positions, see each other’s point of view more clearly, and come to agreement.

What if your counterpart still refuses to cooperate? Taking your dispute public may start to seem like your best option, but be aware that doing so could escalate the dispute in unforeseen ways. Your partner might retaliate by making embarrassing public accusations against you or suing you, for example.

If going public still seems like the best option, you can take steps to increase the odds that the public phase of your dispute will be a short one. First, warn the other side of your intentions, as the mere threat of a public backlash could motivate her to back down.

Second, organize your campaign, and be prepared to clearly explain your principles and goals to the public. Market Basket workers (perhaps supported by Arthur T. and his allies) relied on both traditional media and social media to foment their customers’ moral outrage—and it worked. Authors United, by contrast, has been less effective at generating widespread public condemnation of Amazon’s tactics.

Third, if negotiations continue or resume, try to keep them private, lest you further escalate the dispute, and keep striving to meet the other party’s interests behind closed doors. Finally, if you do reach a settlement, attempt to put the incident behind you as quickly as possible by making a joint statement that emphasizes your shared intention to move forward.

This past June, a long-standing family feud erupted in public when Arthur S. Demoulas, an owner of the New England low-price grocery chain Market Basket, fired his cousin Arthur T. Demoulas, also an owner, from his position as the company’s CEO. Many of the company’s 25,000 employees, who had received good wages, bonuses, and profit sharing under Arthur T., began protesting the ouster, and customers soon showed their support with a boycott. As the protests dragged on for weeks, Market Basket shelves emptied, and the company started losing millions of dollars. Among some of his supporters, Arthur T. was elevated to folk-hero status.

On August 27, at the prodding of the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, independent directors from the chain’s board were able to mediate a resolution between the family’s two warring factions. Arthur S. and his allies agreed to have Arthur T. reinstated as CEO and to sell their 50.5% stake in the company to him and his allies for $1.6 billion.

To many, it was an inspiring story of employees and customers taking a stand against a perceived injustice. To others, this version of the dispute was just a facade. In a September Forbes magazine exposé, Hollie Slade reports that the employee uprising was not spontaneous but “orchestrated from the top.” Employees who contributed $500 to fund the campaign to reinstate Arthur T. were reimbursed via a bonus, according to Slade. Forbes also portrayed Arthur T.’s ouster not as a power grab but as a responsible reaction to a CEO who habitually concealed financial information, rejected oversight of his decisions, and spent company money improperly.

Writing in protest
Whether the movement to bring back the company’s popular leader was calculated or spontaneous, misguided or on the mark, the saga serves as an illustration—cautionary or motivational, depending on your perspective—of what can happen when a private dispute goes public.

A similar story is unfolding in the book world, where authors have begun to organize against Amazon in its dispute with publisher Hachette Book Group. In reaction to Hachette’s refusal to accept lower prices for e-books and make other concessions, Amazon has penalized Hachette and its authors, taking measures to decrease their sales by slowing down the delivery times of Hachette books and selling them at list price, for example.

Hundreds of writers, including literary lions such as Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie, have joined Authors United,
a coalition that has taken out media ads condemning Amazon’s actions. Authors United has a bigger goal: It plans to pressure the Department of Justice to investigate the online retailer for antitrust violations.

Leveraging public opinion
When a dispute seems irreconcilable, the temptation to battle it out in the court of public opinion can be strong. But it would be a mistake to do so before exhausting your full range of dispute-resolution options. In many cases, a good mediator should be able to help you and your counterpart overcome your entrenched positions, see each other’s point of view more clearly, and come to agreement.

What if your counterpart still refuses to cooperate? Taking your dispute public may start to seem like your best option, but be aware that doing so could escalate the dispute in unforeseen ways. Your partner might retaliate by making embarrassing public accusations against you or suing you, for example.

If going public still seems like the best option, you can take steps to increase the odds that the public phase of your dispute will be a short one. First, warn the other side of your intentions, as the mere threat of a public backlash could motivate her to back down.

Second, organize your campaign, and be prepared to clearly explain your principles and goals to the public. Market Basket workers (perhaps supported by Arthur T. and his allies) relied on both traditional media and social media to foment their customers’ moral outrage—and it worked. Authors United, by contrast, has been less effective at generating widespread public condemnation of Amazon’s tactics.

