What are the most important negotiation skills?

Interviewer: So what is the most important negotiation skills to master?

Certainly listening. And I would say that being clear about what your position is, is also important and trying to pair away some of the emotional baggage that goes with it. So really preparing yourself to put forward your position. That doesn't mean you can't express the emotion around it. To misunderstand negotiations, to think that emotion is left at the door, it influences us, it makes us the people we are, and we have a rational part of our brain, and we have an emotional part of our brain.

And the neuroscience specialists will tell you that both have to be engaged. And sometimes, ultimately as the flow of the negotiation works its way through, it's the rational brain that makes the decisions, or at least you hope it is. But you've got to respect and understand you have an emotional part to it too. So you'll hear people say I'm so angry, I can't think straight at the moment. Now, if that is the case, then a good negotiator has to be able to allow that person to express that anger, to get rid of it and get beyond it, to allow a negotiation to happen.

So that's a really key skill. And speaking really slowly, and not so slowly that you patronise, but just making sure people can really understand where you're coming from, 'cause that's your purpose in the negotiation, is to try to persuade people that your position is really heartfelt and valid, and the other side need to listen to that, respect it, and then put their view across as well. And you're in persuasion mode. You're trying to persuade people that actually there's merit in what you're saying.

Manipulation's a horrible word because it's got negative connotations, but actually good negotiators are manipulators. They're trying to persuade someone to come towards their point of view in a negotiation, in a compromised position. What you want to try to achieve is as much as possible of your position being incorporated into a settlement.

Interviewer: What are the ingredients of a successful negotiation?

Hmm, difficult question. I think probably the most important ingredient is preparation and that's, obviously the parties have got to prepare. And if you have a, a third party neutral, then that neutral has got to prepare too. And it's very easy to say that, but the level of preparedness that's required to do it really well involves great attention to detail and discussion around how people are going to move and how people are going to react to that move. What are they going to bring to the mediation in terms of their attitude and their behaviour and strangely, people don't actually think about the, in my experience, the impact that their behaviour is going to have on the other party.

I mean, they, they probably do at one level but they don't appreciate quite how important it is to get the wording, the tone right. Because if they get it wrong, it can just get such a strong reaction from the other party. They stop listening. And as soon as they stop listening, then trying to get a result is going to be doubly difficult.

Interviewer: What steps would you take to prepare for a negotiation?

Ah good question. So the obvious and easy answer is you need to work out your WATNA and your BATNA and your ZOPA and all of those good things. And for sure, it's incredibly valuable to do it. However, in my experience, in most situations, people have to go beyond that BATNA and that's when you get to an impasse, they prepared, they prepared what their worst cases they see it, but actually they get to that and they haven't got a deal. So they then have to quickly reassess the situation.

And this is the bit that really good negotiators are able to do. They're able to see beyond that before they get into the negotiation. Now, that doesn't mean they will have worked out what the answer is but they will know what the constituent parts are and they will know who they will have to influence. Very frequently there will be somebody not at the negotiation table, negotiation table who is going to have to be involved in the decision to go beyond the BATNA.

And the good negotiator will have worked on that person beforehand and know how to move them to get the authority to conclude the deal. You don't see it happen very often but a really good negotiator like Kissinger will have worked on that and got that in place before they go to the table.

Interviewer: What are the ingredients of a successful negotiation?

Some will say there are many, I think it really reduces to some core commonalities. One is that you have the right people in the room. They are able to make decisions to be able to share information and to receive it and to be able to comment on them. I think those are really critical. I think to have the right issues tabled, to know that there won't be any surprise eggs somewhere along the negotiations that's going to derail the whole process. You expect things to come out and surprise you, but if it's a main area that will make that negotiation not happen or any success implausible, you want to try to avoid that at all costs.

And I think a lot of preparation can help avoid some of that. And then there's having, I think, the ability to communicate issues freely and not feel as if you have a front. Political negotiations can see this in various ways, which could be detrimental. No one wants to appear weak, or I guess unable to come through with whatever solution that's come to. So there is a lot of boasting and over promising. And I think with negotiation, it's really critical that you get to a point where people can actually discuss things in an open way, maybe not letting all their cards because that wouldn't happen if there was a need for negotiation.

But I think when it comes to having the conversation and things that matter, it's quite critical. So there are other elements of a negotiation process which make it successful, including buy-in from stakeholders. If you're coming in representing an organisation or a family or a group of some kind, you want to make sure that you have the authority to speak and that the people who are outside the room will agree to the same things that you are saying. You don't want to make sure there's a mismatch of that because if there is, it's not going to end well.

