Tag Archives: tradeoffs

Negotiating your way through homeschooling and virtual learning

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As the school year approaches and COVID-19 drags on, many of us find ourselves faced with two potentially challenging options for educating our children: homeschooling or supervising their virtual learning (with the latter potentially resembling the former).

Since neither permits a focal parent to do much else, both are likely to prove difficult. Since renegotiating the parent’s relationships with the other involved parties can considerably ease the burden, however, it’s worth thinking of the situation as a bundle of negotiations and considering how some basic negotiation principles can make it marginally more negotiable.

In particular, when planning for your children’s fall education, you may wish to negotiate with:

  • Your supervisor: Spending hours imparting lessons or overseeing your children’s virtual learning will clearly impact your ability to work normal business hours. Yet, the work still needs doing. A frank conversation with your supervisor about how to accomplish the underlying objectives on a distinctly different timetable, hopefully guided by the two parties’ underlying interests rather than their intractable positions, should help to identify a solution.
  • Your spouse or partner: The fact that you’re in charge of educational oversight does not imply that your spouse or partner is uninvolved. Those chores you won’t have time to do? Hopefully they can chip in. Those nighttime work hours you’ll have to pull? Perhaps they’ll take over bedtime procedures for the freshly educated kiddos. The tradeoffs you’re making to deliver a quality education should not just be personal tradeoffs—they should be tradeoffs with the supportive people around you.
  • Your kiddos: The role of parent does not perfectly correspond to the role of educational overseer. At any particular moment, you as parent might allow your kiddos considerable discretion as to their time management, their intra-house location, and their appetite for intellectual enlargement. As educational overseer, however, you may well need to lay down some laws on topics like these. Here, a focus on making the first offer (and potentially the final offer) as to the rules for learning at home may usefully anchor everyone’s expectations.
  • Your neighbors: Educational oversight does not have to be a solitary endeavor. Many neighbors have already decided to band together and provide home-based learning collectively. Perhaps the kids will co-locate under a rotating cast of neighbors to learn virtually and in parallel, thereby furnishing some social connection. Or maybe the parents will even rotate through the homeschooling duties themselves on a particular schedule. Regardless, the bartering and swapping of educational responsibilities could easily enlarge everyone’s pie.
  • The teacher: If you’re overseeing virtual learning, you’ll probably have many opportunities to negotiate topics like due dates, response formats, and the appropriate amount of guidance with the teacher. Rather than suffering through an insufferable response template, for example, it can’t hurt to ask about an alternative format. Conversely, if you’ve decided to homeschool, the teacher is precisely yourself. Since homeschooling will probably challenge an already fragile work-life balance, you might consider treating your work-life balance as a negotiation with yourself.

If our experience in the spring taught us anything, it’s that home-based learning will be hard to negotiate in the best of circumstances. Still, by recognizing the many opportunities to renegotiate our relationships with the other involved parties, we can probably learn to make home-based learning at least a bit more negotiable.

When and why to pick your battles: The hidden connection to logrolling

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We’ve all heard the hackneyed organizational advice to “pick your battles.” But there are two interrelated and semi-obvious problems with this (and much other) advice: No one can clearly say when or why it applies.

Luckily, negotiation research has something indirectly but highly relevant to say about picking your battles. Since understanding what it is can make organizational life negotiable, let’s unravel these cryptic comments further.

The negotiation literature has not, to my knowledge, directly investigated picking your battles. But it has often investigated the negotiation strategy of logrolling, in which you make a concession on a relatively trivial issue if (and only if) your counterpart concedes on something of critical importance to you. You accept the silly financing plan if the dealer gives you the coveted discount. You agree to work on the task you secretly sorta like if your coworker relieves you of something onerous.

As you might suspect from the examples, the ability to effectively logroll is central to the ability to effectively negotiate in general. The logic is simple: It’s often considerably more satisfying to get everything you want on a really important issue (and nothing on something trivial) than is to get half of what you wanted on both.

Now what (in the world) does this have to do with picking your battles? Quite a lot, actually. Because what does it mean to pick your battles if not to let someone have their way on an issue that doesn’t really rock your world (but might rock theirs), in expectation that you’ll demand your way on a future issue capable of making your own world shudder? Put like that, the connection to logrolling is obvious: picking your battles is simply logrolling spread over time—conceding on the unimportant issues of the present in exchange for someone else’s concessions on the critical issues of the future.

If you buy the analogy, then you should find it easier to detect the situations when the advice really applies: when you’re dealing with an issue that’s trivial to you and critical to them, as well as a person you expect to depend on in the future. (If any of these conditions don’t apply, battle away!) Additionally, you should find it easier to motivate your own battle-picking since you can now see the benefits looming down the line. Most importantly, you should increasingly find yourself waging and winning the critical battles at work rather than belaboring and losing the continuous war.

Negotiation as entrepreneurship

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When we hear the word “negotiate,” we often think of ourselves in a “negotiation,” staring down an unscrupulous car dealer or intransigent HR representative. Only infrequently do we treat “negotiate” as what it is: a verb.

That’s a shame because it leads us to forget that negotiating is an action people choose to take. Someone has to decide to negotiate. Remembering that can help us see negotiation for what it really is: an entrepreneurial attempt to achieve our own goals by helping someone else do the same. And seeing negotiation as entrepreneurship can make life more negotiable.

A quick, simple, real-life story to illustrate what I mean: I hate and I mean hate putting away all my clothes after they’re washed. I’m not sure what it is: perhaps it’s the press of other priorities, e.g., the need to publish or perish. Or perhaps just laziness. Regardless, I despise few chores more than folding and hanging. My wife, in turn, hates and I mean hates cleaning the cat box. And her reasoning is a little more sensible: it stinks and spills all over the place, and the cat inevitably decides to resolve his indigestion at just that moment. Loving my boy cat to pieces, however, I don’t really mind it.

Now, this looks nothing like a negotiation—particularly the kind with the car dealer or HR rep. But it clearly presents the opportunity to negotiate—and did in real life. Talking through our respective hates one day, she expressed confusion over mine: “What’s so bad about putting your clothes away?” And herein lay an entrepreneurial opportunity.

No, I wasn’t launching a Silicon Valley startup, seeking VC funding, or even setting up a corner store. But I would like to think I was being quite entrepreneurial when I proposed the simple and obvious trade: How about you put my clothes away if I clean the cat box? It’s not rocket science, and my end of the bargain may even seem silly if you like folding or dislike cat excrement. But it made sense to both of us at the time and made us both better off over the long run.

It’s a silly story, I know, but it has a point: the real purpose of negotiation is not to bend a car dealer into submission. It’s to create value by meeting your own needs and someone else’s at the same time. Since doing that is the same as being entrepreneurial, we’d probably all benefit by starting to see negotiation as entrepreneurship rather than conflict.