Third, if negotiations continue or resume, try to keep them private, lest you further escalate the dispute, and keep striving to meet the other party’s interests behind closed doors. Finally, if you do reach a settlement, attempt to put the incident behind you as quickly as possible by making a joint statement that emphasizes your shared intention to move forward.

Anger can carry an advantage in negotiation, past research has shown. When we display anger, our counterparts tend to view us as powerful and intimidating. Consequently, they make more concessions than they would ordinarily and lower their demands.

On the flip side, negotiators who appear happy tend to do worse than others. Happiness and contentedness appear to signal satisfaction with how a negotiation is going; as a result, counterparts tend to demand more of happy negotiators.

In two recent experiments reported in the Negotiation Journal, researchers Han-Ying Tng of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore and Al K. C. Au of the National University of Singapore tested whether these results hold when negotiators are faking their emotions. In one of the experiments, undergraduate students in Singapore were told they would be engaging in a negotiation simulation with another student via instant messaging. In fact, an experimenter posed as the negotiating partner. Before negotiating, participants were given information about their counterpart’s personality that described him or her as (1) sincere and frank about his or her emotions; (2) insincere and manipulative; or (3) unpredictable in engaging with others.

During the online negotiation that followed, participants took turns exchanging offers with their counterparts, and they also received information about the other parties’ emotions, namely whether they were angry or happy with how the negotiation was going. The results showed that when negotiators perceived their counterparts’ emotional displays to be authentic, they conceded more to angry counterparts than to happy ones. But when negotiators believed their counterparts’ feelings were not authentic, they made fewer concessions to counterparts who were acting angry than to those acting happy. Negotiators made similar levels of concessions to those whose expressions of anger or happiness were ambiguous.

Using anger as a strategic tool can backfire in negotiation, this study suggests. We might conclude that false displays of happiness, by contrast, can be beneficial. However, because it’s difficult to control whether your counterpart will view your emotional displays as authentic or not, this strategy could backfire as well. The lesson, then, may be to resist the urge to try to convey emotions you don’t feel, lest your performance be unconvincing.

Source: “Strategic Display of Anger and Happiness in Negotiation: The Moderating Role of Perceived Authenticity,” by Han-Ying Tng and Al K. C. Au. Negotiation Journal, July 2014.

In the National Basketball Association (NBA), signing an endorsement deal with footwear giant Nike has become a rite of passage for newly anointed superstars. Save for a few notable deals by Adidas, Nike has dominated the practice of paying top talent millions for the right to sell lines of collectible shoes in their names.

This past August, sportswear and footwear supplier Under Armour made a bold play to change that. Basketball star Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder was reaching the end of his seven-year, $60 million endorsement deal with Nike, and Under Armour, which only entered the footwear market in 2006, was looking to make a big splash. Durant is a well-liked player who became the NBA’s Most Valuable Player after averaging 24 points per game in the 2013–2014 season.

In a detailed presentation at its Baltimore headquarters, Under Armour offered to pay Durant $265 million to $285 million for a 10-year sponsorship deal that included promises of company stock and the construction of a community center named for his mother. The offer represented almost 10% of Under Armour’s total marketing budget, according to Kyle Stock of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Rapper Jay-Z’s sports agency, Roc Nation Sports, which represents Durant, reportedly gave Nike less than a week to match the offer or walk away, according to the terms of Nike’s contract with Durant. Calculating that it couldn’t afford to lose Durant to an upstart competitor, Nike agreed to match—despite the fact that it could be looking at a money-losing deal.

Consider this analysis from Stock: Nike pocketed about $112 million from the sale of its “KD” line (Durant-branded gear) in 2013. The company is said to spend 11% of its sales on “demand creation,” which includes advertising expenditures and payments to athletes. To keep Durant’s average annual payments of $27.5 million per year at 11% of sales of its KD line, Nike will have to book about $250 million in KD revenue annually—roughly double the line’s current sales.

In its negotiation with Durant, Nike was faced with a question that haunts buyers in competitive markets: Should you compete for a scarce commodity and risk overpaying in a bidding war or stay out of the race and risk being left behind?

In fact, buyers are rarely limited to such either-or choices. Here are five other options you might exercise to gain an edge—and avoid a bidding war.

1. Get a jump on the competition.
Nike appeared to have been caught off guard by Under Armour’s attempt to lure away Kevin Durant. It certainly was surprised—and probably dismayed—by the size of its competitor’s offer.

