Six habits of merely effective negotiators

Most executives know the basics of negotiation; some are spectacularly adept. Yet even experienced negotiators routinely leave money on the table, end up in deadlock, damage relationships, or allow conflicts to spiral. They fall prey to common mistakes that keep them from solving the right negotiation problem. In any negotiation, each side ultimately chooses between two options: accepting a deal or taking its best no-deal option--that is, the course of action if a deal were not possible. As a negotiator, you seek to advance your interests by persuading the other side to say yes to a proposal that meets your interests better than your best no-deal option. Because the other side will say yes only to a proposal that meets its own interests better than its best no-deal option, you must understand and shape your counterpart's decision so that it chooses in its own interest what you want. Far from being exercises in manipulation, understanding your counterpart's interests and shaping the decision so that the other side agrees to a proposal for its own reasons are the keys to jointly creating and claiming sustainable value from a negotiation. In this article, James Sebenius compares good negotiating practice with bad, providing examples from the business world and insights from 50 years of research and analysis on negotiation. The author describes six common mistakes that result in merely effective negotiation: neglecting your counterpart's problem, letting price bulldoze other interests, letting positions drive out interests, searching too hard for common ground, neglecting no-deal alternatives, and failing to correct for skewed vision.