What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (11 page)

The good news is that you get opportunities to negotiate every day and so have many chances to practice this skill. Here’s a story illustrating that negotiations can happen anywhere. A couple of years ago I was in Beijing for a conference and my colleague, Ed Rubesch, met up with some of his students from Thammasat University in Thailand who were planning a sunrise trip to the Great Wall. That sounded fantastic, and I became intent on finding a way to see the Great Wall at sunrise, too. I thought such a trip would be easy to arrange, but for some reason it turned out to be nearly impossible. I started with the concierge at the hotel, then a local professor, and then the taxi drivers near my hotel. No one was able to help me with my quest. At the same time, I was talking up this idea with other colleagues, many of whom wanted to join the excursion. We agreed to meet in the lobby of the hotel at 3:00 a.m. for the trip, and it was up to me to make it happen. I wasn’t going to let them down, but I had no idea what to do. I had used up all the obvious solutions.

Across the street from my hotel was a school that taught English, and I thought that at the very least I’d be able to find someone with whom I could speak. The receptionist suggested I talk with a seventeen-year-old student who was in the lobby. I introduced myself and sat down to chat with him. My goal was to negotiate with him so he would help me reach my goals. After a short time, I learned he was an accomplished student, musician, and athlete who was in the midst of applying to colleges. Eureka! I‘d found the way I could help him. I told him that if he would help me get to the Great Wall at sunrise, then I would write a letter of recommendation for him for college. It sounded like a great deal to him, too. With a few hours of effort he solved my problem, and I was only too pleased to write a letter that described his initiative, creativity, and generosity. Together we created a wonderful win-win situation.

Stan Christensen, who teaches a course on negotiation at Stanford, has built his career around extracting the most value from negotiations.
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He has found that most people leave a lot of value on the table because they make assumptions that aren’t correct. Stan recommends looking for surprises when you negotiate, because surprises indicate you’ve made inaccurate assumptions. He also advises you to pick your negotiating approach based on the interests and style of the person with whom you’re negotiating, not on your own interests. Don’t walk into any negotiation with a clearly defined plan, but instead listen to what’s said by the other party and figure out what drives them. Doing so will help you craft a positive outcome for both sides.

Being a parent offers endless opportunities to hone negotiating skills. For example, several years ago, Josh wanted to purchase a new bicycle. He was interested in competing as a road cyclist and “needed” a fancy new bike. He came to Mike and me and said, “I’ve done all my research and have found the perfect bike. It’s really important to me.” Our response was, “That’s nice…There’s no way we’re going to spend that much money on a bike. We would be willing to spend half that amount. But perhaps you can find a way to make purchasing the bike more attractive to us?” I urged Josh to think of things he could do for Mike and me that would be worth the price of the bike. What could he do to make our lives easier?

He thought for a few days and came back with a proposal. He offered to do all of his own laundry and to both shop for food and cook dinner for the family three nights a week. Mike and I took this under consideration and decided it was a good deal. By doing his laundry and making dinner, he was saving us a lot of time, and he would be learning some important skills. We agreed to the deal. Josh got the bike and took his new responsibilities seriously. Like all parents, we’ve had many other opportunities to negotiate future “deals,” which goes to show that the most important outcome of any negotiation is to get to the next negotiation. The first deal is just the beginning. If the first negotiation is fair and balanced, and both parties follow through on their commitments, then chances are the next negotiation will go even more smoothly. As mentioned several times, we live in a very small world, where repeat appearances are the norm.

There are some cases that offer no win-win solution, and it’s actually better to walk away. Stan gives his students a case involving a real estate deal that demonstrates this point. When you uncover the interests of the different players, it’s pretty clear there’s no intersection between their goals, and walking away is the best choice. Despite this, most students strike a deal anyway, even though it’s suboptimal for both parties. Many of us hold to the mistaken assumption that any deal is better than walking away. This certainly isn’t always the case, and walking away from a deal should always be considered a viable option.

The best way to know whether you should walk away from a deal is to understand your other choices, so you can accurately compare them to the deal at hand. In negotiation lingo this is called a BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement).
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Always know your BATNA when you start to negotiate. Stan uses a case study involving Disney and a group of environmentalists to illustrate this point. Disney wants to build a new theme park and the environmentalists are opposed. They go around and around on what Disney could do to protect the environment while still building the park. The two sides are unable to reach an agreement, and the deal falls apart. The result? The new park isn’t built. However, shortly thereafter, the land is sold to a developer who builds tract housing on the same spot. The impact of the housing is much worse than that of the theme park would have been. Had the environmentalists taken their BATNA into account, they would have realized that reaching a deal with Disney was the preferred outcome.

In general, to negotiate effectively you should work to understand your own goals as well as the goals of the other party, attempt to come up with a win-win outcome, and know when to walk away. It sounds simple, but it takes a lot of effort to master these skills and to ensure that both parties are satisfied.

Another valuable skill is the art of helping others. When I was in college I spoke with my parents about once a week. At the end of every call my mother would say, “What can I do to be helpful to you?” The generosity of this gesture made a huge impression on me. In most cases there was nothing she could do to be helpful, but just knowing she was willing to help if needed was comforting. As I got older, I have realized that we can all do this for our friends, family, and colleagues. When you ask others if you can help, they are always pleased that you offered. A small number will actually take you up on your offer, and the things they ask for are usually modest. On rare occasions, someone will ask for something that you can’t or don’t want to do. Even when you turn them down, they are grateful that you offered and graciously accept the fact that you aren’t able to help.

