First Step Marketing

Cool negotiation

The ways and means of your doing that lie in three simple steps — the Three S’s of Cool Negotiation. These tell you that you need to:

• Spot what’s happening
• Step away from the anger
• Speak assertively.

Let’s look at these one by one:

Spotting what’s happening

You should be able to do this easily. You won’t find it a new experience. Being with someone who’s getting annoyed or beginning to feel annoyed yourself is a situation that we’ve all been in. When it happens, when the ‘temperature’ of their (_or your) words starts to rise, you’ll be able to recognize that they (or you) start to do things like:

• express opinions as facts — ‘that won’t work’, ‘that’s a useless idea’, ‘that’s stupid’
• use ‘I’ sentences a lot — ‘I think …’, ‘I don’t believe what you’re saying’, ‘I don’t agree’
• push opinions at the other person — ‘You should do it this way’, ‘You shouldn’t have done that’.

Body language will also enable you to recognize that risin_g`temperature’ when your (or their):

• speech becomes fluent with few hesitations and a hard, sharp, sometimes sarcastic, tone
• gaze becomes hard and dominant trying to stare the other down
• gestures start to be dominated by finger pointing or even fist thumping.

When the stress level of your negotiation rises, when you feel that you are beginning to lose your detachment or when you see that the other person is getting angry, then you need to take the next step — to step away, to pause.

Stepping away

It takes skill and courage to be able to step away from a rising conflict. Most of your difficulty in doing so will come about because you’ll feel that you’ll ‘lose face’ or look stupid if you do it. But that’s not all. For you’ll also feel, in a very real way, the influence of the rising tide of chemicals that your body is generating in response to your feelings — feelings about being attacked, embarrassed, hurt or frightened. But if you’re going to move forward then it must be done.

Every experienced negotiator has their own way of handling this — mine is to take a good deep breath and tell myself that it isn’t me he or she’s getting angry with, it’s somebody or something in their past. Yours may be different — but finding it isn’t just important, it is key to you being assertively effective in these conflicts. Once you’ve found it then you’re ready for the next S of Cool Negotiation — that of responding, constructively and effectively, to the aggression that you face.

Speaking assertively

There are a number of ways that you can do this. You can, for example, respond to someone who’s getting angry by being _empathic, by saying things like ‘I can see how angry that makes you feel’ or ‘It sounds like you’re pretty upset about that. How can I help?’ Alternatively you might want to count to four (to yourself, of course) and then respond. Whatever way you do it, it is essential that early in your response you ask for more detail or facts. This, of course, is easier said than done. It takes a brave man or woman to limit their response to an aggressively critical statement like: `This is typical of your department — always cocking it up!’ to that of a calmly said: ‘What makes you say that?’ This sort of response — asking for facts or clarification — usually works. But if it doesn’t, even after several tries, then you might have to face the fact that your negotiation is breaking down. If that is what’s happening then the best way is to cut off the discussion — but leave the door open to come back at a later date.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Business Management, Business Plans, Career Management, Marketing, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.