Negotiating – “Make the Pie Bigger”

If you plan on doing business with another party more than once, a successful outcome in the negotiation requires that both parties feel satisfied.  You really do not want to hammer the other party into submission, as they likely will spend most of their time and energy getting even with you at some time in the future to the detriment of both parties.
Over the years, I have determined that in many people’s minds, probably in most people’s minds, negotiating is a confrontational process where at the end of the day, someone has to win and someone has to lose.  This attitude can be seen from the inception of most negotiations where the parties position themselves on opposite sides of a rectangular table and set up another “chicken dance.”

Imagine a pie in the center of the table with the objective of dividing it between the parties.  If the parties are sitting opposite one another staring at the pie, each will be thinking of ways to cut the pie in such a way that “their half” is bigger than the other party’s half – a pretty typical mind set for negotiations.  To achieve true success, that thinking has to change.  In other words, the objective has to change from getting a “bigger half” of an existing pie, to an objective to work together to “make the pie bigger” so that both parties get a bigger piece of pie than they could have gotten on their own.

For this outcome to have a chance of happening, the physical set-up has to change.  In those cases where I was able to arrange the setting, I made sure that there was a round table where the parties had an opportunity to act as equals —no head of the table and no arbitrary “line in the sand.”  In those cases where a rectangular table is the only available option, ask the other party to make room for you on their side of the table so you can put your heads together and hopefully achieve a better outcome for both parties.   Explain that your hope is to combine your talents and resources to “make the pie bigger.”  At first this approach may not be credible to some people because of their perspective of negotiations as strictly transaction type events.  So, in fact, your first negotiation may be to convince the other party that you are sincere, that you are honest and that you really are trustworthy.  In other words, you will need to convince them that this approach is not some new kind of negotiating tactic or trick to win something from them before you even get to the main points in the negotiations.

Lesson learned:  To achieve a successful outcome, both parties have to feel as though they’ve won.  For both parties to win, you need to “make the pie bigger” before you cut it in half.