Negotiating Tip #67:
Build Rapport with Your Colleagues
This series of tips about internal negotiations is based on material in the Harvard Business Review Press book Creative Conflict: A Practical Guide for Business Negotiators by Bill Sanders and Frank Mobus.
While rapport with your interlocutors is useful in all negotiations, it is essential in internal negotiations. You are likely to be dealing with these people for years. You need to get to know them.
If you have a poor relationship or none at all going in, you’ll need to spend time to fix or build it. Ideally, you’ll get to know your internal colleague before the two of you are faced with a tough decision or pressing deadline. At the outset, it’s usually better to defer shop talk and open with small talk, or nontask talk. There’s gold to be mined in topics like family, hobbies, favorite TV shows, or sports teams. (Politics can be trickier, unless you know going in that the two of you broadly agree.) The goal is to come to see each other not as inputs and outputs in a work process but as people with similar interests or values.
Once a social foundation is established, it’s time to learn about the other person’s work style. Do they prefer one-page summaries, or do they like to be involved every step of the way? Beyond the scope of the next deal, what problems are they facing at work?
At some point, differences will surely surface between you and your new best friend. But a strong rapport will make them more easily reconciled.