Negotiation

A couple of weeks ago during my CSS 350 class, my team participated in a mock negotiation to practice techniques we learned based on assigned readings. The whole thing was staged so that our team, who represented a best-selling author in the negotiation of a contract, was paired with another team who represented the publishing company hoping to take our author on as new client.

The team was given a quick summary of the author's stance on the various topics we would be negotiating with the publishing team. Right away we read through and determined which things we thought would be important to them and what was most important to the author. We chose our bottom line for those portions and with our assumptions of the aspects they would be most interested in--aside from the obvious monetary values like signing bonuses, advances, and royalties-- determined the areas we could apply the concept of leverage we were introduced to for negotiations. The idea is to figure out what is really important to the other side and even if it is not that important to you, make it seem like you are sacrificing something and doing them a favor by giving them this desired agreement.

We also went over another key point to hash out prior to meeting our meeting with the publisher's and that was determining which "school" each of us came from. I was incredibly thankful that we all agreed that we would only be comfortable with honest negotiations. Unanimously we discovered our values of being straightforward, meaning not lying to get what we wanted and win, is the only way we felt comfortable engaging in negotiations. Technically, we did not "win," but we stayed true to ourselves and were only 100 points off, which was pretty close to a perfect win/win.

The activity was really fun and incredibly interesting, especially from a psychology standpoint. It turned out many of the topics of negotiation we thought would be huge for them that we could use as leverage to get something even bigger for us, for example, a longer book contract, were not nearly as important as we anticipated to them. That made keeping our "leverage" far more difficult than any of us thought.

Personally, I was surprised by the roles my team members took on as well as my role. We did not choose one negotiator to represent us, but I think that was okay. We seemed to all pick up when our personalities were most needed and take over for certain parts. My role, typically in situations similar, is to be the leader in the conversation and showing my dominance. I believe this part of my personality did come through, but I do not think it came across as overbearing or bullying, like some similar past situations may have. I believe this partly is because I trusted my team and knew we were on the same page. It was, however, interesting to see how the other team did not seem to have a guideline they stuck to consistently. Often, we would come to an agreement with them on a portion of the contract and one would suddenly object to their other team members in the midst of the negotiation.