How to Make Giving a Route to Success
How to Make Giving a Route to Success
We saw that Adam Grant of the Wharton School wrote in his book Give and Takeabout how takers are the most successful engineers. That that may be no surprise, the next result of Grant’s research may be. He found that the engineers with the lowest productivity are givers, but the ones with the highest productivity are also givers. When it comes to sales, he found that the top salespeople were givers, averaging over 50% more revenue than takers or matchers. Grant concluded that across occupations, givers dominate the bottom and top of the success ladder.
That lesson applies to negotiating too. We showed last time that price haggling that is a Taker’s game. That is where most negotiations begin, but they don’t have to necessarily end with that.
Consider a negotiation that starts with a big price difference. The way successful givers work, instead of either side conceding right away, they stand their ground and get creative. That begins with exchange information, working the discovery process. The winning givers find new ways to do things, to restructure the deal in way that both sides gain.
What this illustrates is there are different sets of rules that apply to different types of negotiations. And rules that work well in one mode of negotiation, are completely counter-productive in another. In basic bargaining, if one side or both are trying to gain at the other’s expense, the negotiation looks very much like a win-lose contest. But negotiating has the potential to move into creative deal-making, and it can even move into strategic relationship building. You may lean towards the taking side when you’re bargaining, but to find out the kind of information that’s needed to make a more creative deal where you’re actually adding value – like the “prepay and add” shipping — you’ve got to come across as a more cooperative and collaborative counter-party, where the goal is “I want to help the other guy out.” “Jim’s got a problem; how can I help him solve it?” So you’re leaning much more heavily in the direction of being a giver. But not completely. As you add value, you still want to make sure you’re getting your fair share, so it’s more of a matching strategy.
There’s an important warning here: as the negotiation becomes less adversarial, there’s a tendency to assume the positive—that I can now trust this person to share these rewards equally. But that’s not always the case. Successful givers don’t just assume Trust. They recognize that to make sure that to get their fair share, trust has to be negotiated.
And regarding the so-called rules of negotiating, the rules have to change as you shift from basic haggling. In bargaining we said that the less information you share the better; but if you just stick with that tactic it becomes almost impossible to find a more creative deal.
