- Before the Negotiation
- Set your own outcome.
- Be clear on both your top and bottom line for agreement.
- Set your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement), in other words what you will do if you cannot agree.
- Set the evidence for your outcome.
- Prepare a resourceful state.
- During the Negotiation
- Maintain a resourceful state.
- Use anchors and maintain a resourceful physiology.
- Establish and maintain rapport.
- Use different perceptual positions.
- Be clear about your first position. Use second position to gain understanding and third position to track the relationship and course of the negotiation.
- Ask questions and seek understanding.
- Chunk up to an area of common agreement at as high a level as necessary.
- This is the key skill in negotiation. You chunk up from the specifics of the disagreement to something you can both agree on.
- Chunk down from the common agreement to specific issues.
- Seek congruent agreement.
- After the Negotiation
- Establish an evidence procedure independent of the parties involved.
- How will you know that the agreement is effective? You may need an independent third party representing a third person or "honest broker" to check that the agreement is working.
- Future pace the agreement.
- Mentally rehearse the agreement you have reached. Imagine how it is going to work out. Think of all the things that might go wrong and how you could deal with them under the agreement.
- Negotiation Skills
- Set a clear outcome frame.
- If possible, choose the layout of the room and where people sit. They should sit at an angle rather than directly opposite.
- Aim to frame the negotiation as a shared problem. Anchor it in front of both parties. This will give a sense of "facing" a shared problem.
- Be clear about what is relevent.
- Use backtracking to summarize progress, to maintain rapport and test agreement.
- Backtracking is the skill of restating key points using the other person's own words and often matching their voice tone and body language. It paces the other person and is and extremely useful skill in negotiation for summarizing, building rapport, providing tangible evidence that you are listening, and working towards an agreement.
- Use the conditional close to explore possibilities: "If such and such were to happen, then what would we do?"
- Open possibilites by asking: "What would have to happen for such and such to be possible?"
- Do not make a counter proposal immediately after the other person has made a proposal. This is when they are least interested in what you have to offer. Discuss their proposal first.
- Use questions rather than statements. It is better for the other person to discover the weakness of their position for themselves through your questions than for you to try to convince them directly.
- Explicitly signal your questions and comments to focus attention on that detail: "May I ask you a question about that?" or "I would like to raise this point."
- Give one strong reason for your position rather than many weak reasons.
- Play Devil's advocate to test for congruent agreement: "I'm not really sure we agree on this..."
