Negotiation jujitsu: strategic conflict resolution

Hi. My name is Susan Raines. Today, we're going to be talking about negotiation skills, and I call this negotiation jujitsu, and how to do strategic conflict resolution, which is central to all of our negotiations and success in business.

I'm a visa consul with the United States Department of State, currently posted in Tijuana, Mexico. But really, I come to this work because I was a professor of conflict resolution for 23 years running the master's program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. And I also have had a consulting business working with Fortune 500 organizations and international organizations worldwide to help their leadership teams manage and prevent conflict and to prevent brand damage due to scandals or other bad things that could come out by having a good culture and successful collaborations internally.

We're going to talk about everyday negotiation. The Number 1 lesson here is that we don't want you to miss all the opportunities you have to negotiate because you're probably negotiating every day without even realizing that's what you're doing. In an average week, how often do you use your negotiation skills? Think about every day, do you negotiate household chores? Who's taking the kids to school? Do you negotiate things that are obvious, like a rise in pay, office space, or contracts? Those are the more formal negotiations we do. Every performance review is a negotiation and a conversation trying to reach shared understandings about what we expect of one another and how we will be reviewed or rated. There are negotiations happening every day. We often fail to recognize those. When your dog begs at the dinner table, that is a negotiation. We're going to talk a lot about recognizing these and then making sure that we're negotiating effectively using all the skills we have. Negotiation is just a conversation between two interdependent parties who may have a perceived conflict between their needs and desires, yet believe that a negotiated outcome is superior to the outcome they could achieve unilaterally. That basically just means two or more people or organizations seeking to work together for mutual benefit, and they can't accomplish what they want all on their own. If you could accomplish what you want all on your own, you would not bother negotiating. You'll would just do it. People often overestimate their own power in a negotiation or underestimate the other's power in a negotiation, because they believe somehow their status or authority gives them the ability to make someone else do what they want them to do when it actually doesn't. You know this if you have a teenager and you say do your homework or improve your math scores, and they may or may not do what we ask them to do or tell them to do. So you might think you have the power and then find out you don't. We're really talking about how do we negotiate effectively so that we can achieve the goals of ourselves, our unit, our team, or our organization.