Host: Philip Brown, Founder of The Negotiation Club
Guest: John Skinner, Business Consultant & Entrepreneur
“The essence of negotiation is to understand that not every battle needs to be fought right now.” — Unknown
Episode Overview:
In this episode of The Negotiation Club Podcast, we are joined by the seasoned negotiator John Skinner, who brings decades of experience in negotiating a vast array of contracts. John delves into the importance of preparation in negotiations, highlighting that while it's possible to prepare for 90% of what is needed—and even up to 99% with thorough brainstorming—there's always that 1% that can catch you off guard, creating an "Oh Shit" moment.
It's in these moments that the skill of "parking" an issue becomes invaluable.
Instead of panicking or making hasty decisions, staying calm and suggesting that the matter be "parked" for later discussion allows you to keep the negotiation on track and maintain your composure.
Why "Parking" is Crucial in Negotiations
1. Prevents Suboptimal Decisions:
When an unforeseen issue arises, continuing the discussion without full understanding can lead to less than optimal outcomes. Parking the issue buys you time to gather necessary information and strategise effectively.
2. Maintains Confidence and Control:
Pushing forward when unprepared may inadvertently reveal your discomfort or anxiety. Parking the issue allows you to project confidence and control, minimising the risk of the other party leveraging your perceived weaknesses.
3. Improves Strategic Thinking:
By parking an issue, you have the opportunity to rethink your strategy, seek advice, and return to the negotiation with a stronger position. This ensures all aspects of the negotiation are handled thoughtfully.
Common Mistakes When Parking an Issue
1. Appearing Hesitant or Indecisive:
It's crucial to park an issue with confidence. Any hesitation can signal weakness and uncertainty.
2. Failing to Revisit the Parked Issue:
Make sure to address parked issues at an appropriate time with adequate preparation. Ignoring them can damage your credibility.
3. Overusing the Technique:
Parking too many issues can make you seem unprepared or evasive. Use this technique selectively and strategically.
Practicing the "Parking" Technique in Club Meetings
1. Role-Playing Scenarios:
Engage in negotiation scenarios where unexpected issues are introduced. Practice parking these issues confidently while maintaining composure.
2. Feedback Sessions:
After role-playing, provide feedback on each participant's ability to park an issue. Focus on their body language, tone, and how they plan to revisit the issue.
3. Debriefing:
Discuss as a group the parked issues and collaboratively develop strategies to handle them. This helps understand different perspectives and approaches.
Negotiation Card: "Parking"
We have created a special Negotiation Card titled "Parking" to help you practice this crucial skill in your own negotiations. Each episode of our podcast is accompanied by a Negotiation Card that listeners can use to put the discussed techniques into practice. The "Parking" card is designed to guide you through the process of confidently parking issues during negotiations, ensuring that you remain in control and make well-informed decisions.
You can find the "Parking" Negotiation Card and others on our Negotiation Podcast Cards page. Use these cards to enhance your skills and transform your negotiation experiences.
FOLLOW, LISTEN & LEARN
Tune in to this insightful episode and many more as they are shared to listen and learn from real negotiations but do take it one step further... practice!
- Join a local Negotiation Club to keep practicing,
- Create your own Negotiation Club, or
- JOIN The Negotiation Club and be a part of a growing community of people who come together to practice.
Practice makes perfect, and our club meetings provide the ideal environment to refine this essential technique.
Welcome to the Negotiation Club Podcast with Phillip Brown. The Negotiation Club is the only community focused solely on enhancing your negotiation skills training through practice with others. Today we're talking to one of Phil's old friends, John Skinner, about the parts of a negotiation that you can never be quite prepared for and a strategy called "Parking" that can help. Welcome to the Negotiation Club Podcast. Find out what the experts and the other practitioners in the world are doing, the techniques and the skills that are being used that we can actually practice for ourselves and bring into our negotiations, make it our style of negotiations. So we're going to focus on one aspect here and I want to introduce you to John Skinner. Now John Skinner and I go back a number of years because in fact the first time we met was when John was interviewing me for a job. But John's a business owner, he's got plenty of experience in here. So John, tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi. Well, I trained as an accountant, eventually became a finance director of a train company and a managing director. So at that point I'd been used to running railways, lost my job after a takeover and became a freelance. I spent most of the last however many years dealing with rail contracts, either bidding for contracts or letting them on the government side in the UK and abroad. So railways run on contracts these days and I have quite a bit of experience in them. I know. Fantastic. I mean, I've got to say I really enjoyed my time in the rail industry. It's almost like a family to be really as a close-knit group. But of course, as you say, we run on contracts as well as rail. So I am really excited to hear from you about some of these stories. Now, we did have a quick chat beforehand and you've got one area which I think is really important for negotiators to be able to consider. So tell us what your thoughts are and where we're going with this. Well, it's better than the 1% of the negotiation. So normal negotiation is you do your preparation work, you've got your negotiation cards, you've researched your whoever's on the other side of the table, you know a bit about them. You've got your own desires, wishes, objectives, red lines. You're pretty well prepared, you're 90% of the way there. So you're feeling fairly confident and you've maybe talked to some colleagues and asked them to do a bit of brainstorming or whatever I've forgotten. Hopefully that brings you up, you're 99% of the way there when you walk into the