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Enhancing
Your Power in Negotiations
by Michael
Chaffers
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.
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