Blog: The Negotiation Edge

Job hopping can be a slog, but it’s also one of the most effective ways to move up and earn more. The average person will change jobs around 12 times in a 30-year span, or once every 2.5 years. And the pressure to keep moving is real—a study done in 2014 showed that those who stuck out a job beyond two years ended up earning a whopping 50 percent less over the course of their lifetime than their job-hopping counterparts.

There’s a difference between negotiating at the same time and negotiating as a team. If you’re laser-focused on getting your turn to speak and nailing your part in a negotiation, you’re leaving money on the table. In fact, if you’re consumed with your next move, you’re  setting yourself to fall short. Below, we’ve laid out four tips for improving your team’s communication and effectiveness in a negotiation.

If you’ve ever taken a negotiation course or read a book on negotiation, you’ve likely learned some techniques for effective communication. But unfortunately, negotiation is not like riding a bike. Much like a foreign language, unless you regularly practice the techniques, those valuable skills you learned will begin to decline over time.

Whether you are working out a high-stakes business deal, negotiating with a vendor, or simply discussing with coworkers what to order for lunch, bargaining isn’t likely to get you what you want. Here’s why seasoned negotiators don’t bargain—and why you shouldn’t either if you want to get ahead.

When you go into a negotiation that has a high probability of being combative, these are the strategies for overcoming those points of contention. In fact, most of the approach stems from ignoring your natural inclinations to right the wrongs, explain the why, and promise to make sure the other side won’t have to experience the irritation ever again.

Okay, so you’ve reached out to a vendor, communicated what you’re looking for, and requested a service-level agreement (SLA), timeline, and price quote. In an ideal world, the proposal you receive would match your desired budget, goals, and expectations. But that’s often not the case.

One definition of negotiation that can be found in a dictionary is "a focused comparison of ideas/results," which to me is a sophisticated way of saying an argument over issues.

When responding to any counter-proposal, you need to make sure you don’t let yourself get sucked into the sequential move game. In a sequential move game with “evenly” matched players, as a second mover, you can only tie or lose. Are you interested in a more complicated game of tick tack toe?

Before you go into any negotiation you probably address some form of the below:

• Time spent planning
• Purpose of interaction
• How do we move the negotiations forward?

Now ask yourself, how much of that is self-centered?

If you knew what the people on the opposite side of the table thought you’d surely get everything you wanted. Unfortunately, you don’t have a crystal ball or a time machine and haven’t fully developed your psychic abilities just yet. Hence the reason for a communication process and varying amounts of preparation based on circumstance and of course time.