negotiation. And then you're sitting there, you're talking with the other side and all of a sudden something crops up that you had not expected. It's the 1% or if you like, it's the O shit moment. What do I do now? Yeah. And you know what? I've been there and you really are picking a position which I think is perhaps what most people are afraid of, it's like all the preparation in the world, but it's that 1%, as you say, it's the O shit moment. So from your perspective, you've had these experiences. So talk us through that a little bit and how it's worked and perhaps how it hasn't worked and then we'll try and work out what type of skill or technique we need to think about. Sure. Well, one was quite straightforward, it was a bidding situation and we were not in a face-to-face negotiation. So at that point in our time to think about what to do, three bitters for a contract, we needed a maintenance service, we got three bitters, all looked competent, capable of doing the job, et cetera, et cetera. Bitter A came in with a price beginning with a three, said, "There's one slight problem, I don't actually have a maintenance facility, it'll be two years before I can start." Okay. So we'll go two years without a train service, no, probably not. So they're out of the race. Second one comes in, yeah, they can do the job, price begins with a three, so very similar, looks all right. Second one comes in, they can do the job, price begins with a seven. Now, at that moment, you think, now, if they'd come in with a price that was beginning with a four or a two, so not too far away, maybe you can negotiate your way through. When they came in a price beginning with a seven, what do you do? The obvious thing is to bite off the hand of the one that came in with a three and say, "Yeah, we'll go with you," but can you negotiate with them? Actually, can they deliver a three if the other guy wants a seven? What do you do at that point? When you hear something which is so far removed from your expectations, that's what really does differentiate because you've then got to, in many ways, you're going to think to yourself, "Okay, what do I do? I think we were talking about it," you've pretty much got to try and bite some time as well. Yes, and we were lucky because this is a paper exercise at this point, so we had time. But we had to do a big rethink. Can the guy is beginning with a three, really deliver on the contract? Yeah. Or is the guy beginning with a seven just trying to take the mickey? Who knows? Yes. But you're right. Yeah, we had to buy some time. We did some research and we came up with an answer. The only thing we lost was the power to play one off against another in the negotiation, so I have to tell you the outcome of that. We went with one with a three and the contract developed over years and has been very successful. Thank you very much. That's absolutely right, but it's that early moment of, "Okay, this is so extraordinarily out of there. I'm not quite sure what to do with it and therefore whatever." So this was done in many ways. This was being done possibly as a paper exercise, but actually I have seen this happening directly when you're sat in a negotiation, in a meeting, you say something or the other party says something and it completely goes against a 99% of your preparation. It's a 1%er. We actually saw it last night at the negotiation club. There was a moment where somebody said something as part of their plan and it didn't work at all. But it wasn't a case. It wasn't no plan B. It was a case of, "Oh dear, okay, this is far removed." Now, I mean, we just said it there and one of the things that you said is you had time to do that, but when you're in a negotiation and that happens, okay, we are talking to one another, we see one another and if I said something, you said something and the other party suddenly, "Oh, they look uncomfortable. They don't look as if they're prepared or know about it." It can actually really be detrimental to your position in a negotiation. It certainly can because you teach a negotiation, you know, this better than I do, but the way somebody looks and their body language immediately shows you whether you're getting an advantage in a negotiation, you've got them on the back foot, you've caught them out, whatever. And however good a poker player you are, it is very difficult not to show the very least facial reaction. You may be able to control your physical movement and not bounce around and certainly hands whatever, but controlling facial movements is very difficult. I had one in a situation where we were sitting down together and I'd prepared for this. I had a sideline, I used to run a guest house and we had a price for rooms, we had some people staying with us from a government organization, and they were told at some point they needed to negotiate a special rate with us. So we prepared, if they're going to give us 50 room nights in a year, how much do we knock 10% off, 100 room nights, 20% or whatever, we had our negotiation stunt. We went in and said, "Lovely as to talk to you," et cetera, et cetera. What can we do for you? And they said, "We've got our instructions from above. There is no way we can pay you any more than this per night." Now the catch for me was that this was one pound more than our single night rate. So I got my discounted schedule under the table, so to speak, and they're offering more than I was even going to ask for. Right, so in this case, it was a positive shock, which is... Absolutely, but at what point do you bite the hand off and say, "Okay, we'll go for that." Do you try and say, "Well, that's all very well, but can I get another 10% on top because I've got the area?" And you try and do an unscripted negotiation to try and push them up. And literally it was face to face like, "I'm talking to you now, what do I do?" And of course it wasn't just me, my partner there as well. We needed a side conversation to say, "Do we fight hard, and what do we do?" And the only thing you can do is get a time out of some point, buy some time. Would you like another cup of tea? I just need to talk to each other, we need to go out to 2 minutes and talk to each other. But if you haven't planned for that, what do you do? Yeah, because what you need to try to achieve is a window of time to think about it, because you haven't had that time before, and you haven't thought about it beforehand, how do you deal with it? How do I buy time without looking like I'm buying time, or the alternative is you jump into the black hole and you just accept what they say because you don't think of anything better on the spot, and that may not be the best possible outcome. It might not be the best possible outcome. No, you're right. It might not be the best possible outcome. It's still something you can do. There's no rules. