Jack Suess is Vice President of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
Negotiation. For some people, the very thought of this causes their pulse to quicken and their stomach to gurgle. For me, the connotation that first comes to mind is purchasing a car—that horrible process where you and a car salesperson haggle over price. While this blog post won’t focus on purchasing a car, I will discuss why negotiation is one of those important “soft” skills that everyone should learn, and I will go over some approaches that will help you become more comfortable with this important skill.
Why is learning to negotiate so critical? First, as an IT leader, you are constantly being asked to do the near-impossible: meet project deliverables, on tight deadlines. Second, building and keeping a high-performance team often requires regular negotiation with team members around their personal and professional development. Lastly, managing your own work-life balance with your partner and family is key to both your professional and your personal success. Deciding whether you or your partner should take that job in another city is often a negotiation. Learning how to negotiate successfully will help you in all of these varied endeavors.
Like many others in the IT field, I had negotiated with vendors, but I didn’t really consider the importance of negotiation skills until twenty years ago when I had the opportunity to attend a very unique training session put on by the university as part of leadership development. The session was run by Ron Shapiro, who is well known in Baltimore as one of the most prolific sports agents in town, having represented Hall of Fame baseball stars such as Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken. However, as a lawyer, he also was involved in complex business negotiations and was heavily involved in regional politics. Even though most of us won’t negotiate multi-million-dollar salaries, CEO transitions, or the fate of candidates interested in political office, almost every week we will be negotiating something. It is important to learn how to do this well.
As part of negotiation training, we received a copy of a book Shapiro had written: The Power of Nice: How to Negotiate So Everyone Wins—Especially You! For the rest of this blog post, I’ll draw from the lessons I took from this book and the strategies I still use today.
What I like about Shapiro’s approach is that in many ways he boils negotiation down to an algorithm, which for an IT person is always a good starting point! Shapiro’s high-level strategy is Prepare, Probe, and Propose. In addition to his methodology, he emphasized that we should always be looking for what he called Win-Win opportunities. Even if you have the upper hand and can drive a harder bargain, he highlighted why this approach is not usually in your long-term interest. A Win-Win opportunity is one in which both parties find common ground and walk away from the negotiation feeling that they achieved a fair deal. Often a Win-Win opportunity results in a stronger partnership and a commitment to mutual success. Lastly, Shapiro emphasized that successful negotiation requires what we now call emotional intelligence—a high degree of self-awareness, listening ability, empathy, and self-control.
Prepare. This is the core of Shapiro’s approach. It starts with doing your research and gathering as much information on the subject as you can. Preparation allows you to build confidence in yourself and your reasoning. As you get a detailed understanding of the subject, you should define the minimal endpoint for success, below which you have to be prepared to walk away from the negotiation. The second part of preparing is thinking through the negotiation as if you were on the other side: what information do you think they have, what do you think their objectives will be, and how do their objectives relate to your objectives? This is a critical part of the process because it allows you to understand how you might think differently in the negotiation and find scenarios that might be Win-Win. The preparation phase is the one phase of the negotiation that you control. If a negotiation is important, you must allocate the time and energy to prepare. In the car-purchasing scenario, researching the dealer’s invoice price and the demand for the model, as well as knowing the top price you are willing to pay before walking away, allows you to go into a negotiation with confidence.
Probe. Before you propose an offer, you should be comfortable talking with and asking questions of the person with whom you are negotiating. Most negotiations don’t start as formal negotiations and are not adversarial; however, since we think of them as win-lose opportunities, we sometimes think of the other person as our opponent when in fact he/she is just another person with a job to do. Talking to the other party and asking direct questions about what that person wants to get out of the negotiations can be critical in assessing whether you prepared your strategy properly. Shapiro highlighted that most of his breakthroughs in tough negotiations come from asking questions and listening to the response from the other party. Often, these questions opened up additional discussion areas that allowed the negotiation to reach a win-win scenario.
Propose. This phase is what we often think of as negotiation: the act of discussing a proposal and reaching a successful conclusion. The general consensus is that you don't want to put your best proposal on the table as a starting position. If you do need to put a proposal on the table, you should structure it to give room for the other side to "negotiate" better terms. The reasoning for this is that psychologically the other party wants to counteroffer, so you need to give them an opportunity to do so. When you are responding to this first offer, listen carefully and see if the offer contains the elements that you thought would be part of the negotiation. If there are points under consideration that you didn’t anticipate, give yourself some time to process this information before responding. The offer, even though one-sided, may allow you to identify elements that are less important to you; then you can focus on getting leeway on those elements that are most important to you.
In some situations, you will need to be the first to put an offer on the table. In these situations, use the probe method to ask questions and understand the motivations of the other party before you make a proposal I recommend that as you prepare for the negotiation, you put as many elements into play as makes sense. This allows you to expand the opportunities for give-and-take while focusing on what is most important to you.
One of the key negotiating lessons that Shapiro emphasizes is that sometimes, the best deal is no deal. Shapiro notes that by preparing ahead of time with what is your minimum acceptable deal, you will not get caught up in the heat of a negotiation and settle for something you might be unhappy with later on. Often, when you mentally process the discussion that took place in an unsuccessful negotiation, you will find new elements that will allow you to reach a successful conclusion the next time.
Finally, all of these phases rely on a strong foundation of emotional intelligence skills. For those of you who want a quick introduction to the topic of emotional intelligence, see “What Is Emotional Intelligence?” For a deeper review, I encourage you to read Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. In a nutshell, emotional intelligence focuses on perceiving, reasoning, understanding, and managing our emotions. In a negotiation, harnessing these emotions is essential to success, and these are skills that can be improved with practice.
As you go forward, think about your next discussion with a family member, or a coworker, or a vendor about something over you don’t have final and complete authority—in other words, something you must negotiate—and apply the lessons discussed here. Please share your results!