Explain the methods of negotiation?
Answers
. Reframe anxiety as excitement. The preparation stage of negotiation often comes with unpleasant side effects, such as sweaty palms, a racing heart, and seemingly overwhelming anxiety. It’s common even for professional negotiators to feel nervous, but this state of mind can lead us to make costly decisions, according to Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks. We tend to believe the best negotiation techniques to deal with our anxiety is to calm down, but that can be easier said than done. Try reframing the state of high physiological arousal associated with anxiety as excitement, recommends Brooks. This subtle reframing tactic, which treats your arousal as a plus rather than a minus, actually increases authentic feelings of excitement—and improves subsequent performance in negotiation, Brooks has found in her research.
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2. Anchor the discussion with a draft agreement. Due to a widespread decision-making heuristic known as the anchoring bias, first documented by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the person who makes the first offer in a negotiation is likely to sway the discussion in her favor. First offers tend to serve as powerful anchors, even for experienced professional negotiators. To make an even bigger impact, you might try opening substantive negotiations with a draft agreement, or standard-form contract, prepared with your legal counsel and any relevant decision makers from your team. Though such drafts aren’t always appropriate, they can increase your influence over the negotiation, according to Tufts University professor Jeswald Salacuse. A standard-form contract not only uses the anchoring bias to your advantage but could save both sides time and money, making this one of the negotiation techniques that could really be worth trying.
3. Draw on the power of silence. In negotiation, as in any discussion, we tend to rush in to fill any uncomfortable silences that arise with persuasion techniques and counter-arguments. That can be a mistake, according to Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian. After your counterpart speaks, allowing a few moments of silence to settle can give you time to fully absorb what he just said. “Silence give you the ability to dampen your instincts for self-advocacy and amplify your instinct to listen,” according to Subramanian. Silence can also help you defuse your own tendency toward the anchoring bias. If a counterpart drops an outrageous anchor, “your stunned silence will far more effectively defuse the anchor than heaps of protesting would,” says Subramanian.