Listening Your Way up the Corporate Ladder

In a negotiation, silence is golden — in fact, it is money in the bank. Remember, you can’t listen and talk at the same time (not to yourself or to anyone else). Many a negotiation has been blown — and many a sale lost — because someone kept talking long after discussion was necessary or desirable. Conversely, many an opportunity to gain valuable information has been lost because the listening activity stops too soon. One of the best ways to control a meeting is to listen to everyone in the room. Pretty soon you’ll be running the meeting. If a big talker is monopolizing the negotiation, that person probably doesn’t even recognize that others want to contribute to the discussion. Stifle your instinct to grab the floor yourself. Instead, point out someone else who looks as though he or she is trying to talk. “Jane, you look like you had a comment on that.” Jane appreciates it, others appreciate it, and you suddenly control the meeting even if you’re the junior person at the table. Sometimes others can make your point for you. If you find that you still have something to add, the group will probably let you do so. You are now a hero, even to members of the other negotiating team. When you do say something, everyone listens out of appreciation — if not admiration. Various studies have shown that successful people listen better than their counterparts — especially on their way up. Ironically, great success sometimes causes a person to be a less sensitive listener, usually to that person’s detriment. The most visible example is the president of the United States, who must listen well during the rise to political power. However, a sitting president can easily become cut off from the very people who helped in the ascent. The isolated president is a common feature of the American political landscape. To become successful in the business world and stay successful, you must be a good listener. Here are some examples of the importance of listening effectively while you’re on the clock:

• Many managers face setbacks in their careers when they prejudge an employee before they hear all sides of the story. If you want to gain respect as a manager, gather all the data from all the parties before you take any action.
• New employees need to listen first when they enter a meeting or a department. Get the lay of the land. Resist that first verbal contribution, which will be everyone’s first impression of you, until you know that the contribution is a good one.
• Salespeople lose sales when they talk more than they listen. The successful ones use empathetic statements to show they understand what the customer is saying and how he or she is feeling.

Broadway Danny Rose is one of Woody Allen’s best films. You don’t have to like Woody Allen to like this movie. It’s all about some very senior stand-up comics (has-been, borscht-belt guys) sitting around New York’s famous Carnegie Deli reminiscing about the life of a renegade agent named Danny Rose (played by Woody Allen).
During the movie, note that Woody Allen’s character talks nonstop without ever stopping to think what he is saying. But he hangs in there. Give that man points for tenacity. His negotiating success is purely accidental from a technical point of view. He never uses any of the negotiating skills in this book. You may wonder why people spend the time and effort becoming good negotiators when people like Broadway Danny Rose can succeed without skills. The movie demonstrates just how accidental his success is. Life is sweeping this man along. He just keeps talking.

Breaking the Stone Tablet

Write down your goals but don’t chisel them in stone. Goals can and should change throughout the course of your life. Use your written goals as a roadmap to your success. Writing them down sets the process in motion and allows you to frequently review your goals.
During a negotiation, you should state your goals as just that. If you state your goal as a take-it-or-leave-it demand, you create a terrible dynamic.
Remember these keys:

• Goals
• Limits
• Opening offers

If you keep these three concepts separate in your mind, your negotiations begin — and end — on a much happier note. Even if you never change your goals, you should review them just before you close the deal. Then look at your goals again after closing the deal. If they were too high, or maybe not high enough, consider what information you didn’t have before you set your goals that caused you to miss the mark. Don’t kick yourself if you decide that your goals should have been higher. Remember the reasons for making the deal you made and learn from the experience.

How to Set the Opening Offer?

The opening offer is nothing more and nothing less than the first specific statement of what you’re looking for in a negotiation. After you have set your goals for the negotiation, you can consider the opening offer. For example, in a job interview the opening offer is the salary you’re seeking. Don’t look for any hard-and-fast rules or magic formulas. To determine your opening offer, you should draw heavily on the goals and limits you set and the information you have gathered while preparing for the negotiation.

