When negotiations break down, it can leave everyone feeling like they’ve wasted their time and effort.
However, it’s important to remember that everyone involved in a good faith negotiation is at the table because they want to see things move forward and reach a positive resolution.
With a simple change in perspective and attitude, a stalled negotiation becomes an opportunity to refresh, reset, and come back with a different angle. Here are four valuable tactics to understand before heading to the negotiating table.
Keep Things Low-Key
There are times when getting public feedback about negotiation can be beneficial.
Overwhelming public opinion can be one of the fastest ways to change someone’s mind, especially if those negotiations involve people in elected positions or businesses supported by consumers.
Other times, the quick, harsh judgments made in the court of public opinion can derail a negotiation before it ever gets going. When negotiating, it is best to limit any factors outside of your direct control.
Once information is released to the general public, there is often no effective way to reign in rumors, gossip, and misinformation, even with the help of a talented public relations team.
For this reason, it’s often better to keep the details of your negotiation as secret as possible until a resolution has been reached.
If you feel it is imperative to take your story to the public, exhaustively review and edit the information you intend to share. Make sure you’re only saying what’s necessary and that you’re saying it in a way that cannot be misunderstood or frivolously dramatized.
Even more crucially, make sure you’re talking to a media contact or public relations firm you trust.
Withdraw Resources or Support
The classic labor strike is the first thing many people envision when they think of tried-and-true hardball negotiating tactics.
History shows us that an organized workforce withdrawing their labor can bring an employer back to the bargaining table in a hurry and — when executed successfully — can also result in significantly improved workplace conditions.
While mass labor movements have been the most ubiquitous beneficiaries of this technique, you don’t need to be a worker in a factory to use the withdrawal (or threatened withdrawal) of resources to your advantage.
A business owner negotiating with a longstanding vendor, for example, might let them know they are willing to take their business elsewhere if certain contract conditions aren’t met.
No matter what sort of negotiations you find yourself in, the fact that you have a seat at the table means someone else needs or desires something you can provide.
Correctly evaluating and effectively leveraging this “thing” is at the core of every successful negotiation.
When drastic measures become necessary, you can simply threaten to take this “thing” off the table entirely, be it labor, products, money, long-term contracts, or something else.
This is a blunt tactic, but it can also be effective and potentially save time by cutting to the true heart of the negotiation.
Total Reset
Even the most impersonal, businesslike negotiations can become tense over time as parties come to feel slighted, manipulated, or unheard by not getting what they want.
When negotiation has accumulated too much baggage, sometimes the best thing to do is simply start over.
This requires some acting, as everyone will still remember how poorly negotiations were going before the reset was called. It can also seem silly — why would anyone waste their time doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result, after all?
This silliness, however, is part of what can make starting fresh such a good negotiation technique.
When two parties join in the play-acting required to pretend a failed negotiation never happened, it can help build the sort of trust and camaraderie that keeps everyone invested in working together rather than in opposition and in moving toward a positive resolution.
Once you get over the awkwardness of “playing make-believe” to restart a serious negotiation from scratch, you’ll come to find it’s quite a practical tactic. Most things get better with practice and familiarity, and negotiating is one of them.
Furthermore, there is always the chance that someone involved in the negotiations will latch onto a detail that was overlooked the first time around. Sometimes these details are where you find your path forward.
Mediation
Professional mediators are typically lawyers by trade, and many have some mastery of business and psychology concepts as well. Mediators don’t merely understand business and the law.
They also come to the table with specialized negotiation training that your regular attorney or in-house corporate legal team may lack.
A good mediator will simplify matters rather than further complicate them. A mediator will offer impartial feedback, and valuable legal insight and be dedicated to seeing things through to a smooth and sustainable conclusion.
Some mediation firms even offer negotiation training courses of their own to better prepare you for future negotiations.
Don’t Panic — Keep Working
Most stalled negotiations don’t stay dead forever, and there is a wealth of other tactics beyond the above that you might try to jump-start failed talks. Remain calm and be respectful to the other party while clearly asserting your own interests.
If necessary, take the next step and invest in mediation or negotiation training for yourself and your team.