Don´t Bargain Over Positions

Don´t Bargain Over Positions

1. Most people negociate by taking on extreme positions and after doing that they want to start negotiating, this is bad because:

   • Both sides become personally comittied to their decisions
   • Egos become intertwined with issues, and people start feeling the need to save face.
   • Large amounts of time can be wasted during the process
   • It can make enemies of people if one side feels it has lost at the expense of  the other party.

2. There are soft styles of negotiation and hard sales of negotiation

   • Some people try to escape the problems of   positional negotiation by adopting a soft style, which leads them to make more concessions.

3. Disentangle the negotiators from the problems

4. Focus on interests and not positions

5. Generate mutually beneficial agreements, and be creative in the process .

6. Insist on using some fair, objective criteria for judging potential agreements

7. Three phases of the negotiating process

   • Analysis
   • Planning
   • Discussion
     • It must be face to face

8. It is important that both sides now what the other wants before even starting with the negotiation