Obviously, your opening offer should be higher than the goals you have set for yourself. But it shouldn’t be so outrageously high as to be off-putting to the other side or make you look foolish or inexperienced Whether the amount you state in your opening offer is higher or lower than the amount of your goal depends on whether you’re the buyer or the seller (you determine how much higher or lower through good preparation):

• If you’re the seller, your opening offer should never be lower than the goal you set.
• If you’re the buyer, the opening offer should never be higher than the goal you set.

People are quite anxious about the opening offer. They’re fearful that they will mess up the entire negotiation by blurting out a demand that is too modest or too ambitious. State your opening offer positively and precisely. You want the ability to measure your achievement. Use your anxiety level as a measure of how well prepared you are. Part of being well prepared is knowing relative values. If you know the value of what you’re offering, the opening offer is easy to deduce. You just decide how much negotiating room you want to leave yourself. Have your opening offer in mind even if you don’t plan to state it openly. This approach speeds your reaction time to whatever offer the other side makes.

How to prioritize your goals?

Be sure to rank your goals in terms of importance. Ideally, you want to achieve 100 percent consensus about the official ranking of your goals. However, different individuals may hold onto their personal agendas. In those cases, let the majority prevail and note explicitly the view of the minority. By making special note of the minority view at the beginning, you record it for the duration. Later, you can allow the repeat discussion, but remind the advocates of the minority view that they were outvoted.
It is a rare negotiation in which you achieve all of your goals. You must know which are the most important. This decision can become contentious. Teams often abandon the critical step of prioritizing in the name of keeping the peace. Unfortunately, such teams only defer the argument to a later point in time — and probably a worse time, such as

• When not enough time exists to deal with a side issue.
• When the team needs to hang together.
• When the stakes in the outcome seem higher because they are more immediate.
• When a distraction from negotiating is the most damaging. What a disaster! Bite the bullet and get the team together on this important issue when you settle upon the list of goals.

How to set challenging yet attainable goals?

It is absolutely certain that you never achieve more than your goals. Experiments testing this thesis have shown it to be true. Surprise! At the same time, you must ground your goals in the real world, otherwise you’re just daydreaming.
If you’re asking $525,000 for your house, and no house in your neighborhood has ever sold for that amount, you’d better have some good reasons for setting your goal that high. Maybe you’re in a rising real estate market. Maybe your house is larger or noticeably nicer than any other house in the neighborhood. Maybe a state-of-the-art shopping center is under construction nearby, making your location more desirable than ever before. Any of these factors make a record-breaking price for your home attainable. Without special factors like these, you’re wasting your time by starting with such a high goal. Likewise, you want to be sure that the $525,000 is challenging. If every house on the block sells for $525,000, that price isn’t much of a goal — unless your house is noticeably more run-down than the others (in which case, you may want to consider some landscaping or painting first). You may have to do some research to find ways to justify asking a higher price than the others in the neighborhood. If you find out that major construction is planned for the near future, for example, you can make that part of your sales pitch. Too many of us suffer from setting our goals too low. Shoot high or not at all — you can be sure that the other side will never ask you to raise your goals. But remember that you don’t have to become rich and famous before breakfast. Goals that are too high for the deal lead to frustration and failed negotiations. For the specific negotiation at hand, consider the marketplace, current values, and your available options.
You can quickly see that setting a challenging yet attainable goal requires that you have a good deal of information — information you always need before you start negotiating. Setting your goals is one way you know whether you’re prepared for your next negotiation.
Think of that big thermometer the United Way puts up before every fundraising drive. The number at the top of the thermometer represents a figure generally a little higher than the previous year, but not too much higher. A better economy, more members participating in the fundraising drive, or a special event (such as building a new recreation center) justifies an increased amount. As group members raise money, they fill the outline of the thermometer with red paint to show exactly what has been contributed. Whether the organization reaches its goal or not, the thermometer looks very red at the end of the campaign, and those who contributed feel good.

