Short essays on negotiating through everyday life, work, and times of upheaval.
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What’s my alternative?
The road to regrettable yet avoidable workplace mistakes is littered with the absence of three small words: what’s my alternative? A failure to ask this simple question, I submit, can account for a major portion of our worst workplace decisions. To avoid such decisions and make our lives more negotiable, let’s look at a few…
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Make it easy for them!
Scarcely a day passes when we don’t need a coworker to do something—respond to an email, review a report, run an analysis, take a web survey, or offer a status update. So deep is our dependence that we’ve developed a sophisticated repertoire of strategies for eliciting others’ responses. Some of the most popular: Persuading them:…
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Questions instead of concessions!
There comes a moment in most negotiations when we consider making a concession. Whether it’s reducing the amount of the requested discount on our cable bill, succumbing to a coworker who keeps asking us to do something, or accepting an organizational decision that we know to be flawed—opportunities to concede abound. And in many such…
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Our many opportunities to mediate: And our new opportunity to learn how
Does it seem like the people all around you just can’t get along? Do you often lament everyone’s inability to relate to everyone else, which often impedes your own happiness? If so, you’re in luck. You have many daily opportunities to mediate! Anytime you can help the people around you reconcile their differences, you have…
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Do I have to? Convincing yourself to do things
A significant portion of life consists of convincing yourself to do things—things you know you should do but really don’t want to. From watching your diet, to organizing your garage, to seeing the doctor, unappealing but critical tasks abound. What can negotiations research teach us about such situations? Quite a lot if we treat them…
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Convincing kids to do things, part II
Last week, we considered convincing multiple kids to do things, characterizing the whole process as a multiparty negotiation. This week, let’s consider convincing one kid to do one type of thing: something good for them but not particularly appealing. For example: eating their veggies, getting their flu shot, or making some form of physical contact…
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Convincing kids to do things: On multiparty negotiation
Convincing multiple children to do something—anything—is a multiparty negotiation. Coming out of the bath, putting on their shoes, going to bed, you name it: it’s a multiparty negotiation (I’m told.) Given the complexity of such situations, wouldn’t it be nice if negotiation research could help? It would, and it can. Negotiation scholars have surfaced several…
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Doing their job for them
Achieving your own objectives often requires the assistance of customer service representatives whose job is to help you. Just one problem: At times, the representatives on whom you depend seem to have no intention of doing their jobs. Accordingly, making life negotiable can require you to do at least a portion of somebody else’s job…
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Negotiating with the airlines (i.e., from a position of complete powerlessness)
Disputes with the airlines tend to elicit a sense of complete powerlessness. Bad seat? Full bin? Overbooked flight? It’s David versus Goliath x 10. Given that you need to get somewhere and they get to decide whether you do, your own power position seems tenuous, at best. Since such disputes will probably only increase in…
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Asking more of our sales associates
Most people try to spend as little time in a store as possible. If we can get into a store, find the desired product, and get out without ever talking to a sales associate, we would we ever dilly-dally? Well, that philosophy works well enough for most purchases. But I’m here to highlight the types…
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Negotiation lessons from the safety patrol
I recently volunteered to serve as safety patrolman for my neighborhood. In essence, this involved trolling around the neighborhood at night, making sure no one (i.e., no teenager) was breaking community rules (e.g., loitering at the community beach) or even breaking the law (e.g., defacing said beach). Since my duties tended to bring the community’s…
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What, we agree? Compatible issues in a disagreeable world
It sometimes seems that seething disagreements surround us. Crazy passengers punching out flight attendants, angry politicians launching invective, nasty comments following a nice news story about puppies and kittens. At times like these, it’s easy to forget that we actually agree with each other quite often. In negotiation-speak, we can easily lose sight of the…
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Mythical images of the negotiator
I recently attended the International Association of Conflict Management meeting in Berlin—an opportunity for negotiation researchers like myself to geek out. And in the process of geeking out, I had an interesting albeit especially geeky thought: the image of negotiation and negotiators that most of us hold in our brains is actually quite different than…
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Our many everyday opportunities to negotiate
I might write about negotiation, but I’m still amazed at how often everyday negotiation opportunities present themselves. And identifying such opportunities is nothing short of critical, as finding chances to negotiate is often the only way to make life negotiable. To see what I mean, consider three recent interactions with a single bike shop. The…
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Summer travel synopsis
If you’ve hit the roads or visited the airport recently, you know that the summer travel season is well underway. Thus, I thought this an opportune time to review some of the many ways negotiation research can make travels negotiable. To that end, here’s a brief synopsis of a few past posts on travel, along…
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Delayed response: Replying to emails sluggishly but strategically
I have to admit it: I am a compulsive email replier. I feel the acute need to reply almost immediately to every email I receive. Unfortunately, this tendency is not always helpful, particularly in the context of an email negotiation. Indeed, sending a delayed reply, uncomfortable as it may be, can help negotiators in many…
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Dissatisfactory service: Separating the person from the problem?
It happens too often: dissatisfactory service spoils an otherwise satisfactory experience. Given the ubiquity of such events, it probably makes sense to consider our reactions carefully, comparing them against the types of reactions that can make life negotiable. Let’s start by considering two real and recent experiences from my own life: Last Friday, we arrived…
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Making hotels negotiable
The Memorial Day weekend saw me and many others staying in a hotel. And staying in a hotel reminded me just how many aspects of a hotel stay are negotiable—how many aspects of a hotel stay often require negotiation to make life negotiable. Luckily, many hotel negotiations rely heavily on just one principle: the notion…
