| Roger Volkema has the leverage BY MIKE UNGER Roger Volkema has been negotiating all his life. Literally. “You’re negotiating all day, every day, from the day you came out of the womb practically,” says the chair of the management department at the Kogod School of Business. “You cried because you wanted to be held, changed, fed. These were negotiations. My definition of negotiation, and I have a very broad definition, is communication between two or more parties to determine future behavior.” An expert on the art, science, and nuance of negotiation, Volkema recently penned a second book on the subject. Leverage, which hits the shelves later this month, is packed with advice on how to tip the scale of power in your favor in a negotiation, be it in your kitchen with a refrigerator repair man or in a corporate boardroom with high-ranking executives. We all negotiate all the time. With our friends over what movie to see. With our employers about that much-desired raise. So we might as well learn how to do it right, Volkema says. For the past decade Volkema, who came to AU in 1988, has been teaching negotiation to both undergraduates and graduate students. His first book on the subject, The Negotiation Toolkit, was published in 1999 and contains many of his core beliefs on the subject, including a “golden rule” inspired in part by a bit from the comic Father Guido Sarducci. Allow him to explain. “There was a cut on his album about something called the five-minute university,” Volkema says. “You go to college for all these years, and in the end, you forget almost everything you learned. You take economics classes, macro and micro, what do you remember from this? Supply and demand, that’s it. He was going to start a five-minute university. “So we’ve got this class on negotiation, and we’ve got 15 seconds to teach this class. What is it going to be? I think it all boils down to this one principal: People will not negotiate with you unless they believe that you can help them or hurt them. If you have a unique set of skills that they desperately need then you have some advantage and they’re likely to want to talk to you and hire you. And, if they don’t, you can go to work for a competitor and this is how you can hurt them.” Negotiating, Volkema says, is a learned skill, no different than swinging a golf club. That’s why his students don’t merely read textbooks and listen to lectures, but are asked to negotiate case studies with one another and in real-world situations. Once he bought packages of sponges and told his students to return them, without providing them with receipts or the name of the retailer he purchased them from. “We tend to believe signs,” he says. “I tell the students that anything that was negotiated is negotiable. Just because something is negotiable doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to do it. You have to go into a situation with the mind-set that you’re going to be able to negotiate this. If you think you can’t, then you can’t.” Volkema believes that a number of tactics can improve one’s negotiating ability. “Probably the most common one that people use is an exaggerated offer or demand. Most of us do this, in fact there are some researchers who argue that you have a right to do this because the other party is going to assume that you did it,” he says. “If I want to sell something for $1,000, I know the way the game is played. I ask for $1,200 or $1,500, and you’re going to say I want to go $700 and we’re going to end up in the middle. So if I’m straightforward with you and say, look, $1,000, you’re going to assume I’ve exaggerated and I want to sell for something around $800, so it’s almost as if I have to do it in order to play the game. “People use delays as a way of gathering information. They’ll hold back something or make a concession. People sometimes do speed-ups. The airlines do this when you call them and they tell you about this great fare and then say this rate is only good until midnight tonight. They want you to make a decision quickly and not take the time to contact other airlines or Travelocity.” Sometimes, the best negotiating maneuver is biting your tongue. “Silence is actually a great tactic to use because the most important element in negotiation is information,” Volkema says. “This is what makes all the difference. If you know that the other person desperately needs your product or service, then you have leverage, you have the advantage. So sometimes if you’re quiet the other person may get somewhat nervous. Sometimes knowing the other person’s style is invaluable.” A group of key behaviors, which can be learned, also improve a person’s negotiating skills, as does the understanding that a negotiation is not strictly a win-lose proposition. “Expert negotiators tend to ask open-ended questions: ‘Tell me what you’re looking for in a deal,’” Volkema says. “Those sorts of questions can give you information about how you can help or hurt the other party. Pointing out areas of agreement or common ground. Summarizing discussions. There’s behaviors like that, that show respect to the other person and increase the flow of information and trust, and the ability to find these kinds of breakthroughs results in win-win agreements.” |
