Section Five

Understanding the Players

In the previous sections, I’ve concentrated on how to play the negotiating game. Now I want to focus on the importance of understanding the other negotiator and realizing that it is a major key to Power Negotiating. People are different. They throw who they are into the negotiation. It affects the kind of strategy that they develop, it influences which of the Gambits they will use and how they will use them, and it determines their entire style of negotiating.

Remember you’re always dealing with an individual, not an organization, even if you are negotiating with a union boss who heads up a 10,000-member union. I don’t blame you for assuming the needs of his members dictate his actions, but I believe that his personal needs guide his actions. A secretary of state may have explicit instructions from the president on how he should conduct international negotiations, but his personal needs may still dominate his actions. Understand the person and you can often dominate the negotiations.

We’ll look at you and see if you have what it takes to be a Power Negotiator as I cover the Personal Characteristics, Attitudes, and Beliefs of Power Negotiators. People seem to think that some people are born with the characteristics that make them successful negotiators. “Oh, he’s a born negotiator,” you’ll hear people say. You know that’s not true. I challenge you to open any newspaper in the land and show me a birth announcement that says, “A negotiator was born at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital today.” No, people are not born negotiators. Negotiating is a learnable skill. In this section I’ll teach how to feel comfortable with any style of negotiator, so you can easily read various negotiators and their approach to getting what they want. Then I’ll show you how to adapt your style of negotiating to theirs.