As the buyer in a business relationship, your power is likely to decrease as the number of competitors rises. Therefore, your primary goal should be to keep negotiations one on one.

You can take several steps to reduce the need to bid against one or more competitors for a contract you hold. First, solidify the relationship by demonstrating your commitment and excellence throughout the life of the deal. Second, begin the renegotiation process well before the contract’s end date. Third, emphasize the unique assets, beyond price, that you bring to the relationship. With any luck, you’ll wrap up a new deal before your competitor has a chance to put forth an enticing offer.

2. Don’t undervalue yourself.
What if your client is proactive about shopping for a better deal, as Durant and his management team were? Imagine, for example, that a longtime customer informs you that it is putting your soon-to-expire contract up for bid in an online auction that will be awarded based on price alone.

In such cases, don’t assume you have to accept your customer’s new process terms, advises Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian in his book Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions (W. W. Norton, 2011).

You might schedule a meeting with your customer and inform her that your company won’t be participating in the auction. Explain that you predict the winner of the auction will have to sacrifice quality to deliver on price. Then open up a conversation about ways you might improve the existing contract for both sides.

As Subramanian notes, your participation in a negotiation has value. Rather than giving that value away, negotiate concessions in exchange for staying in the game.

3. Consider a coalition.
Sometimes in negotiation, you can avoid a bidding war by finding ways to partner with your competition. Of course, antitrust laws bar you from forming alliances that could harm consumers, as Apple learned the hard way when it was found guilty of colluding with five major book publishers to set prices for e-books.

Yet there are perfectly legal ways to head off certain types of competition. In recent years, for example, individual ranchers and farmers have formed “wind associations” that allow them to negotiate leasing rights to their land with wind developers as a group. Rather than competing with one another for deals with single developers, the landowners market their group property rights to numerous companies, sometimes triggering their own bidding wars in the process. Similarly, companies can team up to offer a higher-value package to a prospective client, as in the case of two consulting firms bundling their services.

The lesson: Don’t assume you and your competitors have to be at odds. Consider whether there are legal and ethical ways for you to collaborate rather than outbid one another.

4. Negotiate matching rights with care.
Granting a buyer the right to match or improve upon another bidder’s offer within a set period of time can be a win-win move for both buyer and seller, according to Subramanian. Such so-called matching rights, or rights of first refusal, give buyers the opportunity to stay in the game and sellers a chance to explore their options. Once used exclusively in large mergers and acquisitions, matching rights are now incorporated into all types of deals across industries.

Because matching rights are often imprecisely worded in contracts, however, they can create new problems. It may be unclear, for example, if a buyer will end the contest when it matches a third party’s bid or if the match will trigger a bidding war.

Similarly, matching rights may limit, or appear to limit, the competition to a single issue: price. This fact can constrain buyers from competing on other issues and sellers from shopping for the best all-around deal.

Finally, when adding matching rights to their contracts, buyers often overlook the importance of having ample time to decide whether to match a competitor’s offer. Sellers and other prospective buyers may take advantage of this fact by making exploding offers with short fuses, notes Subramanian. Roc Nation Sports appears to have used this tactic in its negotiations with Nike on Durant’s behalf.

For all these reasons, don’t blindly accept your lawyer’s boilerplate language on matching rights the next time you sign a contract. Instead, negotiate for terms that will lessen your odds of overbidding if a contest arises down the road.

5. Guard against competitive arousal.
In negotiation, no matter how well we prepare, the desire to “beat” another party may lead us to make irrational decisions that go against our best interests, such as bidding well beyond an item’s value in order to defeat a rival bidder in an auction. This type of competitive arousal is a natural human response that is likely rooted in our fight-or-flight instinct and therefore difficult to overcome, according to Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra.

Fortunately, two safeguards can help us stay focused on what really matters. First, because we are most susceptible to competitive arousal when we’re under time pressure, do what you can to slow down the clock. That means pushing back when a client or competitor tries to get you to make quick decisions about whether to bid higher.

Second, because negotiators feel pressured and become more competitive when they’re performing in front of an audience, work to keep your negotiations private. That might mean negotiating one-on-one rather than as part of a team, asking your boss to stay out of the room, or making a “no leaks” pact with other parties to keep observers, such as the media, from tracking your progress. (For more on the risks of taking public disputes private, see the article on page 7.)

