Hello my name is Dr. Rob Yeung I'm an
organisational psychologist and a coach
at a consultancy called Talentspace and
I'd like to talk to you about
negotiation but rather than giving you a
specific set of rules on how you can
negotiate I'd like to talk about one
central concept which will help you to
negotiate more effectively and that is
of "The Pie" so think of a literal pie
something that you can eat for a moment
so it's an apple pie or perhaps a savoury
pie like a meat pie
now novice negotiators usually think of
negotiation as the process of arguing
over who can have the biggest slice so
imagine that you've got two parties a
more powerful individual and less
powerful individual, perhaps the more
powerful individual is saying that
actually they should have 90% of this
pie. Whereas the less powerful party
may be ideally trying to get close to a
50/50 split. Or imagine that say your
organisation is thinking about buying a
service from a supplier perhaps your
company is hoping to pay around eight
thousand pounds for it but the supplier
may be hoping to charge ten thousand
pounds so then the negotiation becomes a
tussle an argument over who can get the
price closer to what they want.
Experienced negotiators ask a different
question so rather than thinking about
how can we carve up this small pie they
re-frame it they ask the question how can
we in the first instance bake a bigger
pie so by working together how might we
create more value than at first seems to
be on offer.
So taking us back to that conversation
between say your company and a supplier
we might open up the discussion rather
than buying just this one service I
might think about the benefits of maybe
buying two or three times the size of
the order so how can we perhaps open up
further economies of scale or perhaps if
I'm offering you more stable cash flow
perhaps that might be worth a further
discount. The point is that by sharing
some of my problems
with you and vice-versa we might be able
to solve problems for each other and
therefore create further value or it
might be worth even considering creating
some entirely new service together.
Or imagine a different scenario you've been
through a round of job interviews and
you've now been offered the job, you're
going in for a negotiation about your
salary and you want as higher salary as
you can get but the organisation may
have some genuine constraints over how
much it can offer you so it's worth you
thinking about other ways that the
organisation could offer you value, for
example the organisation might be able
to allow you to work from home on one or
even several days a week and in that way
you reduce your commuting time and
therefore your stress levels or perhaps
you might enjoy working on certain
product lines or you might develop
further in your career by working with
certain customers so that again might be
worth more value to you but in turn you
need to think about added value that you
can offer the organisation so perhaps
you have some skills some knowledge that
you could train your colleagues up on
and boost their skills or you could
offer to work in a more flexible fashion
because that might benefit the
organisation but allow me to sum up so
the point is that whatever the
circumstances of your negotiation don't
just think about immediately how do we
slice up this pie think about how might
we bake a bigger pie in the first
instance so think about sharing some of
the problems and the annoyances and
concerns that you face, try to get the
other party to share some of theirs as
well because we might be able to fix
problems for each other and therefore
create further value. So remember that
effective negotiation is about first
baking this bigger pie creating bigger
better opportunities that we can then
share out.