The ability to negotiate is a critical skill in our working lives. We negotiate daily, whether it’s to secure resources, coordinate project responsibilities or progress our careers. How good we are at it depends on our adaptability and a great deal on personality.
Yet often, we aren’t aware of how our personality traits shape our negotiation style. Worse still, we may not be recognise how our counterparts prefer to approach things. We wonder why we’re not getting through to the other person.
Even worse, our default negotiation style might be precisely the wrong approach for the person we’re negotiating with.
At Insights, we know it's often a matter of perception, and the same message delivered in different ways can produce entirely different responses. It pays to understand who you’re talking to and learn how to speak their language
Students of negotiation or mediation strategies will be familiar with the Harvard-developed Mutual Gains Approach. But if you’re catching up, the basic premise is that it rarely works to take a rigid, positional “I need X” approach to negotiating settlements.
Positional bargaining leads to a frustrating zero-sum game, and even when a compromise is reached, some needs may remain unmet and some parties may remain unhappy.
In contrast, interest-based negotiation works better. Negotiation isn’t all about winning at zero cost or compromising; it’s about understanding what’s driving the other party. Chances are, each party -including you- will have different motivators, so you can creatively build offers that will satisfy their motivations and values, while still satisfying your own.
We often see this style of negotiation in recruitment: A candidate is motivated by freedom and asks for a higher salary (perceiving the salary as a means to freedom). The company is already at the top of its hiring budget; it is at an impasse. After a few conversations, the hiring manager instead offers additional vacation days and flexible working. This meets the hire's motivation for more freedom and the hiring manager's motivation to stay within the budget. Everyone feels they 'won' in the negotiation.
In Mutual Gains, we take the time to understand ourselves and to understand others. Awareness of what others value is critical and one does not negotiate without it.
It's not just what you say (Mutual Gains), it's also how you say it.
Once you understand what others value, it's important to adapt how you communicate your ideas to align with your counterpart's preferred communication style.
Once again, awareness is key.
It's important to understand your natural communication style and what you most value. Action vs accuracy. Speed vs caution. Within that context, you can look at the other party's communication style. Do they prefer action or accuracy? Do they prefer speed or caution?
For example, you may look at:
When you first meet, don’t just leap in. Read the room. There’s a fine line between solid substance and feel-good buzzwords, and that line shifts with every personality type. You still need to sell your idea, of course, but even with your prep done, working out what actually lands with different people can be trickier than it looks. This is where Insights will help.
Using the Insight Discovery colour energy model as our guide, we can adapt our presentation based on a communication style that's likely to resonate with the other person.
If you both seem to share the same negotiation style, that’s a bonus, but make sure you leave with everything you need to progress. And sometimes, when progress falters, and the only thing you can agree on is a timeline, that’s still progress. After all, you can build on a timeline; it gives you a mutually agreed-on starting point.
Bottom line: The most effective negotiations leave each party feeling satisfied and willing to work together. It should be a case of ‘how can we solve this problem together’, not ‘how can I win this?’. Good luck!
Insights Discovery is an award-winning L&D training system that creates high-performing teams by awareness and workplace relationships. Using a memorable four-colour model to illustrate different behavioural styles, it creates a common language that connects colleagues across geographical and cultural boundaries, fostering collaboration, driving productivity and transforming workplaces.