Welcome back! Last week post went out to the world some hour later than usual, I don’t know which is the cause, if it is the different time of day or the irregularity , but it has heavily underperformed even to respect of the summer recaps where most of us was at the beach keeping our minds very far from emails. So, because I’m actually pretty proud of my last piece and this new post will be public at the usual time, I’ll give it a little help with a shout out.
Go check it out if you missed it, it’s packed with topics I like!
Takeaway (TL:DR)
During our daily lives we are constantly put in front of some kind of negotiation. Often times even with ourselves, on taking our priorities. Personal relationships, Family relationship, Business relationships they all involve in different forms a negotiation of the terms in which that relationship can thrive. “…in different forms…” is pretty crucial though, and even if the principles are pretty much the same is hard to mutuate the experience accumulated on a type of negotiation to succeed on a different one. Also, knowing some theory can give you more tools during a conversation, but practice is always required to really learn to be effective, gain confidence and understand when how to actually apply the theory without making huge mistakes.
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Weekly retrospective
I have a cousin, we grew together in the same family, we have the same age, we had a similar education, we always been very close. In the past we worked together, I helped him and other friends founding a startup, we lived together in Milan, we have a lot of shared experiences and a good relationship with a pretty open conversation.
He’s freelancing now as a digital specialist (Analyst, Operations, Marketing), and collaborating with a company, that accidentally is partially owned by his father, my uncle, with which I have actually no relationship at all (longer story).
Since my cousin and I really like to work together, because we really esteem each other professionally, we are constantly searching for opportunities to do so, and we were discussing for a while now (more than a year) to find one in this context.
From six months I’m legally a freelance, so finally that opportunity arrived. The company asked him to find someone to produce the images and artworks they need for social media and communication, based on the brand guide another agency provided. He knew I had the required skills, so he called me and we found some time to discuss the terms of the collaboration.
Things went south
The job requirements were really defined and clear, the request was to provide a price list, a very easy one, an hourly rate with an estimated time for each piece of work, or some kind of price-per-image. In contrary I was pushing to stretch the boundaries of the job and the terms of payments as much as I could.
Not because I wanted to do something else, I was happy of the opportunity as an icebreaker for more. Nor to get more money — we both knew there wasn’t any good money in this job for which I was overqualified — but rather I was foolishly pushing over principles only because I’ve been studying some negotiation theory and this was my first opportunity to apply some of it and try out some strategies.
This led me to misread the situation, to take several wrong evaluations and to keep hitting my head over and over on the effort of letting my points break in, up to the point of building up tension, creating a situation where there was no value for both of us. Also, I allowed to some kind of pride together with the fuzziness of the end of the day and the emotions of the period to prevail and cover up my vision over the core topic of the negotiation, that was our collaboration.
The principles
Last year I worked very closely with Jacopo — he was an agile coach in that context, he is so many other things whenever he want — on a client project. I learned a lot from his moments of “instructions” and when the project came to an end I decided to buy and read his book about negotiation (Italian only) and got pretty interested in the topic.
I believe is super important not only as a freelancer or an entrepreneur to close contracts with clients, or as an employee in the job market getting the best offer for your next adventure. As I said in the introduction we find ourselves negotiating every day in very different contexts and even in our every day jobs, having the tools for a win-win negotiation is crucial to build healthy and valuable relationships with all of our stakeholders.
Whit the things I learned in the book I was able to obtain my current contract and get to an ambitious financial goal, several years before I expected if you asked me some years ago at the end of my studies.
With all these concepts in mind I was also able to catch on and connect concepts to another great teacher I found during my daily dose of youtube videos (have you read my last post yet?).
Chris Do is “teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love” through his company and YouTube channel, The Futur. There’s so much valuable free content on a great variety of contexts but I’m really passioned about his videos on negotiation, exceptionally the role playing ones, in which he plays fake negotiation situations with his students.
I’ll be discussing what went wrong, and how it solved in the end, during the negotiation with my cousin based on some of the things I learned from these two guys. As sometimes happens, the problem is also the solution, and the reality is that you and your need to change perspective are the real problem.
What went wrong?
What are you talking about, exactly?
So, first of all, since I was talking with my cousin, since we often discuss and speculate business and professional topics, and I was proud to show off my new learnings, one mistake has been to mix the current pragmatic context of negotiation with the speculation about the principles I was applying, introducing confusion, entropy and obstacles to the communication.
Sell, Sell, Sell?