In sum, when you’re considering making a significant purchase for yourself or your organization, don’t assume you have less power than the seller just because she has something you want. With advance planning and careful strategy, you can take steps to reduce your competition and increase your odds of walking away with a fairly priced prize.

When you enter a job negotiation, what goals are foremost on your mind? If you’re like most people, you are primarily preoccupied with making a great impression and winning the job. Acing the interviews can seem like the only thing that matters, especially if you’ve been out of work or desperate to escape a miserable job.

But consider the results of a 2013 Gallup survey of 230,000 employees in 142 countries, which found that only 13% of respondents felt engaged by their jobs. This statistic suggests that many people are capable of getting a job, but not necessarily one that they will find enjoyable and fulfilling in the long run.

To negotiate for employment that we find more than just tolerable, we must overcome three common traps: (1) mispredicting what we will truly value in life; (2) holding ourselves back in job negotiations; and (3) failing to recognize our relative bargaining position.

1. We overlook what we truly value.
Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman notes that during recruiting season on the school’s campus each spring, he overhears lots of discussions in the student center about interviews and job offers. Students might share information about starting salaries, the name of the firm, the city where the job is located, their work responsibilities, the amount of travel involved, and so on.

What type of information do you think is most likely to travel through the MBA grapevine? According to Bazerman, data that conveys the most prestige, such as a high salary or an offer from a top consulting firm, will probably get the most attention. The impressed reactions of one’s peers to a job’s high-status attributes will enhance its appeal to the job candidate.

Meanwhile, less flashy characteristics of the job, such as the freedom to pursue one’s interests or the length of one’s commute, may recede into the background.

Because of their close focus on status, according to Bazerman, many Harvard MBA students end up accepting high-paying jobs with prestigious firms—only to quit soon after and take jobs that are more rewarding on levels that ultimately matter more to them, such as a shorter commute or more interesting responsibilities.

It’s not just newly minted MBAs who fall prey to the so-called vividness bias, or the tendency to focus too closely on vivid information and overlook dull but equally valuable information. As Bazerman writes in his book The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (Simon & Schuster, 2014), we are all susceptible to overlooking key information that would improve our satisfaction with the outcome of our negotiations.

How can you get a better sense of what you value? By creating a scoring system. A scoring system allows you to weigh different issues, determine how much you value each one, and compare them more accurately. A good scoring system is complete (it identifies all the important issues), measurable (it provides a common metric for comparing qualitatively different issues), and useful (it offers a shorthand for understanding what’s at stake and what you value), according to Professor Don A. Moore of the University of California at Berkeley.

To develop your scoring system, begin by listing each issue relevant to a given job offer on a spreadsheet, such as salary, health insurance, location, and so on. You can add issues to your scoring system as talks unfold. Next, list the possible options within each issue, such as two, three, and four weeks of vacation. Finally, establish a point system that can help you determine how much you value various issues. For example, you might assign 50 points to two weeks of vacation, 75 to three weeks, and 100 to four weeks. If you receive multiple job offers, follow this process for each one, then add up the points and think about whether the outcome reflects your true desires.

Avoid sharing details about your job prospects with others until after you have used a scoring system to determine what matters most to you, Bazerman advises. When you do get feedback from someone, consider whether the reaction tells you anything new. If not, you can feel satisfied with your decision.

2. We get in our own way.
We also have a somewhat self-destructive tendency to hold ourselves back in job negotiations. Consider the recent salary negotiations of Ira Glass, the creator and host of the long-running public-radio show This American Life. In 2013, the board of WBEZ, the show’s producer, raised Glass’s salary from $170,000 to $278,000 to reward his achievements. Glass felt “weird” about the big bump in pay, he told Cara Buckley of the New York Times—so weird that he asked the board to lower his salary to $146,000 (less than the starting point of the negotiation), and later asked them to lower it again. Though Glass says he still earns “a lot of money,” he has been booking speaking engagements around the edges of his 60- to 70-hour workweek to help cover his and his wife’s living expenses in New York City. Why would Glass negotiate his salary down rather than up? He apparently felt self-conscious about earning a high salary from a not-for-profit organization funded by grants and listener donations.

Negotiation is difficult enough without creating extra roadblocks for ourselves. But as this anecdote suggests, that’s exactly what many of us do. This tendency can be particularly strong in hiring negotiations, where we often feel vulnerable and insecure about our worth.

