Negotiation Skills for Introverts

Negotiation Skills for Introverts

If you’re anything like me, there will have been countless occasions you’ve dreaded, avoided, or struggled with negotiation.

I have found certain personalities, styles, situations, and timeframes extremely testing and relied upon steely willpower and determination, delivered through smiling, gritted teeth, to negotiate positive results for myself and others over the years.

I guess like most of you, I wasn’t taught how to negotiate. I had some fabulously feisty female role models, appropriate it seems when negotiating on the front line in the social and political climate of the 70s, but not necessarily that helpful in the developing creative industries, where generosity, difference, and nuance are everything.

So having spent decades developing my style, negotiating on behalf of artists and creatives, charities, institutions, businesses, individual staff, teams, and family, I eventually decided it was time to seek out some new approaches to help make negotiating to feel a little less challenging.

Over the last few years, I have learned from some of the best in the business, including:

....to name but a few.

I’ve been astounded and delighted at how negotiating well and making it a daily practice, helps you feel more confident and in control of your present and future.?

I learned so much from Kwame Christian and Dave Stachowiak in particular, including that:

a) preparation is fundamental to successful negotiations and feeling more empowered and relaxed

b) maintaining curious compassion is the magic key to downloading data, building rapport, and getting to a place of mutual understanding

c) that we are all just human, and sometimes people get under your skin, so having techniques such as taking a bathroom break or squeezing your toes to ground you helps you regain composure.

Inspired and lifted by these brave, brilliant, benevolent experts, I’ve been sharing my learnings with scores of creative clients in both my coaching and mentoring work.?

So many creatives have a shy or introverted streak, and hate the idea of ‘win-win’ or having to over-assert themselves at the expense of others.?

As a result, they often find themselves at a loss in negotiations, desperately not wanting to cause offense or conflict, but also not knowing how to stand their ground respectfully or stay true to their vision and goals.

There are so many possibilities when it comes to devising, producing, and delivering creative work to an unsuspecting public, that exploring all potential negotiation points is impossible in one meeting.

And yet so many institutions, businesses, and organisations negotiate in the same way they might over a product or HR service. Time and again I’ve witnessed CEOs, Directors, and Heads of Departments demonstrate a lack of sensitivity, knowledge, expertise, or understanding when it comes to negotiating with an artist or creative.

We don’t afford creative projects the right amount of development and negotiation time or budget, staff support, contingency, and audience consultation to get the best, most exciting results.?

Every stage of a creative project requires a different set of negotiating terms. And all too often we expect artists to lead on the concept, project management, HR, H&S, press, marketing, merch, learning and engagement, evaluation.?

We demand great ideas from them, that they dig deep and come up with something that will blow everybody’s expectations out of the water, in record time. Then we expect them to liaise with every department, learning each individual and team’s objectives and re-negotiating their goalposts at each turn.?

So many commissioners haven’t learned how to negotiate or work with creatives. They map their usual negotiation and project management styles onto the creative, which, frankly, is like putting a straightjacket on a Cuttlefish from the outset.

The creative is expected to rock up to the meeting with definitive answers. Yet awe-inspiring, transformational creative work demands staying with the not knowing for longer. It requires trust, deep consideration, reflection, re-imagining, and psychological safety.

It requires next-level, 5D thinking, a gentle ‘feeling through’ of concepts, materials, contexts, and potential outcomes, bandied about freely over some time to test, stretch and tease the best solution for that moment, audience, budget, response.

So providing the right conditions to help creativity thrive, deeply considering and connecting with their process and what might come out of your collaboration together will provide a better starting position for you all.?

Creative negotiation and collaboration never look like one party imagined. That’s the benefit.

Learning how to negotiate creatively will expand all our horizons. Learning how to nurture creativity will foster more innovative solutions at every stage of your business.

But unless you plan for that, negotiate effectively for that, both parties will reach the end of the project feeling frustrated and disappointed.

This is so common, that I have dedicated time in November to supporting artists and creatives developing core negotiation skills, to ensure they have a toolkit to help them launch from the starter block, without the straightjacket.

Let's all be more Cuttlefish.

Artist Mentor Negotiation Skills for Introverts classes take place

10am-11.30am Tuesday 16 November https://ArtistMentor.as.me/negotiationskillsforintrovertsmorning

and 6pm-7.30pm Thursday 18 November https://ArtistMentor.as.me/negotationskillsforintrovertsevening

I hope I can do for you what my negotiation mentors have done for me.