One idea that we want to think about as we jump into a negotiation is to think about the nature of the good or service that we're negotiating for. And we want to think about is how important is the relationship to the overall outcome that we get? And here's what I mean by that. So one dichotomy is good versus services, but it's actually a little more complicated than this. But you can think about you're negotiating for some thing. So you're negotiating say for a barbecue. The negotiation will conclude, you'll walk away with the barbecue and your relationship with the seller may not matter very much. As opposed to say negotiating for a tutor, you care deeply about the relationship with the tutor because if through the negotiation process, you've somehow insulted or offended the tutor, that's going to be less pleasant as you're experiencing and sort of consuming that experience and the tutoring might be affected by it. As opposed to if you ended up not developing a good relationship with the person selling you a barbecue, maybe that doesn't matter very much. Now, I've talked about developing a bad relationship, you could also conversely think about developing a really good relationship. So imagine you've been incredibly pleasant, you really engage in active listening, you developed great rapport with the person selling you the barbecue grill. Well that's great, but it's not going to improve what happens next very much. As opposed to say with this tutor, maybe you have a great relationship and now they're going to stay a little bit later or help you out in some other way, the relationship may impact the total outcome of what you get. Now in some cases, we don't think about the relational outcomes, it might even guide us to avoid negotiating altogether, or might guide us to make more concessions. So in this case of a tutor, maybe we want to make more concessions and not bargain as assertively with somebody for whom that follow on interaction matters a lot, or maybe there's a repeated interaction. So negotiating very aggressively with your contractor may not be ultimately very effective because there are so many changes you might make along the way that if you negotiated very assertively one case, there's another negotiation and you'll end up paying it back there anyway. So we want to think about what is the nature of what we're negotiating for and goods and services are one general category, but it's not perfect. So if you remember, I was talking about this barbecue grill as an example of a good, but suppose that it needs assembly. And now you're buying the barbecue grill, but there's a service component to that as well, and so the good versus service dichotomy is imperfect. We want to think just more generally about to what extent does the relationship matter going forward? And the relationship really matters that should guide our negotiation strategy. So if we think about it, the sort of the classic framework negotiations, we think about how important are our material outcomes. Are my material outcomes really important or not very important? And then how important are the relational outcomes? Not very important to very important. So when the outcome is really important to me and the relationship is really important to me, we put on a different negotiation hat, a different negotiation strategy than when one of these things is less important. So here's an example. Suppose that I'm negotiating with my employer, I care a lot about the relationship and I really care about what happens to me in terms of compensation or the career trajectory I'm going to have there, the different rotations I might have. So the material outcomes to me matter, the relationship matters a lot, and there I want to be collaborative. It's like we're solving a puzzle, we're working together what's best for you and for me. So that's a collaborative sort of problem solving, puzzle solving approach and we should take our time to find the best outcome. Now conversely, suppose that the material outcome to me is not very important, but the relationship matters a lot. So here, suppose I'm negotiating with my spouse about who should run an errand or take out the trash. There, I really care deeply about the relationship and this particular issue isn't that important. Well in that case, accommodating could be exactly right. That is the best long term outcome for me is a great relational outcome and taking out the trash, it's not a big deal, I'm just going to help out. You can imagine the converse here, that is suppose we put on the wrong negotiation hat, and we're very competitive and we're like, hey, I took out the trash last time, it's your turn. Well, you might be right, but that's not the right negotiation strategy when relational concerns are so high. Now there may be cases where your outcomes matter a lot and the relational outcomes matter very little. So imagine buying a house, we're talking about a lot of money, and in this case, the seller's moving out. You might not deal with this realtor much in the future. The best course of action for you can be competitive. That is we're going to start high, we're going to concede slowly, we're going to be assertive about our demands, and we're going to dig in our heels. We're going to care a lot about the material outcomes and less about the relationship, and that could be the right strategy in that case. So when relational concerns are low, material outcomes are high, we might be more competitive. Now when both are low, we don't care much about material outcomes, we don't care much about the relationship, maybe there we just avoid the negotiation altogether. So this is the kind of thing we're seeing distant relatives at Thanksgiving or we're passing somebody in the office, we could pick up the conversation negotiate and try to work something out. But if it's not really important, maybe we just let it go and move on to what comes next. Now we can also think about what happens when both are kind of moderate sort of in the middle, in which case we do something like just split the difference or do something sort of quick and sort of compromising. Where suppose you go out with four friends, you go out for lunch, you're splitting the tab here. Here the compromise could be, look, let's put it in fits for the five of us. That's a quick compromise, as opposed to being super accommodating, hey look, I'll just pay it all or competitive, hey, you got the side salad and you got the second glass of wine, that's a more competitive approach. Sometimes just being sort of quick and clear is the right outcome. So here's the idea that is rather than having one negotiation hat that fits all situations, we would like to be flexible depending on the relational concerns and the material outcome concerns. But for most people, it's hard for us to nimbly navigate these things. What I want to suggest is that by thinking about this more explicitly, we can figure out what we might be adopting the wrong approach given the situation that we're in. And that when relational outcomes are high, a competitive approach may not be the right outcome. We might end up doing much better being much more relationally focused. Often the relational outcomes that we have really will impact the economic outcomes that we get. And we can't readily disentangle the economic from relational outcomes. And so the idea here is we want to be really mindful of building and managing our relationships as we go through a process. And this is particularly important and safer for salary negotiations where relational concerns are so high. I just added one quick follow up idea that is with review processes, it's changed the nature of some of these relationships. So even though say renting a house or using a car service, it may be a single shot transaction. The idea that we might review each other changes that interaction so that we really do care about this relationship sometimes even in a seemingly single shot transaction, because the reputations that follow us really matter. So there, even in those cases, relational concerns are really important.