To negotiate more effectively, we have to recognize how we “get in our own way,” write Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and Jessica L. Porter in their new book Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins Into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015). Pitfalls include failing to recognize opportunities to negotiate, focusing on our own weaknesses, and making the first concessions in our own heads, before we have even given other parties a chance to voice their positions. That’s what Glass did: He bargained with himself without giving WBEZ a voice.

Bargaining ourselves down starts with self-doubt about our value to the hiring organization. Before a job negotiation begins, we consider what we want, what we think we can get, and whether we’re willing to fight for it. We think that the employer has all the cards—that they are in the driver’s seat and our only choices are to acquiesce or reject an offer outright. These internal dialogues are where the first concessions in the negotiation are made, write Kolb and Porter. We might decide that we won’t ask for plum assignments for fear of seeming pushy. Or we might decide in advance not to negotiate salary because we want to negotiate hard on another issue, rather than looking for ways to negotiate about multiple issues that are important to us.

When we fail to recognize our own value, we are vulnerable to accepting less than we’re entitled to and even to giving back what the organization believes we deserve, as Glass did. It’s important to be fair to your employer, but you also need to be fair to yourself.

In addition, our beliefs about what will satisfy someone are not necessarily correct. Glass’s employer, for example, might have preferred that he accept a raise that would enable him to focus fully on his work without the need to overtax himself with side jobs.

Kolb and Porter suggest ways that you can position yourself to be a more effective self-advocate. Begin by gathering information so that you will feel that what you are asking for is defensible. Prepare to explain the value you would bring to the organization. Develop alternatives to the current negotiation to increase your flexibility at the table, and remember that the other party’s alternatives may be less attractive than yours. In addition, examine your vulnerabilities and plan ahead to compensate for them. For example, if you are insecure about a gap in your work history, think about the important things you were doing during that time and prepare to share them with enthusiasm.

3. We fail to recognize our relative bargaining power.
Job seekers, and women in particular, recently have been so inundated with the message that they fail to negotiate forcefully for themselves that they face the risk of overcompensating. Take the now-infamous story, related on the blog Philosophy Smoker earlier this year, of an anonymous academic who said she had received an offer for a tenure-track position as a philosophy professor from a small liberal-arts college after a round of interviews. The woman responded to the offer by e-mail, sending a list of numerous requests—for a salary increase, a semester of maternity leave, a pre-tenure sabbatical, and so on. Rather than continuing the negotiation, the college revoked the job offer, saying it appeared the candidate was looking to work for a research university rather than a teaching-focused college.

The woman was dismayed and confused by her negotiation failure. But her principal mistake was an obvious one: She failed to recognize the strength of her bargaining position relative to that of the college, says Kolb. In the job market for philosophy professors, a hiring college is clearly in the better bargaining position. It likely has received applications from hundreds of qualified candidates. Meanwhile, the average job candidate might be lucky to get even one interview. Consequently, a job candidate who presents a list of requests or demands is giving the hiring college a good reason to end the negotiation and turn to other candidates.

The philosophy candidate’s list was also risky because it had a common theme—requests for time off from teaching—
that may have given the impression she wouldn’t be a hardworking teacher. Negotiating via e-mail is also usually a mistake in such situations, as it tends to be less collaborative.

Savvy job seekers remember to treat the negotiation as the beginning of a long-term relationship. You can get that relationship off on the right foot by looking for opportunities to give the employer what it wants even as you seek to get what you want.
Begin by using your network to gather information, advises Kolb. The philosophy job candidate, for example, could have consulted with her fellow graduate students or an online group about how much leeway she might have in negotiating her job offer. Then, rather than e-mailing a list of requests, she should have called her contact at the college (or, if possible, met in person) and started asking questions, advises Kolb. For example, she might have asked about the college’s early-career sabbatical policy. What criteria do they use to award it? Then she could have looked for ways to make an early sabbatical palatable to the college, again by asking questions. She could have asked if she could teach extra courses before taking the leave, for example, or give undergraduate students opportunities to get involved with her research while on sabbatical.

Prioritizing is key, as well. Referring back to your scoring system, think about the issues that matter most to you. Focus on two or three of them during your negotiations rather than overwhelming the other side with a list of demands. Less important issues can wait until after you’ve been on the job for a while and proven your value to the organization.