The secret skill to getting what you actually want at work

Every meeting is a negotiation. You might think that you’re just casually logging on to a video conference, or sitting passively in a meeting room, to hear an update on the latest project, but whenever someone opens their month at work, there’s usually an unspoken negotiation taking place.

It’s probably not as obvious as haggling over the price of a contract, however the regular push and pull that occurs between conversations about juggling deadlines, talking about your current workload or adjusting expectations for the future are all forms of bargaining.

Knowing you’re in a constant negotiation, and learning how to get better at them, is a skill that can get you better working conditions, higher pay, improved deals and give you more control of your working life. Yet most of us are never taught how to do it properly.

I know this topic very well as I have deeply immersed myself in it for the last few years as I’ve researched and written Clear in Tension, my new book on how to get better at conflict that will be published next month.

As part of my research I spent time at Oxford University with Paul Fisher, one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation. Paul heads up the teaching of negotiation at the Saïd Business School, where he’s responsible for helping a stream of top global executives improve how they fight.

Many of them have been negotiating professionally for decades, and arrive on Oxford’s campus thinking they just need to fine-tune their skills. It doesn’t take long before they understand how complex the subject is. ‘They don’t know how much they don’t know’, says Paul.

Once you get to why they are thinking this way in any negotiation, you can uncover what you’re actually fighting for.

One of the first things he teaches is to stop thinking of negotiating as a stressful, zero-sum game where someone has to win and someone else lose, as it doesn’t have to be.

“If you focus on building relationships and reframe the negotiation as me and you working together to sort out a common problem,” says Paul, “then you can get deals where both of you are better off than you would be otherwise.”

The biggest breakthrough in negotiation comes from understanding the difference between positions and interests. A position is what someone says they want, and it’s where many negotiations take place as they trade on numbers, desires, or wants. An interest is the hopes, fears, concerns and reasons why someone wants an outcome, and getting to this deeper layer is the key.

Let’s take one of the most common negotiations that all workers face at some stage of their career: asking for a pay rise. No matter how much you prepare for it, it’s still one of the most uncomfortable requests most of us will make.

One reason for this is that employees tend to focus on the wrong thing and head into the meeting intending to ask for a dollar figure or percentage increase. On the other side of the table, employers are dealing with limited budgets that they must carefully manage. When you negotiate only on this level of dollar figures, you’re not going to get far.

If, however, both parties spent some time clarifying exactly what interests underpin each of their reasoning, you’ll have a better chance of finding a solution that satisfies both.

There are always reasons behind why you’re asking for a pay increase. Money is the obvious one, but you must get to the bottom of why? It might be the need to provide more stability for your family, rebalancing pay levels you perceive as being unfair or wanting public recognition of your contribution.

All of these are deeply held – and usually unspoken – feelings when you walk nervously into a meeting with your manager to ask for more money.

Employers also mask their real reasons for their positions too, often beyond just the financial, that restrict what they can offer. Once you get to why they are thinking this way in any negotiation, you can uncover what you’re actually fighting for.

So before you pull up a chair in your next work meeting, or log in to listen, think of what you’re really trying to get out of it. The best conversations happen when everyone gets past the distracting topics that sit at the surface to what’s truly driving it underneath.

Tim Duggan’s new book, Clear in Tension: How to get better at conflict, is available for pre-order now from www.clearintension.com.au

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