Chapter 26
Trust-Based Negotiations
Bringing trust to the negotiating table not only turns transactions into win-win opportunities, but also creates relationships out of transactional negotiations. With trust-building as a part of your negotiating approach, you will experience more rewarding and profitable outcomes and business relationships that stand the test of time. This chapter addresses the subtle pitfalls that lead to negotiation mediocrity and describes how to apply the trust principles to any negotiation for better results in the short term and the long term.
Negotiations 101: There is a parable about two monkeys that vividly illustrates the way negotiations usually play out. There once were two monkeys and one banana. Naturally, being monkeys, they both want the banana. They struggle briefly and the banana gets ripped in two. One proceeds to peel off his half of the banana and eat the skin, while the other throws away the peel of the banana and just eats the meat inside. One only wanted the peel, the other only the skin. Each gained just a portion of what they could have had if they had stopped grabbing and negotiated what each wanted.
The key to trust-based negotiations is to live the trust principles, which means focusing as much (or more) on how you conduct yourself as you do on the near-term result you get.
While we all like to think of ourselves as higher-order beings, the fact is we often approach negotiations—efforts to create outcomes that satisfy various ...
