Deception in Negotiations
I would love to be able to give some fantastic example from
work where I have dealt with negotiation, but all I can think about is my
children. When you have children, all you seem to do is negotiate whether it’s
bedtime, another snack, eating their veggies, etc. As they have gotten older,
the negotiating sessions that happen could rival that of high executive
business men. You have to have skills at this game or you are going to lose and
losing at this game has more long-term personal consequences. However, the kids
are just as good and every now and then they will through me a curve ball that
keeps me on my toes.
During these little negotiation sessions, we both have ways
in which we evaluate the information that we are presented with. The first
thing that I do is to evaluate the content of the negotiation. Am I interested
in engaging in battle over this issue? Will I win this battle if I engage? Will
the outcome produce the desired result? The next thing I do is to try and
anticipate what they really want out of this negotiation and what my bargaining
range will be. I ask open-ended questions that will give me more leverage when
he ends up saying things that he doesn’t know will be detrimental to his case. But
the biggest way for me to evaluate information during negotiations is watching
for their nonverbal cues. Kids are infamous for these type things and when you
know your kids like I do, you can spot the lie before it even comes out of
their mouth.
For example, my son recently came to me with wanting his bed time
to be 11:00pm on school nights. He is 13 after all, practically a
self-sustaining adult, so why shouldn’t he get to stay up till then? Well of
course that is insane and there is no way I was going to let that happen, but
pushing the time back a bit was well within my range of what I was willing to
give. After talking with him about it and asking him questions I was able to
figure out that his real desire was to play video games and not stay up late, even though he never
directly said that. At the moment, he only gets to play for an hour on the
weekends only. So while in the midst of our discussion I offered him one hour a
day all week, but only in the afternoon after homework, or no time during the
week but 4 hours a day on Saturday or Sunday. I also gave him a third option
that for every hour spent reading, he would earn 30 minutes of game time on the
weekends. My personal agenda was for him to not play any games time during the
week, so by making the weekend more enticing, I knew which one he would pick. I
did what Dan Ariely talked about and I offered up three offers, one that awful,
one that didn’t seem so bad, and one that seemed awesome in comparison to the
other two. Of course, he picked the one I wanted him too.
Sticking with the examples of my children, I most recently
led a negotiation with my daughter. We are building a house and they have each “called”
which room they would like. My daughter picked the basement bedroom and my son
picked the loft. My daughter is only 10 and I don’t want her in the basement,
so when I was negotiating with her, I overstated just how big her room would be
if she picked the loft. I also overstated the furniture she would be able to
buy if she picked the loft. I made the loft seem way more enticing than the
basement, even though the basement was the better room.
In both cases, because we are talking about my children, I
would go as far as I needed to in order to make sure that I won whatever
negotiating we did. I do whatever is necessary within my moral confines to
leverage my position to make sure that I do win.
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