Q & A Table of Contents
Selling Deals In-house
From: Francis, Accra, Ghana
Question: What strategies are critical in communicating the outcome of
negotiation to make it sell to the entire workforce — particularly,
when the outcome is not good?
Response: A good negotiator — or negotiation team — includes
consideration of other stakeholders within their organization when they
prepare for negotiation. Learning the interests of colleagues (from
one’s own silo or from others) is a crucial element of preparation.
Negotiators can learn whether the deal they anticipate reaching with
outside parties will have needed support within their organization if
they ask colleagues a variety of questions including: “How can a deal
we make help you achieve your objectives?” “What can you tell us about
the group with whom we’ll be negotiating — their veracity,
dependability, the quality of their products, etc.?” “What would you
assume about the other party’s interests and/or objectives? What
information should we pursue in our negotiations to determine whether
those assumptions are accurate?”
Getting your colleagues involved in your preparation for negotiation
gives them a feeling you are taking them seriously, helps them feel
they’ve contributed to the ultimate outcome, and provides you a
framework to use in explaining the ultimate results within your
organization. Moreover, conferring with your colleagues who may not be
involved in the formal negotiations could well yield crucial
information that will increase your capacity to negotiate wisely.
Unfortunately, the scenario you describe indicates the preparatory
steps suggested above were not taken. As a result, the negotiators
went into the process underprepared; not only have they failed to get a
clear indication (before the negotiations) of whether they’ll get buy-
in from the rest of the workforce after the fact; they have also
undercut their post-negotiation credibility with their colleagues.
In this circumstance, before publicizing the negotiation’s outcome it
could make sense to do some internal information-gathering with other
parts of the workforce. Find out what each department or group of
people is likely to think about a variety of possible outcomes from the
negotiation — both the actual outcomes and theoretical alternatives.
Try to discover the criteria each group of colleagues is likely to use
as a benchmark for determining whether that particular result is good
or bad.
Once you have done this research you should use the information gained
to design a marketing plan to ‘sell’ the actual result to your
colleagues. It is not a matter of creating a propaganda campaign, but
rather preparation for an internal negotiation process to bring about
buy-in by your colleagues. If you have a reasonable good understanding
of their interests and how they determine what makes them comfortable
with a particular outcome, it increases your chances of designing and
implementing a process that increases their acceptance — and perhaps
even enthusiasm — for the result reached in the external negotiation.
Going backwards as described above is definitely nowhere near as wise
as upfront internal preparation. Your negotiators have created a risky
situation by failing to prepare using collaborative internal decision-
making; now the job is to minimize the damage they have caused by that
failure to prepare.
Good luck,
Steve
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