The Three Traits of Great Negotiators
John F. Thompson, CPWA?, CIMA?
As a Private Wealth Advisor, I help highly successful Business Owners, Professionals and their Families work towards making "work" optional so they can focus on their life of meaning
Key Takeaways:
Everyone negotiates. From selling a company to buying a house, from getting your partner to agree to do the dishes for a week to convincing a teenager to get his homework done, people are constantly trying to make deals with each other.?
Whenever there are two individuals interacting, each with their own agendas, negotiating is going on.
The self-made Super Rich tend to be highly skilled, effective negotiators, in our experience. Many of them are even great negotiators.?
So what does that mean, exactly? Being a great negotiator means getting deals done and getting them done so they’re in your favor—profiting handsomely, for example. A good negotiator might sell his company for more than it is worth, while a great negotiator would sell it for far, far beyond its value.?
But negotiation greatness goes beyond that. Great negotiators share certain qualities and look to develop certain understandings. They also, more often than not, share certain ways of thinking about their negotiations.?
Take a moment to consider your answers to the following questions, using this scale:
No matter how you scored, you can potentially enhance and even optimize your negotiation skills in a wide range of situations.
We believe, based on our experience, that great negotiators share three key traits:
Highly confident
Generally, great negotiators are highly confident. They know what they need to accomplish and are self-assured about getting these outcomes.
Their confidence works to bolster their side. It can also have the psychological result of humbling the other people at the table, putting them at a disadvantage from the start. It mentally enables great negotiators to move forward assertively, often with greater prospects of attaining significant results.?
The confidence of great negotiators comes in large part from education: They are well versed in a multitude of bargaining strategies. It also stems from experience. Having been in many negotiations, they have learned what gets results and what does not. This leads to a virtuous cycle of successful negotiations building confidence and further success. Simply put:
Confidence + Success = More Confidence + More Success
Successful negotiations consequently breed additional success. Great negotiators expect to succeed. In their minds, they invoke their track records, which further energizes them. Their surety and passion can many times make a big difference in the outcome of a deal.?
Important: While confidence is a key characteristic of great negotiators, they regularly temper their self-confidence so they’re not seen as being arrogant. By instead being empathetic, great negotiators end up focusing on the implicit and explicit requirements of other people—their motivations (more on that below).?
Furthermore, great negotiators are adept at providing the evidence that underlies their confidence. Great negotiators don’t say “believe me” in a vacuum—they support their attitude with facts, expertise and reason.?
Expect great results
Not surprisingly, given their confidence, great negotiators are not interested in “doing the best they can” and seeing how that works out. Instead, great negotiators are all about setting the bar very high—with the goal of then leaping over it.?
Having great expectations often leads to asking for a lot. If people want to reach high, they have to ask in order to get. Great negotiators will regularly go for the upper limit of what they want to achieve. The idea is to not mentally concede anything before they begin negotiating.
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It is important to note that great negotiators do not set high-end goals and strive to reach them. They have moved beyond goals into expectations, and they truly believe they are going to meet or exceed those expectations. In their minds, they believe that the more someone expects, the more he or she gets—and that the less someone expects, the less he or she gets.
Caveat: While great negotiators have substantial expectations, they are also realistic—they don’t seek the impossible. If they did, they would not be taken seriously, and their efforts would be derailed.?
Intensely focused on uncovering motivations
In most cases, people in negotiations will best achieve significant long-term negotiating success by building solid relationships with the people they deal with.?
There are exceptions—if, say, one side holds all the cards and doesn’t expect to negotiate with the counterparty ever again. But more often than not, great negotiators make it a policy to establish excellent levels of rapport and trust with the people they do deals with.
One important way to accomplish that is by going beyond stated positions (what people say they want) and uncovering the other side’s motivations—the reasons why they want what they want.?
All negotiators pay attention to the other side’s positions—it’s necessary to do so. Great negotiators really home in on divining the opposition’s motivations. Those motivations can vary extensively, of course, but they often involve the other person’s needs, desires and fears. They can reflect a person’s ego, a sense of belonging or the need for control. Regardless, it’s important to determine what they are and how they impact the negotiations.
Identifying those motivations is done by learning from the other side throughout the process of bargaining. There are a number of ways to do this. One simple but powerful approach favored by great negotiators is to ask and listen. Through savvy questioning coupled with deep listening, they get an increasingly better understanding of the counterparty’s motivations, needs, wants, perspectives and limitations.?
Subsequently, great negotiators use those insights accordingly—to adjust their agenda, to do a better job of managing expectations and to ask for (as well as make) concessions. The insights empower them to get a mutually acceptable deal done.?
Conclusion
The good news is that everyone is capable of becoming a great negotiator. The traits we see among great negotiators can be learned, practiced and sharpened over time. The mindset we see among great negotiators can be adopted by anyone looking to achieve better results with other people in their businesses and lives.?
The upshot: You don’t have to be a billionaire today to have billionaire negotiation intelligence. All you have to do is implement the best practices of top negotiators, and you can start to position yourself for outcomes that exceed your highest expectations.
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