Negotiation is central to business - but how to do it is where parties disagree.

Psychologists suggest that a good way to start is to first seek out areas where you agree, and to acknowledge these communal values and/or interests; then to address the minor disagreements; before attempting to deal with any more major disagreements.

This allows time for some rapport and trust to be built up and means major disagreements are more likely to be dealt with in a more rational and adult manner than would otherwise be the case. Faced with an extremely recalcitrant opposite number across the table, instinct may be to trade verbal insults, but this risks developing into a vicious and escalating cycle - better to hold fire, take the high road and disarm the other party by giving them something they want.

hold fire, take the high road and disarm the other party

Generous opening gestures can break a deadlock. The story goes that in the very difficult Israeli-Egyptian peace talks between Begin and Sadat in the late 1970s little progress had been made. With 13 days of the two-week process gone, Carter presented autographed photos to Begin, personally addressed to each of Begin’s grandchildren.

Here, as elsewhere, the intrusion of interpersonal concerns into the political area reputedly changed the mood and opened the way to move forward and reach agreement. Negotiations reportedly moved on in earnest only after this personal touch.

Presently, a number of companies are faced with the unpleasant task of balancing books in a time of falling orders. Since staff costs are often a major component of total costs, changes to staffing levels often ensue.

Some companies tell staff they are going to be made redundant at the last minute, perhaps partly in an attempt to minimise any unpleasantness between staff and management, or to prevent staff taking company data with them.

Companies with a more self-organising ethos sometimes present the bottom-line figures to workers and ask them what they wish the company to do to balance the books.

Different divisions may take different paths: some cut hours, others lay-off staff early on with a view to avoiding prolonging the pain, others give staff an extended holiday. At Semco, staff have been allowed to use company premises to get other work.

Whatever the outcome, most staff prefer to be consulted and feel better and more respected if they have been included in the negotiation process.

The more Machiavellian amongst us can try using non-verbal communication to assess the progress of negotiations.

When someone feels attracted to us, or agrees with, and is engaged with, what we are saying, they are more likely to mirror our postures and gestures. For example, they might lean in at a very similar angle and cross arms when we do.

Likewise where they disagree, it is common for people to move away slightly at the time the statement is made.

To assess if another party is feeling sympathetic to your line uncross your legs or straighten your glasses and see if the other person moves something themselves immediately after. If they do popular wisdom has it they are either attracted to you or fairly persuaded by your arguments, that or they have an itch. Or that they have studied non-verbal sales 101 too!

Find out more

Watch Evan Davis on The Bottom Line videos

Discover more about the art of negotiation with these Open University Busines School courses:
Managing performance and change
Fundamentals of senior management
Business functions in context

About the author

Jane Henry is an applied psychologist. She chairs the Open University Business School Creativity, Innovation and Change programme.

Subscribe to Jane Henry's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

After using email for 15 years, in 1990 Donald Knuth, the eminent computational scientist, gave up reading and replying to email. His reason - he needed more uninterrupted time for his work. By all accounts this is a common feeling about email. Knuth’s solution, however, was not as draconian as it might appear. He wrote,

“I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming mail and separates out anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.”

Knuth’s solution to the ‘problem’ of email – to delegate it – isn’t available to most of us in such a complete solution. In her Four D's for Decision Making model, productivity expert Sally McGhee finds three more Ds to accompany delegate. She adds:

• Do it (in less than two minutes)
• Defer it
• Delete it

In practice everyone uses her Four D’s model for email management in one shape or form – but McGhee’s message is that efficiency benefits do accrue from such systematic, daily practices. Her claim is that 50% of email can be deleted or filed, 30% delegated or completed in less than two minutes and 20% deferred for later completion. 

Systematic strategies do help significantly in managing the email ‘problem’, but I also think that this example of fitting the person to the technology - rounding the square peg - is a tad short-sighted. Of course, if someone is having severe problems with email they should be encouraged to think about whether their aptitudes and skills match the demands of the work. Is the email problem just a symptom of a larger problem? In most cases, however, instead of blaming the individual it’s necessary to look at the role that the technology plays in creating individual problems. I’m not suggesting a luddite solution – there’s no going back from the obvious benefits of email – not even for one day a week. Rather, what is it about the implementation of email systems that creates the problems that users experience? 

While spam is an irritation, the major issue within sizeable organisations is the carbon copy (CC) facility that, by all accounts, is heavily abused. Most complaints I’ve heard about email relate to the sheer volume of CC’d mail – and specifically to the practices of some people continually advertising their existence by broadcasting their thoughts more widely than the message requires. 

While intelligent spam filters can minimise the external spam problem, there are more interesting ways of dealing with internal ‘spam’. One is to get the IT department to disable the CC facility – perhaps more easily said than done. More exciting is to engage in ‘guerrilla war’ with the CC- spammers. It’s easy to set up an automatic task that identifies the sender of a CC’d message and generates a standard reply – similar to the ‘Out of Office’ reply facility. One rather pompous automated reply that has produced results goes along the lines:

“Thank you for your CC’d message. In the interest of efficiency all my CC’d mail is diverted to a holding folder. If by the end of the day I have time to read your message I’ll do so. Otherwise the entire folder is deleted. If you think it’s important that I read your message, please send it to me directly. Thank you.” 

Such guerrilla activities are more effective if done collectively by CC-spam sufferers. 