Setting specific goals rather than general goals

Your goals shouldn’t be so abstract that no one — including you — can tell whether you achieved them. To avoid any ambiguity, quantify your goals as much as possible.
If you’re selling your home, for example, saying, “I want as much as I can get” is not a good goal. This is probably a true statement, but it doesn’t help you achieve anything. A well-stated goal for the price portion of the negotiation must include an exact amount, like $525,000. If you can’t be that specific, you’d better prepare some more.
Along the same line, you can’t buy a house listed for $800,000 if your income goal is only $60,000. This kind of contradictory goal will sabotage all the work you put into achieving your goal. You should strive to rid yourself of contradictory goals at every step of the goal-setting process.

How to set the right number of goals?

The negotiation itself dictates the number of specific goals you should set. It’s amazing how many goals some people can squeeze into even a simple negotiation. Recognize that you can’t get everything done in one negotiation. For example, if your priority is to get a raise, don’t demand a car allowance, overtime pay, and an assistant all in the same session. By putting too much on the table at one time, you just confuse people. Your boss’s eyes will glaze over, and you may not get anything at all.
You want to be realistic about your goal setting. Setting too many goals in a negotiation can make you look ignorant and naïve. To combat this situation, walk into the negotiation with a written schematic of your goals. Stay on course with what is written on the page.
Conversely, you don’t want to set goals too low. Setting very low goals is as detrimental to a negotiation as setting unrealistically high goals. Setting low goals signals weakness and indifference during a negotiation. The other party will see right through you. You should set goals that are slightly out of your grasp, but not so far that you can’t achieve them.

How to keep the goals on course?

Many people out there are frustrated at not being heard. If you ask them to participate in the goal-setting process, the list of demands may get a bit excessive. Before long, the list of goals contains demands that are outside the particular negotiation in which you are involved. This result is especially true in workplace negotiations because, when asked to contribute, frustrated employees may feel that this is finally their chance to relieve their frustration. Allowing people with specific agendas to take your goal off course can keep you from getting what you want.

This caveat doesn’t contradict the good advice in one of my favorite mantras:
“There is no harm in asking.” If your goals relate to the specific negotiation, you can choose to add an unrelated matter to the discussion. You can raise an unrelated issue appropriately, but be prepared to abandon it quickly if the reaction is too adverse. Although asking for a few extras probably won’t hurt, you should be conscious that you are doing so. Be careful that you don’t sabotage the primary goals you’re trying to achieve in the negotiation.

How to get active participation from every team member?

Whether you’re representing someone else in a negotiation or you’re part of your company’s negotiating team, goal setting is a shared activity. Your first negotiation is with the other team members to be sure that the goals are realistic and understood by everybody on the team. In the entertainment industry, these types of relationships are common. For example, the agent/ writer relationship is one of the tightest relationships in the industry. Agents must know their clients’ work and the type of work their writer clients seek. It’s important for agents to know this to send their clients to appropriate pitch meetings that will benefit both team members. In essence, agents must know their clients’ goals.

There is no sense for an agent to send out his or her hot comedy writer to meet with a production company looking for the next great science-fiction project. For one, the writer client doesn’t achieve his or her goal of attaining a writing assignment. Secondly, the negotiation, or pitch meeting in this case, stalls and goes nowhere. Both agent and writer lose out. When assessing your team, odds are that you have someone on your team whom you would prefer to leave out of a planning session. Perhaps this person’s pace is slower than yours, and you’re afraid the team’s work will slow down. Or the person may be cantankerous and hardly ever agrees with the group. Don’t succumb to the temptation to exclude that individual. This person can end up being a stumbling block later when you’re close to a decision deadline. Be sure that everyone who is a member of the negotiating team participates to the extent possible in setting the goals. Some people may not be verbal, but make sure that they’re on board, even in a passive way. You need everyone to agree on the goals. Then they are more likely to own the goals — and the results.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich is an excellent example of how important it is for every team member to actively participate in goal setting. The film is set during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where 11 Israeli athletes are taken hostage and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. In retaliation, the Israeli government recruits five Mossad agents to track down and execute those responsible for the attack. The agents all come from different walks of life, but they share the same goal: vengeance. In the roundtable scene where the group members gather for their first dinner together, the meal starts jovially. But as the scene progresses, the conversation shifts to an intense discussion about the ramifications of their goal. Is vengeance a justifiable option? It’s a divisive goal, but despite objections from some of the team members, they ultimately find common ground and proceed with their mission. Without that discussion beforehand, the mission surely would have broken down later.

