I find that most people employed in ICT know what a negotiation is, yet they inevitably fail to see one, even when it's placed right in front of them. I don't know the reasons (maybe our compulsively rational, binary mindset?) and I don't plan to study them.
I will however claim, rather ambitiously, that if we realize that everything is a negotiation, and deal with it accordingly, we can greatly improve the way we work together, and also be more effective.
Some examples: a colleague reaches out to me and suggests we buy support for the Open Source monitoring product we use, because it's critical to our infrastructure. I say no, briefly arguing my reasons.
We reach out to another team and suggest a change, they decline it.
Are these negotiations? yes! and no!
Yes, well of course they are: as the title says everything is a negotiation. At the same time, the conversation stops short of the discussion with the intent to find a compromise, so it's only just a potential negotiation.
Another example: I ask for a raise, receive an offer for X. Should I take it, leave it, or negotiate? Most of us don't understand this is also a negotiation, much to our detriment. We think we cannot negotiate further, or that it would be perceived as "being difficult". So we often end up accepting the offer, and then complain about that's so much less than what we are worth, and become bitter.
Yet another example: we suggest that we switch to tool X or technology Y, and our suggestion is not considered, or briefly looked at and then dropped. We then go on to complain about how this workplace does not values our ideas, it is not innovating enough, or we will fail as a business if we don't do that. As we were enough business-savvy to understand that (we are not)! My point is that if we actually were business-savvy we would try to understand the reasons for the no, and work with those instead.
So how can we improve our negotiation skills? Here are a few high-level pointers. You'll have to figure out what works for you. There's no 2 days course plus certification for this, I'm afraid.
We are responsible
First off, we must admit that we are responsible for starting or not the negotiation. We must not expect others to do it, lest we accept that our agency exists out of our control.
We enter negotiations with a desire to listen and understand, not to explain and school others. We
ask "show me", even when the process seems abundantly clear. We sit down next to them and, if possible, ask that we carry out the work ourselves to better appreciate even the smallest details.
Win-win
We do not enter a negotiation with the goal of defeating our opponent. Instead, we look for common ground and try to come to a compromise where everybody wins.
We remember this is a
long-term game we are playing, and we want to keep playing (working) with these people for as long as possible.
Learn to retreat
There are very few (exceptional) cases where we are right, and doing nothing short of what we suggest will cause irreparable harm. We accept this (most of us is not as smart as we would like to think we are), and understand that sometimes withdrawing from a negotiation is the best way to move forward with our plan.
Yes, if we keep insisting and hammer our proposal through, we might end up antagonizing the very people we were looking to work with in the first place. This will do very little to secure the positive outcomes we seek out of our victory, and will certainly not encourage anyone to work with us in the future.
It might work once, but at a great cost.
Instead, if we retreat, we will keep the chance to bring the same proposal up, at a later, perhaps more favourable, time. Again, remember this is a long-term game.
Sometimes we lose
A variant of retreating is accepting that, sometimes, we just straight up lose the negotiation. That is ok. Now it's the time to sit down and understand what went wrong: perhaps it was just not the right time, or we failed to argue our reasons eloquently enough. Whatever happened, remember we are responsible for the outcome, just as much as the other parties.
Wining that our great idea was not understood will not help us. Understanding how we fell short of selling it, will do help us. We engage in constructive self-criticism, not in harmful complain.
Losing, just like failure or an outage, is an opportunity, use it to our advantage. If we learn from it, next time our chances of conducting the negotation successfully will increase. If all we do is complain, we won't even start it.
Optimize globally
In certain occasions we want to suggest an improvement or a change in order to make our job easier. If that ends up helping the whole company or other departments too, it's called a global optimization. If it only helps us or our team, and possibly degrades others, it's a local optimization.
It should be self-evident that global optimizations will be easier to negotiate, provided that you can argument their value adequately (see: you are responsible).
Be effective, not right
We do the right thing, not things right.
Nobody owes us anything (trust is earned)
When we start out in a new organization, initially our trust balance is zero. As we interact with others we either make deposits or withdrawals in the trust bank.
No one else can make those deposits or withdrawals, except for us, through our actions. See, again, we are responsible. The more trust we have in the bank, the more chances we have of getting away with the occasional misdemeanour.
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