The Negotiation Book: Your Definitive Guide To Successful Negotiating

7.9. EMPOWERMENT AND SCOPE TO CREATE VALUE

So, responsibility and accountability go hand in hand. Some businesses want their managers to be entrepreneurial. They want to empower them to take decisions, to be creative, to build agreements and to maximise value within the agreements they are involved in. In fact, high potential deals come from creative thinking (trait 9, Chapter 4, page 118). Creative thinking comes from those who are empowered and therefore encouraged to think more broadly. If you disempower someone by providing them with limited scope to operate, it will limit their thinking and attract responses such as: 'I didn't even consider the prospect of a joint venture; it's not part of my remit.'

If you want to negotiate incremental value in your agreements you need to be empowered with as much scope as possible.

7.9.1. The importance of defining value

Having greater scope with moderate forms of empowerment is a healthy way of balancing behaviour within the organisation. However, scope and creativity must also be linked to accountability. You might ask someone to build creative deals that maximise value. However, unless you define how value will be measured they may then overlook the risks they have accepted in their quest to extract value. If the personal benefits associated with highly profitable agreements are very high, limits of authority may be worth building into the negotiator's brief. As we have witnessed in the global banking industry in the lead up to the ...