Second, I tried too hard to sell, in this case an approach to collaboration, sell sell sell, instead of listen listen listen. Chris Do teaches exactly this as a key introduction to these situation. You should only care about the other person problems, and try to understand it better, and behave as a partner and support. You have to care. Only after the problem is clear you can propose a solution, that is deeply connected to what is valuable for your potential client in that moment, and it will itself. You don’t have to sell, sell, sell. It’s easy to spot as a behaviour, it makes the other person feel you care only about yourself and the money, and sets the discussion as a fight rather than as a collaboration to solve a problem. Let them know you care. I probably didn’t at this point, I only cared about selling and landing my stupid approach.
Which is your skin in the game?
As soon as I tried to explore opportunities and the problem with some questions, here’s another basic error. I got slammed a door in the face very fast. “You are trying to make strategy here, I asked you for a very simple tactical activity, please stop”. So here there are actually two linked problems. First I was trying to address the needs of the company, instead of the person who was in front of me, so I wasn’t listening again. Second I was trying to discuss money with a person with no “skin in the game”.
To have "skin in the game" is to have incurred risk (monetary or otherwise) by being involved in achieving a goal.
So of course I encountered resistance. I was talking a different new approach to money, to a person who wasn’t going to spend that money and that has no direct return on the outcomes connected to the quality of my work. Instead, having to defend this kind of novelty in a context with little inclination to change was only adding more effort to the equation for the person on the other side of the table and getting friction in return. I wasn’t helping him in anyway, and pretty naturally, I received resistance. This is a concept to which both the coaches I mentioned refer to: you should alway negotiate with someone who has the proverbial “skin in the game”. Negotiating value with a delegate using the techniques they teach won’t work anyway, you can move only inside the boundaries of the budget they were given from the top, and with little interest.
What’s on the table?
The last error has been to overestimate my BATNA — which stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Basically I entered the discussion believing that the work he was proposing to me, was not of any economic nor experience interest, so I had nothing to loose if by stretching the boundaries of the negotiation towards my interests we end up to not agree at all. And I thought it was the same on the other side, where my cousin was well aware that he could give the job to any graphic design student for half the minimum fee I could ever ask, and still get a decent job done. These are the typical conditions where the role plays of Chris Do end up with something like this.
Your needs for the job doesn’t match the value of quality I can provide. I can help you by recommending you someone else I trust that can better match your budget.
Do you see how even in a rejection he makes clear that he cares about the clients business and he actively propose a different solution? He’s a real master. What I didn’t consider in the BATNA, was family. Our relationship and our will to work together, his involvement with the company, and similar things. This realisation was a breaking point and completely turned the conversation upside down.
And how it turned well!
Transparency and open communication!
Of course anything from this tale could be possible if we weren’t talking openly and with extreme confidence. No games, no deceptions. We have a very strong relationship and we know we can defend and express our thoughts and desires without them being exploited. We know that even if we both try to make our own interests this will never cross the line of damage the other one, we really care about, protect and support each other. And this makes a huge difference to respect of others situations of course, but is also a great field of experimentation, a safe space where to learn my lessons.
Listen, Listen, Listen!
At this point, once I realised what was really at stake and changes my overall perception on the situation, I began to ask the good questions, the ones for the person I was talking to. I started to ask about his perception on the situation, what was his vision about this collaboration, and how he saw the company context and perception of this opportunity, since he’s working with them since a lot and he knows them very well. This opened up the conversation and really started to relax the tension and get to another rhythm and flow.
Declaration of intent!
We ended up restating the fact that even if it’s clearly a suboptimal situation, is finally the perfect one to introduce me and break the ice on something that could lead to a new collaboration between us, and for me also a first step to take my full professional independence towards a real freelancing situation. So in the end we were able to get back to the real focus point. And I was able to make explicit my intention and my real interest beyond the mere economics: I was pushing for this kind of more strategic solutions because I wanted to configure my relationship with the company with the correct premises, and not as a simple executor of pretty images.
Good ending!
I’m very happy of how everything turned out. In the end my cousin got a good chance to introduce me as a candidate for the job and, even if I believe he would have made a good introduction anyway, because we discussed so much about it, he took the time and effort to sponsor and support me explaining very well my profile and the fact that I could actually do other stuff and actually bring much more value on other activities rather than the one discussed. They got interested and seems like this conversation opened up a better opportunity and brought a kind of leap to respect of the little steps we were planning to take.
And you? which is the last time you had to negotiate terms for a collaboration, or an important decision with a partner or a close friend? Tell me a story in the comments!
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Thanks for reading to the finish and see you next week!
Tobia