How do I negotiate with children and at work?
Surveys of families with children show that parents negotiate on average 6 times a day with their children aged 2-12. Likely, this number has even increased during the pandemic. During our negotiation training, I often hear comments that negotiations with children are more difficult than negotiations in working life, and often they don’t go as we would like. Why?
In HBR’s May 2020 article, Mary Kern (Management Professor at Baruch College) and Terri R. Kurzberg (Professor of Management at Rutgers Business School) describe the challenges of negotiating with children. They are at least the following:
1. Emotions
All parents have surely noticed that children are good at expressing feelings of frustration, they know how to make parents feel guilty for their proposed decisions, and they also skillfully play parents against each other. Dealing with these situations is made especially difficult by the fact that the parties know very well that the relationship must continue in the long term and that the parties cannot “separate” from each other.
2. Repetition
We find ourselves in recurring negotiations with our children over routine matters, such as their times to come home, bedtime, and playtime. This repetitive cycle often leads us to respond with the same set strategies, overlooking the unique nuances of each negotiation. This has resulted in us reacting to children with the same old formula and we often don’t stop at the negotiation situation at hand.
3. Preparation
Almost all negotiations with children happen spontaneously, and parents rarely consider it necessary to prepare for these negotiations, because we think that it is after all our own children, whom we know inside and out.
Over the past two decades, I have consulted teams to enhance their negotiation performance and personal negotiation skills. I will share several key factors that have consistently contributed to achieving win-win outcomes in negotiations, applicable both in professional settings and at home.
• Ask questions. Only through questions can you get to what the other party considers important and why he thinks the way he does. Questions also help identify inconsistencies in the other party’s thinking. Being able to think like the other party is perhaps the most important quality for the top level negotiators.
• Define your goals. Define your goals by describing to yourself what kind of end result you want to achieve. “I want to win this contract to gain a foothold in a new industry”, “I want my child not to freeze outside”. When you think about your goal a little more broadly in this way, you avoid getting stuck on one negotiated issue. In this way, you will also be better able to examine your options for achieving the goal.
• Conditional. One of the golden rules of successful negotiations is that we do not auction individual negotiable items, but rather trade things. “I’m ready to agree on the delivery time, if you, on the other hand, agree on the price”. The more often you formulate your proposal using the word if, the better quality results you will get.
Successful negotiations consist of good management of three key factors:
1. Preparation and Planning
2. Strategy and Tactics
3. Individual Skills
In our training sessions with negotiation teams, working on real-case scenarios, we often observe that while the first two elements of successful negotiation align well, it’s the personal negotiation skills that frequently require significant enhancement. Given this context, how would you rate your negotiation skills?
Marko Hänninen
