Page 293 - DMGT519_Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Unit 14: Closing the Deal and Post Negotiation Evaluation

for individual or collective advantage, to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests of two Notes
people/parties involved in negotiation process. Negotiation is a process where each party
involved in negotiating tries to gain an advantage for themselves by the end of the process.
Negotiation is intended to aim at compromise.

14.1 Best 10 Practises for Negotiators

Following are the 10 “best practices” for negotiators who wish to continue to improve their
negotiation skills:
1. Be prepared: Negotiators who are better prepared have numerous advantages, including
the ability to analyse the other party’s offers more effectively and efficiently, to understand
the nuances of the concession – making process, and to achieve their negotiations’ goals.
Preparation should occur before the negotiation begins so that the time spent while
negotiating become more productive. Good preparation means understanding one’s own
goals and interests as well as possible and being able to articulate them to the other party
skillfully. It also includes being ready to understand the other party’s communication in
order to find an agreement that meets the needs of both parties. Few negotiations are
going to conclude successfully without both parties achieving at least some of their goals.
To understand the needs of the other party is a critical step to increasing the odds of
success.

(i) Be Prepared
(ii) Diagnose the Fundamental Structures of the Negotiation
(iii) Work the BATNA
(iv) Be willing to walk away
(v) Master paradoxes

(vi) Remember the intangibles
(vii) Actively manage coalitions
(viii) Savor and protect your reputation

(ix) Remember that rationality and fairness are relative
(x) Continue to learn from the experience
2. Diagnose the Fundamental Structures of the Negotiation: Negotiators should make a
conscious decision about whether they are facing a fundamentally distributive negotiation,
an integrative negotiation, or a blend of the two, and choose their strategies and tactics
accordingly. Using strategies and tactics that are mismatched will lead to sub-optimal
negotiation outcomes. For instance, using overly distributive tactics in a fundamentally
integrative situation will almost certainly result in reaching agreements that leave
integrative potential untapped because negotiations in response to distributive tactics. In
these situations, money and opportunity are often left on the table.

Similarly, using integrative tactics in a distributive situation may not lead to optimal
outcomes either. For instance, one of the authors of this book was recently shopping for a
new car and the salesman spent a great deal of time and effort asking questions about the
author’s family and assuring him that he was working hard to get the highest possible
value for his trade-in. Unfortunately, requests for clarification about the list price of the
car and information about manufacturer incentives described in a recent newspaper
advertisement were met with silence or by changing the topic of conversation. This was a

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