Negotiations

This from another assignment for my Global Management class about negotiations.

I have not had very much experience with negotiating in business, but as I think about it I have done quite a bit of negotiating in my personal life. I have two examples to describe in this report. The first is of a time when I had a successful negotiation in planning a vacation. The second is of a time when I was negotiating and did not have a successful result.

Two years ago my mother wanted my wife and I to travel to Florida to see them while they were there for the winter. My wife did not particularly want to spend vacation time to visit with my mother and her husband and she did not want to fly to Florida or any where else. I did not want to spend a whole week with my mother and her husband either because no matter where they are or who they are with they always act the same way, not granting much consideration to hosts or house guests.

This is how the negotiations worked. My mother invited us to fly down to Lantana, Florida to visit with them and to either go to one of the theme parks or go fishing on a charter boat.

I told my mother that Jayleigh, my wife, did not want to fly at all.

My mother made a counteroffer that she would pay for us to fly down to West Palm Beach Florida.

I responded that we prefer to take road trip vacations and that if she would give us money equivalent to the airfares from Michigan to Florida we could use that money to be able to drive down.

My mother was disappointed that we would not have as much time to spend in Florida if we drove instead of flying, but she agreed to do it that way. My wife still did not really want to go to Florida, but I told her that we would visit my sister and her family in the Charlotte, North Carolina area and we could also spend time with my wife’s aunt and young cousins in Charleston, South Carolina.

My wife agreed to do that. In some ways that negotiation was more successful than the trip itself. We only had two days during that vacation where we were not traveling, but we were able to spend some time with friends from Williamston, Michigan that had traveled to Florida to go to Disney World and an extra day with my sister when we were driving home.

The unsuccessful negotiation that I can recall involved a job interview that my friend helped me get; in fact this was the same friend that I saw in Florida when we were both on vacation. My friend works in designing, installing, and managing computer networks, he knew that I was looking to move out of the helpdesk environment and increase my level of compensation.

During the interview, the soft skills or people skills required for the perspective position were given to me, and my experience and business knowledge and skill level matched up well to those requirements. Then I was given the basics of the technical requirements necessary for the position that they were looking to fill. They were looking for some one that could design a network and then both implement it and support or maintain it.

I was a pretty savvy user, but I was not prepared to work at that kind of computer networking. If that was not enough to drive me out of the pool of potential candidates, then I clinched it when I asked for about a twenty percent salary increase over my current salary. I felt that this was justified, because the new job would have meant a longer commute, and much work to learn the skills that I needed to have for the new position. Plus the compensation structure at the new company would have locked my salary in at the hiring level for at least a year and probably longer.

On the other hand if I stayed in my existing position, I knew that I was going to be up for a compensation increase in less than six months. The new company was not looking for someone that was going to need quite a bit of on the job training. I was not really looking to leave the job that I already had unless the new company made it truly worth my time. Neither one of us wanted to budge in our expectations so the interview process came to a halt and I stayed in the same working organization.

In a successful negotiation it is likely that the parties involved are going to need to come to a mutually satisfying compromise to resolve the issues. Without give and take negotiations will fall apart and no resolution is likely to be reached. Without negotiations involving listening as well as speaking, you are more likely to end up in arguments and misunderstandings and less likely to solve any problems.

Out of this week I found the points about negotiating techniques very interesting. After the report that I wrote about my negotiation history and an argument that I had with my wife yesterday, it came into clearer focus.

In my successful negotiation about taking the vacation to see my mother in Florida it worked out because we were able to come to a solution that satisfied the interests of all parties. My mother was not able to dictate how we traveled or how much time we spent with her just because she was partially funding the trip or just because she is my mother. We were able to travel on our own schedule, spend time with both my mother and other friends and family that we also wanted to see, and we were able to escape Michigan winter weather for nine days.

In the job interview that I had representing an unsuccessful negotiation, I undercut the negotiations by assuming that since my current job had been willing and eager to provide training to prepare me for a position than I had some right to expect this other company to do the same thing. Also since I knew that I had recently received a raise to a level one percent below what I deserved in my current position and the new job would have kept me at my hiring level of compensation for more than a year, I thought I had a right to put down a desired salary that was about twenty percent more than my current salary. This resulted in the perspective company exercising its right to not hire me.

Tuesday night my wife and I had an argument because my wife felt like she had a right to my attention when I was supposed to be done working. I work from home. I felt like I had a right to finish a few last odds and ends of work and reports without being bothered about going for a walk with her and the dogs. Then it became about power, my wife had the power to leave because she has her own car and she wanted something to eat, and I had not made anything.

I had the power to choose not to make supper and the right to get to my work for class. We also showed each other that we had the power to be insensitive, not listen to each other, and yell at each other.

The argument was only resolved when we set aside our desire to show each other that we were right and that we had power to hurt each other. When we stopped and listened to each other and calmly talked to each other about our day and our feelings and plans then we appreciated each others interests. Our interests were actually pretty much the same, we wanted to get certain things done, like school work and grocery shopping and spend time together. Then we both felt like we could not understand why it had blown up into such a big conflict.