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think where I'm thinking here, because I've seen it, you've seen it, and people are going to come across this, is that when that 1% hits you, you have to do several things. First of all, you really don't want them to necessarily know that they've hit you with a 1% up. You didn't know this is so out there, because if you look unsure, if you come across as uncomfortable, and I know some people out there about, you know, win-win and working together, everything else. But the reality is that a lot of people, that is not the case. So you still need to protect the image that you have. So in order to protect that image, you need to be able to practice your response to the 1%ers. Yes. So for me, it is a case of saying, so John, you've just hit me with something. It's like, okay, John, I really appreciate that. It's an interesting position, it's not something that we are prepared right now to actually talk about. So I'd like to just park that for the moment, and we'll come back to it a bit later. Yeah. So the idea there is that I'm trying not to show the fact that I'm not necessarily shocked by it, but I am letting you know that it's not something we're prepared to talk about right now, and we'll move it across. Yeah, and there are little techniques you can use within that you could, if you got your notepad, beside you, look down, write something, scribble a note, because at least that way, if I'm looking down to scribble a note, you can't actually see most of what my facial expression is in those few seconds. I'm looking away. I'm not turning it back on you, but I am legitimately looking away and denying you the opportunity to look me straight in the eye, just look up the seconds whilst I write something down. And it doesn't actually matter what you write down unless somebody's watching you, but... Yeah, because what actually interesting enough, eye contact tells you an awful lot as well. So if I'm able to sort of look you in the eye, so to speak and say, "Okay, John, on this occasion, this is not something I'm prepared to talk about right now. We will look at this in a moment, and then I take my moment just to write it down and search." Because what I'm doing is effectively saying, "Look, let's park it. I acknowledge it, so you acknowledge it." "Oh, this is good, isn't it?" So you acknowledge it, you take control of it, and it's a strategy then to come back to it at some point when you're in a better position. So that 1% is not going to completely undermine you, you need to control it. So I think that here, what we're looking for for our club members and our audience to think about is, you can prepare, you can prepare, you can prepare, but there is always going to be a moment which you're not prepared for, and what we need to practice then is the art of parking. Yes. And it's parking with confidence, not screeching it into a corner, all ties blazing, so to speak. It's about doing it in such a comfortable, confident manner. Yeah, I like that. I was involved in one situation. It was not a negotiation, but it was a review. One of my colleagues was trying to make a point, and he was just making things worse and worse, and two of us were sitting there saying, "What can we do to help him, which is the way we could interrupt the only thing we could think of was to knock over a cup of coffee." Oh, I love that. I love that. I've done the same when I've actually kicked somebody under the chair. I mean, it's a kick up to try and to let them know, "Oh, God, I love that." So not only is there a parking technique, but you've actually got a fallback which is just to do something almost like shock takes it. It starts hurting the attention, isn't it? It is. And at that point, okay, if you knock over a cup of coffee, you've got to stop. You've got a parking moment whilst you clean up. You love it. You actually did that in a reader. You literally tipped the coffee over. No. No, we only talked about it. Oh, no, no, that would have been bloody brilliant, sorry. We sacrificed our mate, sorry, John, but yeah. Listen, John, I'm going to wrap it up here because he's always about just trying to pick out one thing, but I suspect there's probably a few things that we can talk about here as well. So let me just recap. What we're going to do is I'm going to take what you've just said here. We're going to try and create our negotiation card. I think we're going to call it parking because there is a skill to parking, particularly with that 1%. So what we're going to do is we'll create that. What works, what doesn't work, what you need to be mindful of, we'll add it to the library so that other people can learn from our experiences. And perhaps in the future, I'll get you back and then I would have to try the coffee water. I definitely am going to have to try that. John, useful, you enjoyed this? Yep. Very much so. Yeah, it's always good to rethink and interestingly, those were little situations I was in thinking about what would I have done differently? I don't know, but could I have made more out of the contract where the price went up? I don't know, but I know what I did at the time, not sure I would do exactly the same now. Maybe. Well, I'll concentrate on the parking. This is exactly the point. You really experience these situations and it's a reflection to say, "Okay, did I do it right? Would I do something different?" That's the whole purpose of the negotiation club is that this is not happening in a real negotiation, this happens in a practice so we can then try it again. Listen, John, thank you so much for this and listen, I wish you all the very best in the future and I look forward to listening to this podcast as well. You take care. Thank you. Thanks, John. Bye. Bye. If you liked what you heard today, check out the negotiation clubs.com, where you can find professional development courses, join negotiation club communities, purchase negotiation practice cards, get a private consultation, and more. Until next time, thanks for joining us and happy negotiating. Bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
