Negotiations & bargaining: styles & stages

Published on October 27, 2011 Reviewed on June 27, 2018   50 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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Welcome to the Henry Stewart talks series on "Negotiations and Bargaining". My name is Charlie Craver. During this series, we're covering one of the most critical skills for all businessperson and lawyers who negotiate constantly within their own organizations and behalf of their organizations with outside parties.
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During this segment of the series, we will cover the impact of negotiator styles on bargaining interactions. Are you a cooperative problem solver who seeks fair results that are mutually beneficial to both sides? Are you a competitive adversarial negotiator who tries to claim more of the joint surplus for your side than you give to the opposing side? Or are you a hybrid, what I call a competitive problem solver, an individual who tries to get a better deal for his or her side than they give to the opposing side, but once they get that deal for themselves they try to maximize the returns achieved by their opponents. We will then talk about the six stages of the negotiation process. Preparation, we want to make sure you have all of the relevant information recognizing that knowledge is power when we negotiate. We want to plan your strategy. How do you visualize getting from where you start to where you hope to end up? We will then move to the preliminary stage where the negotiators establish rapport and the tone for their interaction. This is a very important part of the bargaining process because it will affect what comes subsequently, and people from impatient cultures tend to move through this stage much too quickly. The information exchange. This is value creation. The parties are trying to find out what's on the bargaining table to be shared between them. They then move into the distributive state. This is value claiming. This is where the parties are going to divide what they found during the information exchange and they will go back and forth with the different items. Near the end of the distributive stage, the parties move into the closing stage. This is where they want to be able to reach definitive terms or a final agreement. When they're done with this stage, many people think they are finished with their negotiation forgetting one last crucial stage, what I call the co-operative stage and games people like to call the integrative stage. This is where the negotiators want to see if there's any way they can expand the pie and simultaneously improve their respective positions. They want to make sure they have reached mutually efficient agreements and have left no client satisfaction on the bargaining table.