The power to persuade is useful in plenty of situations. Sales presentations, supplier transactions, team meetings… just to name a few. And there’s one context in which your persuasive power can have an especially large impact for you personally: your next salary negotiation. The good news is that the ability to influence others isn’t inborn. […]
A few months ago I wrote a post about how we are hardwired to be right. In a negotiation, this can lead us to become positional and prevent us from seeing value creating options which would alleviate our problems. It turns out that there’s another problem with needing to be right – it reduces our […]
Wouldn’t it be great if we could improve the way someone is feeling toward us before a negotiation, without them even knowing that we’re doing anything? It turns out that there is something we can do, and it could be as simple as offering a cup of tea. It may sound like an old fashioned way of solving […]
If you’ve ever come across someone who cannot seem to give up on an argument without being ‘right’, there’s a reason for that. And, in fact, the chances are that you may have done this yourself, even if it wasn’t intentional. Being right may be great, but if we are too focussed on being right, […]
How do you know whether you’ve won a negotiation? When we ask our clients what a successful negotiation looks like, they frequently refer to the goal of achieving a ‘win-win’ outcome. But, in reality, we still see a significant number of people approaching negotiation with a ‘win-lose’ mentality. Where does this pressure to win come from? […]
I recently attended a professional development session on workplace conflict. One of the presenters – let’s call him Mark – delivered a 15-minute presentation about his experiences as a junior union representative of a major union. During this presentation, Mark referred on several occasions to the concept of “win-win” negotiations. And when he did so, […]
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day (8 March 2016) is “Pledge for Parity”. Gender parity is a hot topic in organisations across the world. It is no longer simply a matter of ‘equality of the sexes’. It is increasingly evident that the participation of women in the workforce is an economic issue, with a recent McKinsey report suggesting that […]
Now, I’m a bit of a chocolate lover, so when I saw an article in the Financial Review recently with the words Tim Tam in the headline, I knew I had to read it. It turns out that this article lead me down a very interesting line of investigation into the use of power in […]
“Fair prices and minimal drama”: these were the words that caught my attention when I read The Age’s recent article on how a Harvard-based negotiation strategy helped the Geelong and Adelaide Football Clubs negotiate a complex player exchange. Senior executives from both clubs had recently completed short programs on negotiation at Harvard University and were sufficiently inspired that they put the theory into […]
Do you find yourself regularly dealing with minor day to day frustrations? Or perhaps you have people bringing you endless small problems to solve. These things certainly seem to crop up a lot for me. And although I no longer work regularly on major negotiations, I certainly still get a lot of negotiation practice. As I […]