So when the negotiation ends, that person who was in the room has to really be a champion for what they agreed. Politically, we see this when people say "We did really get what we wanted out of this." You can see the spins whether or not they got exactly what they came in there with versus what they came out of. You see this very clearly in American politics, but I think you can see in a lot of ways that have various parties that think differently about issues.

One example that talks about all these things, it's in a mediation, popularised with the Joe Folger and Baruch Bush book, "The Promise of Mediation". The second edition has an example from a mock-up mediation, where someone is mediating with two parties. Those two parties are role-playing, but it's a real conflict and it's in real time so they haven't practised the mediation per se. And there are two parties and there are two people coming from one family and has one person who's representing a housing association.

And it's called the Purple House Tape because the house that the mother and daughter live in was coloured what the housing association called as purple, which was against the housing association codes, whereas the family themselves, they know this is actually mauve and your interpretation of this is showing your misunderstanding of what an appropriate colour palette is. And so as the conversation goes, you can see that there is some dismissiveness and contempt and there's certainly something else going on. And it gets to a point where the mediator says, "Is this productive?" He's already been summarising and paraphrasing as they go on.

And the woman who owns the house says, "You know when we-" she pauses and this is an emotional moment for her. And she says, "When we moved in, "we didn't get any welcome basket, but everyone else did. "I'm not invited to be a part of the housing association. "You've never reached out to me at all until now "Is that because we're the only black family on the block?" And that's a bit of a bombshell, but she was speaking her truth at that moment.

And all of these events within the conflict may have seemed very minor at the time, but they're small ways to pick at someone and their existence. And for this woman, this was something that she saw repeated over and over again, her entire life. And now someone's going to call her out on something so minor and it was over something that she saw as the housing association really not having representation, to be able to show that the colour palette that was acceptable for the folks on the housing association only seemed to come for them when the house was coloured this colour, but there were other houses coloured different shades.

It was somebody who had green and somebody else who had various elements to their house that maybe weren't to this woman's taste and certainly not within the remit of beige and browns. So this was met initially by the other party with a "No, I have a relation to my family who's black. "I'm not a racist." But the other party just said, "Look, I've had these conversations my whole life. "We're not going to resolve it here. "So, I'm done with it." But her daughter offers to work with the housing association and comes with a sense of optimism and perhaps a lack of history of having to do this her entire life and says, "Look, I'm happy to work with you on this "and figure out a proposal to the housing association "so that we can talk about this "and why certain people are called out and others aren't, "and what the similarities might be within those." And so this kind of captures a few of those elements.

You had the parties affected, the woman from the housing association was allowed to represent them in their interests, she knows all about the codes that have to be adhered to. And they talk about, ultimately, what the real issues are. Certainly it is felt by one of the parties who said, "This is just another example "of how racism affects our daily lives." But then they are able to work with each other and to work on stakeholder buy-in. And as a result, become champions of that new process.

And it's imperfect, and there still could be a lot of things that go wrong, but it's one example of how we might address things that are really big, but as a lived experience of someone. So you're not resolving racism in this context, but you are resolving that lived experience and how it shows itself within a microcosm of daily life.

Interviewer: People have different communication styles. And you're unlikely, maybe, to know what sort of communication style your opposite number is going to have before a negotiation. So what can you do to manage that uncertainty?

Yes, it's difficult, isn't it? Because we all want to find people who are like us. Life is so much easier when you're talking to someone where you want to say, "Yes, you're right, you're right." And when you meet someone who is a blank piece of paper, who doesn't give their emotions over, for me as someone who is very expressive, it's really quite frustrating. So you're not matching with them and it's difficult. So sometimes you have to almost bring in a little bit of your personality so that you don't clash with the person with whom you're speaking.

So if you're talking to a shy person, shouting and being loud and expressive, it's a bit threatening for them. So reflecting the person you're speaking to is a very helpful tactic to enable you to get onto their wavelength. No one's right and no one's wrong. It's just the way we are, it's the way our personalities are. And if you want to achieve a good objective and a good outcome from a negotiation, you need to, the moment you speak with someone and you can see that the first five minutes of impact is assessing, what do they like, how are they dressed, are they conservative in the way they are or are they big loud characters who will not mind you being expressive?

Recognising who it is you are dealing with is super important to do very quickly and to be slightly chameleonesque so that you can change the way that you might present something to get the best outcome.