Another approach is to ask what role CC-spammers think their communications play. Apart from attempts at self-aggrandisement, there are usually genuine attempts to involve others to facilitate collaboration. But, for collaborative working, is email the appropriate tool? Email works well for the individual and for mainly one-to-one communication. Communications such as “when will you have it done?” or “what do you think about X?” are well supported. But when you need to obtain and organise the contributions of several people, email is not the best choice. 

For around twenty years, software which supports collaborative work through messaging has been available – all the while growing in usefulness and ease-of-use. The original system – Lotus Notes – dating back to 1984 is still available (now under the auspices of IBM). Microsoft has its Sharepoint system, which is designed to add a collaborative dimension to their Office suite. Some years ago, the Open Source Moodle system began to take a hold in Universities – an approach to collaboration that was giving ‘street cred’ by its adoption by the Open University. But, perhaps the most interesting approach is the recent offering from the ubiquitous Google called Google Sites. The feature of interest in Google Sites is it doesn’t require users to run their own servers to host the system - in contrast to the IBM, Microsoft and Moodle systems. Google Sites is accessed from the desktop using a web browser – with all the collaboration tools provided through the browser.

Solutions to the problems of email are many. If a goal is to make your life less frustrating, then there are many sources of advice on efficient email management strategies available on the worldwide web – and you can strike a personal blow for freedom from CC-spam by engaging in ‘guerrilla tactics’. If however, you are more interested in more effective working practices – using round pegs to fit in round holes - then using software specifically designed for supporting collaborative working is worth investigating.

Links

•  
• Video extras: email - the experts explain why email is both a blessing and a curse
• 4 Ways to Take Control of Your E-mail Inbox – Sally McGhee on using your email more efficiently
• Managing knowledge - you’ve got the data, but how do you make the best use of it?
• Email is ruining my life! - one-third of workers are suffering from email stress
• Click On: Five ways to… - our quick guides to technology teach you what you need to know
• Join the discussion - do you have any advice for keeping control of email?

Courses

• Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies
• Professional communication skills for business studies

About the author

Before retiring, Dr Geoffrey Einon was lecturer in Telematics in the Technology Faculty at the Open University.

Subscribe to Geoffrey Einon's posts

 

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world – and down your street, in The Money Programme.

In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, Boldwood becomes entranced with Bathsheba, after, in a moment of idle fancy, she sends him a Valentine. He hardly knows her and as the narrator tells us:

The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her – visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most prettily remembered.

Hardy gives us a picture of romantic idealisation; an important part of the process of falling in love. In the psychoanalytic view of love and infatuation, we are inclined to project on to others what we most desire in ourselves. We each foster within ourselves an idealised self and look to the other to complete what we lack. For this to happen, it helps that the other person fits our ideal in some sense. However, it also helps that we don’t see too much detail; thus the other person can become a blank slate on which we write our desires. Popular sayings and songs remind us of this:

‘Love is blind’,

‘When your heart’s on fire, you must realize, smoke gets in your eyes’ ,
‘You know it’s clear that I’ve been blind, I’ve been a fool’.

Internet communication, for many, provides the ideal conditions in which to fall in love. Just enough cues about the other person to hook into our desires, not enough information to shatter the romantic illusion. Candid self disclosure becomes common as it is the only means of getting to know each other and is protected by a degree of anonymity, but it is also easy to build a picture that the other wishes to see. Indeed, as I discussed in a recent column on the psychology of deception, the distancing provided by the internet can reduce the emotional costs of deceiving others. Many are attracted to the internet as a medium for relationships for just this reason – it provides the opportunity for emotional contact without personal risk or exposure.

Face-to-face relationships move from an initial encounter in a physical location and based on physical attractiveness, to the discovery of common interests and self-disclosure. Internet relationships proceed in the opposite direction – the physical encounter comes last. For some the transition from romantic idealisation to genuine attachment happens during the course of an internet romance. For others the fantasy becomes tempered with reality as they meet for the first time. For a few the relationship endures. For many the intense feelings of the online relationship evaporate when confronted with the detailed reality of their amorata.

Rosantonietta Scramaglia interviewed fifty people who had fallen in love on the internet. She describes what they told her about the positive and negative sides of the experience:

It creates ‘mystery’, ‘the unknown’, ‘the excitement of something you’ve never experienced before’, ‘it lets you dream’. It is ‘more fun because you can discover the other person gradually’. People feel ‘the fascination of novelty’…

[but] a relationship can spring up which is, … ‘not as serious because it is easier to leave each other because you do not have to face the situation in person’, or ‘not as easy because you are going into it blind’, or a situation where ‘uncertainty’ prevails, where it is ‘impossible to be sure that the other person is really sincere’, where you have to have a blind faith in what you are told, and you risk meeting the wrong kind of people or being taken for a ride’. And, confronted with these unknowns, ‘the worse thing is that you get your expectations up’, and tend to ‘idealize the partner more’.

An increasing number of online services exist to provide opportunities for online romance. A Google search identifies nearly 8.6 million references on the net to ‘online dating’. As we have seen the internet is a medium which provides mystery and distance. As Thomas Hardy shows us, these provide a fertile medium in which love can flourish.

Is internet romance here to stay? I think I can confidently predict that it will continue to grow and make a few entrepreneurs, who have captured the right mix of mystery, distance and intimacy, very rich indeed.

Further reading

• The dating game – are you loyal? The competition among advertisers for our consumer fidelity is fierce.

About the author

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the OU Business School. His research includes investigations into the performance of traders in financial markets, and the problems that occur when management practices are transferred from one country to another.

He is also a National Teaching Fellow, and Principal of the Centre for Practice-Based Professional Learning.

Subscribe to Mark Fenton-O'Creevy's posts