Eskom Procurement Book 2015

NEGOTIATION

• Not asking sufficient questions to clarify: The better you understand your counterpart’s motives, the better you can offer something that will deliver against his needs. Clarification questions, which may seem superfluous, play a crucial role in enabling you to wrap up a package. Moreover, they also give your counterpart the impression that you care about his needs, thereby generating the necessary atmosphere for win-win. • Withholding information and limiting trust: If your counterpart suspects that you are withholding information or not disclosing fully, trust will be unilaterally withdrawn. Awin-win thus becomes impossible. It would, however, be naïve to demand full and complete transparency from either side. The rule should be: ‘The truth, nothing but the truth; but not necessarily the whole truth immediately.’ • Showing an unwillingness to move: This renders the win-win impossible and increases the probability of deadlock. • Not establishing common ground: The negotiation consequently centres on disparities rather than convergence. Both your standpoint and your counterpart’s will move apart as the negotiation progresses, again making the win-win very difficult to achieve. • Arguing, blaming or attacking: Early in this chapter, emphasis was placed on focusing on the other party’s interests, not their adopted positions. Personal attacks are often the result of zeroing in on adopted positions and it must always be remembered that a counterpart may deliberately start off with a relatively extreme standpoint simply to gain power at an early stage. This adopted position does not negate his/her underlying needs. Your job is not to be drawn into an emotional fight, but to work past the adopted position to uncover underlying desires and needs. • The negotiation becomes a tennis match: The swapping of demands between the parties resembles a tennis match along the lines of ‘I can only give you X if you give me Y’: ‘Well, if I give you Y, I want Z in return’; ‘No, giving you Z means I will need A to compensate’. This is clearly going nowhere, and stalemate is almost pre-programmed. It can be avoided by simply calling a spade a spade, rather than an earth-inverting gardening implement. Say something like: ‘Ok, we’re getting into a tennis match now. Why don’t we think more in terms of packages than individual points?’ • One issue is negotiated at a time: A negotiation is not generally about individual points, but rather about finding a total package that is acceptable but not necessarily perfect to both parties. Focusing on individual points slows the process down and blinds us to the big picture. We should remember, at all times, to focus on the totality of what we are trying to achieve and not on recording what concessions have been traded.

166 CHAPTER 7