Even with a personal goal that seems to be your decision alone, you can benefit from consulting with your family or friends. These people are affected by the decision. If you make your friends and family a part of the goal-setting process, they can be invaluable in helping you reach your objective. For example, if you want to write a book, your loved one can join in, if not with content, then with helpful encouragement so you don’t let less important tasks get in the way. Telling another person about your goal makes it real and also puts a bit of pressure on you to keep working toward your goal.

How to Set a Good Goal?

Setting goals for yourself, for others, or for your organization is a practical activity that demands preparation and disciplined focus. Setting goals is not wishful thinking. It’s not fantasizing. It’s not daydreaming. A goal is any object or end that you strive to reach. For example, becoming rich and famous may be the result of achieving certain goals, but fame and fortune are not the goals themselves. Deciding to write a bestselling book is not setting a goal; it’s daydreaming. Deciding to write a book that is interesting and makes solid contribution is a goal (an ambitious one, but a goal nonetheless). Research shows that individuals who set challenging, specific goals do better than those who don’t.
When you set goals, you need to consider what you want to achieve. Setting specific goals gives you an overall perspective that shapes your decisionmaking process. Use the following lists of questions to help you brainstorm during your goal-setting session.
For business goals, ask yourself:

• What level do I want to reach in my career?
• What kind of knowledge, training, or skills will I need to reach a certain level in my career?
• How do I want my partner or other members of the team to perceive me?
• How much money do I want to earn? At what stage in my career do I want to earn this amount?
• Do I want to achieve any artistic goals in my career? If so, what?

For personal goals, think about:

• Do I plan on starting a family? If so, when?
• Do I want to achieve any fitness or well-being goals? For instance, do I want to remain healthy at an old age? What steps do I need to take to achieve this goal?
• How much time will I reserve for leisure? What hobbies do I want to pursue? Remember, these goals are about you. You have to pamper yourself every now and then. Once you have answered some or all of these questions, prioritize your goals in order of importance. Be sure to prioritize until you’re certain that the goals reflect your business and/or personal aspirations.

Here are a few points to keep in mind when thinking about your goals:

• Distinguish between a goal and a purpose. If your purpose in life is to become an Olympic champion, set all of your goals with that ultimate purpose in mind. You must take many steps along the way to becoming a champion of any kind — the training, the dedication, the discipline. Think about your purpose in life; your negotiating goals should contribute to that purpose deal by deal.
• Don’t confuse goal setting with the process of deciding what to put forward as an opening offer. (Opening offers are discussed in the “Setting the Opening Offer” section later in this chapter.) You must set your personal goals yourself, before a negotiation begins. Get all the information you can from others about the marketplace and the person whom you’ll be negotiating with, but set your own goals. Only you know what your personal dreams are and what will make you happy. Keep a practiced eye on your goals during the course of the negotiation.
• Decide whether a goal is a good goal when you set it, not after the fact. Sometimes people say, “Shucks, we didn’t set our goal high enough.” If you’ve ever said that, one or more of the qualities described in the following sections was absent from the goal-setting process. Each of these qualities is important. You don’t have to wait until after the negotiation to find out whether your goals are well set. You can judge your goals at the moment you make them by determining whether they contain the qualities presented in the following sections.