I suggest that you try this approach sometime, if you don’t do it routinely already. But you must be sincerely willing to help if your offer is accepted. As Guy Kawasaki says, “You should always try to be a ‘mensch.’” He continues, “A mensch helps people who can’t necessarily help them back. Of course, it’s easy to be generous to someone whom you think will be able to help you, but being a mensch means helping others even if you’re pretty sure they can’t help you. You can call it karma if you like, but people who are generous and helpful to others are those that others want to help in return.”
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I clearly remember when I didn’t know how to do this. When I was a freshman in college there was a fellow in my class who had a physical handicap that required him to use crutches to walk. One day he slipped walking down a ramp to class and fell to the ground. As he was struggling to get up, I didn’t know what to do. I felt uncomfortable walking by without helping, but I was afraid that if I approached him I would embarrass him by drawing attention to his disability. I felt the same way when a classmate lost his mother to a long illness. I didn’t know what to say, fearing I would say something wrong, and opted to say nothing. Years later, I was running on campus at Stanford. It had rained the day before and I fell hard in some mud. Bruised, hurt, and muddy, I sat on the curb with tears streaming down my face. At least a dozen people walked by, and not one asked me if I needed anything. At that exact moment I knew what I should have said to the fellow who fell in front of class years earlier and to my classmate who lost his mother. All I needed was someone to ask, “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do for you?” It now seems so simple. It’s remarkable that it took me so many years to figure out.

This lesson is just as relevant when dealing with strangers as when working on teams. Unfortunately, most of us spend so much time in situations where we’re encouraged to win at someone else’s expense that it’s hard to get practice helping others. I remember the first week of college, when I asked a girl in my dorm to help me with a calculus assignment. Without skipping a beat, she said, “If I help you then you will do better than I will and you’ll get in to medical school and I won’t.” I’m not exaggerating. She wasn’t willing to help me because we might be competing four years in the future. Years later, I listen to my son lament that all of his classes are graded on a curve. This means that in addition to focusing on learning the material for an exam, he and his classmates have to think about how well they will perform relative to one another. This is a huge disincentive to helping each other.

After years of working in such an environment, I had no idea how to be a good team player. It took me a long time to realize that this competitive mind-set, where you win at someone else’s expense, is completely counterproductive. Almost everything in life is done in teams, and those who don’t know how to make others successful are at a huge disadvantage. The best team players go to great lengths to make others successful. In fact, the higher you reach within an organization, the less important your individual contributions become. Instead, your job becomes leading, inspiring, and motivating others. Most of your work is done by colleagues tasked with implementing your ideas. Therefore, if you can’t work well with others, then your ability to execute diminishes. Successful team players understand what drives each person on the team and look for ways to make them successful. Additionally, great leaders figure out a way for everyone to play to his or her individual strengths.

I’ve been on teams in which everyone on the team feels as though he or she got the “easy” job. If you think about it, this is the perfect work environment. Each person is doing what he or she does best, and is extremely appreciative of what the other people on the team bring to the table. Everyone has a job perfectly tuned to his or her skills and interests. Everyone feels great about his or her contributions, and celebrates the contributions of others. The saying “paint the target around the arrow” summarizes this wonderfully. I first heard this from my colleague Forrest Glick. It had been a mantra in his group when he worked at Harvard University. The idea is that you should pick the most talented person you can—
the arrow
—and then craft the job—
the target
—around what he or she does best. If you allow really talented people to do what they do best, then the results are astonishing. They’re fulfilled and, therefore, much more productive than if they were doing something that didn’t fit their talents or interests. The key is putting together a team with the right complement of skills.

As a job candidate, your goal is to find out if the job you are exploring is right for you. That is, are you the right arrow for the target? Too often, we focus on just getting the job instead of figuring out if the job is a good match for our skills and interests and, more important, whether we can work with the other people on the team. One way to figure this out is to find a way to talk about topics besides the job at hand. A great way to do this is to include your hobbies and interests at the bottom of your résumé, a hook for the person interviewing you and an easy way to uncover shared interests. I’ve seen this happen time and again. It might be a common interest in Indian cuisine, a curiosity about your collection of petrified wood, the fact that you belong to the same fraternity, or that you competed in the same sport in school. These kinds of hooks will draw your interviewer in, and present you as a person rather than as a collection of work experiences. It’s also a terrific way to find out more about your interviewer.

There is a big pothole that smart people often fall into—they rationalize doing the “smart” thing as opposed to the “right” thing. Randy Komisar, the author of
The Monk and the Riddle,
emphasizes that these two concepts are often confused. Intelligent people often overanalyze a problem, coming up with a solution that they think is in their best interest (the smart choice) but that isn’t the right thing to do. He told a personal story to illustrate the point. Randy had a contractor who had worked on his house. The contractor did a terrible job, and the project required a lot of follow-up work to correct the mistakes. Long after the project was completed, the contractor called Randy and told him that he hadn’t paid the final bill. Knowing how disorganized the contractor was, Randy was fairly confident he would never be able to prove this one way or another. But looking back over his own records, Randy found that indeed he had not paid the bill. It would have been easy to question the contractor’s bookkeeping and to justify not paying the bill. However, Randy knew that, despite his frustration with the contractor’s work, he owed the contractor the money. He wrote a check, knowing he did the right thing.

When I think about doing the right thing instead of the smart thing, I’m reminded of a legal case in which I served as a juror. It was a wrongful termination case, in which a woman accused her employer of firing her without cause just days before her stock options were going to vest. This case went on for ten very long weeks, and I had a lot of time to think about the “right” outcome. The law was on the employer’s side, because the plaintiff was an “at will” employee who could be fired anytime, but it wasn’t clear whether the employer had done the “right” thing with regard to the timing of her dismissal. The jury deliberated for days. In retrospect, the deliberation was so difficult because we were torn between the right and the smart decision. Ultimately, we ruled in favor of the plaintiff, but we gave her a much smaller award than she was requesting. I later learned that the judgment was appealed, and another trial ensued.