In all the speaking and writing I do about negotiation, power comes up more frequently than any other topic. People constantly ask about the role it plays in negotiations, and wonder what they can do about it. People think too much about power in negotiations, and tend to ask unhelpful questions like, 「What will I do if I think that I don't have power?」 Or, 「Who has more power?」 Asking who's more powerful is not useful, since it often leads to a discussion that disempowers you. If you view yourself as more powerful, you may become arrogant and fail to prepare adequately, or you may seek to force others to do your bidding. But if you think of yourself as less powerful, you may feel that you cannot win and so fail to prepare or to negotiate firmly, and thus create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only useful way to talk about power in negotiations is to think about it as the ability to persuade another person to do something, and then find ways to marshal and direct your resources in a focused, purposive way to achieve your goals. Instead of asking, 「Who is more powerful?」 in a negotiation, we ought to ask, 「How can we use and improve the power we have to persuade the other party to do what we think they ought to do?」 Since the working relationship you have with your manager -- and with your company -- is very important, exercise your power in a way that will not undermine the respect, trust and acceptance that you ought to receive from your firm.

Here are three strategies for doing just that:

1. Listen to the Other Party
If you want to persuade other people to change their minds, you have to begin by discovering what they really care about. This requires you to inquire into their motivations, and listen carefully to their responses. The ability to set aside your own views, step into other people's shoes and see the world from those vantage points makes you quite powerful, as it increases your understanding of their interests.

2. Develop Better Options
The more you understand other people's interests, the more you enhance your ability to influence them. Once you know what the other party cares about -- what goals, concerns and objectives they are seeking to satisfy -- you can develop options that address their interests as well as your own. Ideas that benefit both sides create the possibility of moving someone from a fixed position.

3. Use Persuasive Standards of Legitimacy
A great deal of power derives from using sources of legitimacy to support your ideas and to justify your rejection of other ideas. Martin Luther King, Jr., who used the Bible and the U.S. Constitution to persuade many of his opponents that his demands were just and reasonable, is a prominent example of an individual who gained his success by using the concept of fairness. By making sure that any idea you consider can be justified as appropriate, reasonable or fair based on standards independent of the negotiating parties, such as what others are doing in the market, or what the company has done before in similar situations, you can harness the power of legitimacy. Many times, just looking your boss in the eye and saying, 「This is what others in the industry are paying people with similar skills, Do you want to pay me less than what is fair?」, will influence him or her to change his or her offer.

4. Improve Your Alternatives
The better you can satisfy your important interests without the need for the other side's agreement, the less influence (and hence power) they have over you. To effectively use this source of power, you have to select your BATNA -- your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement -- out of the many different possible actions you can take if the negotiations fail.

5. Preparation is Critical
All of the preceding advice requires you to invest some time in getting prepared before the negotiation even begins. You have complete control over the time and quality of your preparation -- use that authority wisely to enhance your power in the negotiation.

6. Assume You Can Achieve Your Goals
The more you assume you can do, the more you will try to do -- and the more you try to do, the more you will actually get done. This does not mean that you will always succeed, or that you will overcome tough obstacles every time. It does mean that you will make more progress than you initially thought possible.

Summary:
It is almost always a destructive situation to become locked in an adversarial power struggle at work. Avoid trying to force your manager to do anything. If you see your task as convincing him or her to do something that he or she does not want to do, you will fail and likely ruin that relationship. Avoid feeling as if you have to give in to your manager's demands simply because he or she is your boss. Follow the advice given here to use your negotiation power as constructively and helpfully as you can. Enhance your ability to influence another person's decision and more often than not, you'll succeed in doing so.