The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [79]
Milk the target: Use questions to show off research, expose preferences (what happened to the last employee?) and points from which to link your wares to their needs. Explore objections: Do they stem from misunderstandings, excuses, or material problems?
Mind the gap: Flummoxed? The question is your life raft. Repeat, clarify; show how you think on your feet. (See Chapter 13.)
React: There is a tale of an Oxford University interviewer who removed his shoes and socks to clip his toenails. Demonic strategy? Madness? Who knows. If someone is determined to unsettle you, view it as a test. Joke (my husband could have said, “Only friends call me Joanna”). Reframe a negative positively. Admire the damned clippers.
BEND YOUR WIGGLE ROOM: A NEGOTIATOR’S GUIDE
Negotiating may feel like poker. Trace your negotiating space beforehand to improve the odds. Its coordinates are: what you want, points you can and can’t concede, what you’d settle for; and these same parameters for the other side (guess). Where these overlap lies territory for settlement.
Outline concessions, planning points to trade, then step back. Is there wiggle room? Review each side’s interests and aspirations. Might something else, not on the table, satisfy both? If so, this is your ace in the hole. Now imagine the consequences if agreement isn’t met. Any alternatives? Aim to walk in knowing you can walk away.
At the meeting, explore motives and assumptions behind the other’s stance. Clarify and you might shift a position. Don’t be shy of stating your criteria or aims either: However shrewd, the other side may not have thought these through. But they should consider them.
If both sides want to do business again, you’ve won, preserving the long-term deal: your relationship. So never confuse what is fair with what is right; history is strewn with noses cut off to spite owners’ faces, as we don’t act in our best interests, preferring nothing to a mean deal—just as chimpanzees in tests refuse to perform a task if their reward is a piece of cucumber, but their partner’s a succulent grape, even if ordinarily they like cucumber. Why? Fairness isn’t logical but psychological: about saving face.
Good negotiators keep deals sweet by keeping them short. Talk too long, positions petrify, and each side thinks the time invested means they deserve more (forgetting the other side has spent just as much, but the pie/grape/cucumber is no larger).
FOLLOW MY LEADER: MENTAL CARE FOR MEETINGS
“The multitude is wiser and more constant than a prince,” averred Machiavelli, after the Medici put him out of a job.
That greatest wisdom dwells not in the greatest minds, but the aggregated views of the crowd, is an insight as old as democracy. All the same, a group thinking aloud isn’t necessarily the slickest means of aggregating them.
Analysts find the most successful management teams argue hard, but hold it together because the tone isn’t personal: The focus is on gains. Without good governance, however, meetings degenerate into either a brawl or a pack, because dialogue spurs people into increasingly extreme positions. Furthermore, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality asserts that the less important an agenda item, the more time is spent on it. Can you doubt it? We speak most freely on matters that won’t burn us, or for which any number of solutions is possible and equally desirable.
The net consequence is that all meetings have a natural life span beyond which dementia sets in. A brief biography:
An issue is born.
Slowly, voices are raised, frail heads of opinion sprout. Some find the light, are watered, grow, others shrivel in the shade, until one vast opinion takes over, draining resources, until an ax falls . . .
The job of attendees is to represent their positions as best they can, with a keen sense of when and how to back down. The chair is axman. But his duties also encompass those of circus ringmaster.
There’s nothing like repetition to persuade people an idea is right (see