📜 Breaking the gridlock: a negotiator’s playbook

Get your internal stakeholders on side before you do anything

Before you begin any negotiation, you need to “unstop the pipes” if you will. In trade negotiations, you start with getting all the agencies around government on board – Commerce, Agriculture, State, Labor, Environment. Then you need to reach out to your Congressional people, the Committees of Jurisdiction, and consult and vet the idea with them. Then you expand out to the broader stakeholder community to make sure the businesses that would benefit from the deal are engaged, and also that you’ve consulted unions and civil society organisations whose equities would be impacted. In other words, get your house in order before you begin any negotiation. If there are differing views, reconcile them.

Understand how other people are looking at the same situation

When a trading partner with whom you are negotiating says or publishes things that get your hackles up (or those of your colleagues), you can’t jump on your first reaction that these people are crazy or they don’t get it. If you back up and look at where they’re coming from, what lived experiences they have, what assumptions they make, and then view their comments through what their own assumptions and thinking is, there’s much more of a basis for understanding. By and large, people are not crazy or stupid,  and if you’re deciding within the first five minutes that somebody is crazy or stupid, you’ve got to reassess your own assumptions.

Strong relationships drive successful negotiations

In a negotiation, it’s surprisingly important to get along with the person you’re sitting down with if you want to make progress. We’re adults, professionals, and we have a job to do, so on one level it should just be about sitting down and saying “Okay let’s get on with it, let’s figure out how we get a deal.” But when things get tough, if you like and respect somebody you’re going to try that bit harder to work things out. A lot of forward movement and ‘unsticking’ happens when you’re having a glass of wine after the long negotiating day is over, or walking along the Thames with a coffee, where you can lay out what’s really going on in that room and what the real constraints are. But you both have to trust each other if you’re going to be able to create that space.