What we talked about before is this preparation, bargaining, and closing stage. That's the broad framework for negotiations. We've talked about preparation, and now I want to talk about the bargaining stage. In the bargaining stage, I want to think about two pieces. The first is exchange of information and the second is the exchange of offers. I know that the exchange of offers is really the exciting part. But what I want to do, and I think it's so important, is to think about the exchange of information that should really precede that exchange of offers. What I want to do in this module is talk about the exchange of information. We're in this information-dependence interaction. That is, in a negotiation, we need to know information from our counterpart, they're going to try to glean information from us, and we're in this dance for information exchange. I want to think about exchanging information sort of like exchanging concessions. We need to reveal some information but we want to make sure we're gathering information too. There's some interesting studies and there's some interesting literatures about conversations. I want to draw on those ideas as we think about this exchange of information process. The first broad idea is about active listening. Active listening is this process of engaged listening so we're going to elicit information from our counterparts. Here are the three key steps. First, we'd ask direct questions. You've got to ask the hard questions. What's the most you ever paid for somebody in this position? We want to ask that direct question. Ideally, we've prepared to know what the key questions are and we want to make sure that we're getting responses. If people are dodging and not answering them, we should make a note of that. That's still giving us information. It's telling us something if that's a question they don't want to answer. The second is to listen. This is a common interview tactic. We'll ask people a question and you can hear by the cadence in somebody's voice when they're ready to effectively hand their baton back to you as if it's your turn. In an interview, somebody might ask you, "Hey, I notice you had a rough semester in your freshman year in college. What happened?" Now, they've handed you up the baton. You take the baton and you answer and say, "Well, yeah, that was a really rough semester. I was really adjusting to a new environment, my new living situation. I was really happy that I was able to pick things up the following semester and really find my groove." As if we're handing the baton back. But what I want to do is focus your attention on just listening. By listening, that means not talking sometimes. That means we're going to just let that space go. We're going to let people fill in as they fill in sometimes more information and sometimes that's when people make concessions. It depends with who was doing a real estate deal and somebody made him an offer. He was ready to accept it, but it was at lunch. He had a piece of lettuce that was stuck in the back of his throat and he paused and looked at him as he was trying to work this piece of lettuce and got 100,000 worth of concession as someone who's just waiting in that space. We want to make sure we're not rushing. And I've seen people talk over key piece of information. We're concessions other people have made in negotiations want to make sure we're really listening. The third key idea is to repeat and probe further. That is, we sometimes might want to say what I'm hearing you say is that you can't do anything else this quarter, but you can do something else next quarter. Or I understand you have these challenges. Here's my understanding. Have I got that right? Here are some ideas about questions. What to ask questions that require elaboration. Want to ask questions they don't presume that we understand the situation. I want to encourage people to expand on the responses. That can you tell me more about this? Or I'd like to hear your perspective on this or can you tell me more about this? There was a study done on expert versus novice negotiators. Expert negotiators speak less and ask more questions. We often think that in this negotiation, my goal is to convince you of my point. I just need to tell you all the reasons why I deserve to ask. When in fact, the best way to get what you want is truly understand the other person's interests and needs. The idea of the magical moment in negotiations when somebody says, what I need should be music to you. That is, now you know what somebody else needs. If you have it, What a great position that you're in. We want to ask questions to really understand where somebody is coming from, what opportunities and what challenges they have. Here's the active part of listening. The active part of listening is to demonstrate interest actively. When somebody tells you you're not listening to me or you're not paying attention to me, or I don't feel like you're hearing me. What they're saying is, I'd really like you to demonstrate interest with these active listening to cues. Here's what they are. First, they are vocal cues, cues that indicate that you're paying attention. Uh-huh, Yeah. Oh, really? Oh, go on. Okay. Oh, I can't believe it. We're saying things and then we're physically nodding or engaged in a way that we're reacting to what somebody's saying. These minimal encouragers keep people talking and they recognize that they're listening to you. The second thing you do is to mirror. If somebody leans in, you want to lean in back? If somebody crosses their hands, we naturally do this in conversations. We often end up doing things that mirror somebody else. We can also do this verbally by repeating the last few words were the gist of what somebody just said. You might just repeat the gist like that wasn't right at all. Or that's really crazy. We're repeating something that suggest this has been a really tough quarter. We're demonstrating that we're listening to somebody. The idea here is, we can think about demonstrating interests with these minimal encouragers that are really helpful. Probing further we're summarizing, were taking their perspective and then we're clarifying things. Let me make sure I understand what you're saying. You know, the depreciation values for last year or the problem with his inventory or the shipping and supply chain challenges are causing this problem. In the next quarter, what you're expecting is this or where do you see these things resolving or what solutions could I be a part of your phrasing things in a way that demonstrates your listening. I'm really focused on your problem. Then you're following up with another question. This is a way to elicit a lot of information. As you're doing it, you're demonstrating concern for the relationship. Remember these two key pillars, information and relationships. Active listening is a way to advance both of these. That is, you're gaining information, you're building rapport. Everybody wants to know that they've been heard and active listening is a key way to do that. For active listening, we're asking questions, we're listening and not talking. We're demonstrating interest were minimal encouragers and mirroring, and we're probing further by summarizing and asking follow-up questions. Those are the key pieces for active listening. Here the last ideas I want to share about exchanging information. When people ask us questions, we should be ready to answer those questions. We should anticipate here key questions people are going to ask me and we want to be ready with answers for those questions. We'll talk more about the idea of question asking and answers a little bit later. When we make arguments for things. Here's why this is the fair market value. Here's the fair market wage and here's the data to support it, we want to give succinct explanations. The ideas of these explanations should be grounded in some facts and objective criteria, that can be an optimistic interpretation of those criteria. We can say, look here's why I'm pricing it this way. Here's the comparable, I think is most relevant, that one comparable suggests this price, or here's the way I've interpreted the trend of prices. We want to give a simple succinct explanation. Expert negotiators provide fewer explanations than novice negotiators. Here's the problem. As a novice, we might think, I want you to have all the seven reasons why I should have a higher salary. But the problem is by the time I get to numbers 5, 6, and 7, those reasons aren't so great, and so I'm ending with some weak reasons that my counterpart could push it back on. As opposed to the two or three very crisp reasons that are very solid, so fewer explanations. Finally, we'll talk more about deception, but we should anticipate that people will engage in deception. It's very common in negotiations. People don't share all of their information. Negotiations is a domain in which deception is far more accepted than other domains, and so we want to ask questions. We want to seek disconfirming evidence. I'll share a fun example from one of my friends, Angel [inaudible]. He was a crisis negotiator. In one crisis, there was somebody that was up on a roof with a rifle. They had cordoned off the whole space. They've been negotiating with this guy. They finally got the guy to throw his rifle down over the side of the building. The SWAT team, they're all ready to go. They're like, we've disarmed him, and Angel held them back. He just said, "Okay, now throw down your other gun," and to everyone's surprise, there was a handgun that got thrown over. The SWAT teams like, well, how did you know that, and he's like, I had no idea, but I figured I might as well ask. The idea is that we might not know things for sure, but go ahead and ask. Assume that there could be more information out there than you know, and we should always be seeking disconfirming evidence, that is, don't just assume that we know everything until we've really checked it out. Those are ideas about how exchange information and gather information in this really important stage of the bargaining process.
