How to Dodge a Hardball
A quick word first
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The clock is ticking for major league baseball with talks between team owners and the players’ union stalemated. There’s a chance that Opening Day will be postponed. Some people worry that the whole season may be in jeopardy.
In the world of negotiation, however, playing hardball is a twelve-month sport. If you haven’t seen any of that this past year, you’re leading a charmed life. But that’s no guarantee that you’ll be spared in 2022. Fingers crossed, but you need to be prepared if find yourself up against a hardball negotiator.
In his book, Negotiating the Impossible, my friend and colleague Deepak Malhotra offers practical advice for countering three of the most common hardball ploys.
Ultimatums
When someone says “take it or leave it” to Deepak, he ignores. “Many ultimatums are not true deal-breakers,” he says. “Sometimes people are just emotional, or trying to assert control, or using strong language in an attempt to gain advantage.” Responding to the demand legitimizes it, making hard for the other party to back down without losing face.
To avoid that trap, Deepak will ignore an ultimatum a second and even third time to test the counterpart’s resolve.
There will be times where the other person really means it, of course. If you sense that’s the case, Deepak says to “reframe their statement as a non-ultimatum before continuing.” If someone tells you “I will never do this,” he recommends replying “I can understand given where we are today, this would be very difficult for you to do…”
The word “impossible” shuts the door to agreement, whereas the phrase “very difficult” leaves it open at least a crack. (It’s also face-saving measure.) And the phrase “where we are today” is a reminder that things may be different tomorrow, next week, or next month.
The salami technique
Then there are those cases where you think you’ve reached agreement, maybe even shaken hands on it, but at the last moment, the other person says, “Oh, there’s one other thing that I’ve got to have before we wrap this up.”
If it has been a long, dragged-out negotiation, weariness might tempt you to give in. But doing so is costly twice over. It means handing over something of value to you. And it also invites the other party, just as he or she is about to sign the agreement, to ask for yet another thing. It’s called the salami technique because slice by slice they’re getting more, and you’re left with ever less.
If that request comes out of the blue, it may feel like either the deal is going to go down the drain or you’re going to have to live with a less attractive result. Take a breath. There’s an easy way to deflect this tactic. Just say, “If this is really critical to you, I’ll give it some thought, but you understand that to make this work, I have to see improvement on some of the other items we tentatively settled.”
That’s a hard statement for the other party to rebut. They may rethink their demand or take a breath themselves and figure out what they can grant you to make the deal mutually acceptable.
Gotta check with my boss
The classic car salesperson gambit is third hardball tactic that Deepak addresses. It’s where the person across the table says, “I’ve got to get my manager’s okay on this. (And of course the manager is never okay with it.)
Deepak points out that the problem arises “from a failure of not having negotiated process before substance. In other words, before getting too deep into deal terms, you want to elicit more information about how you will get from where you are today to the finish line.”
If your counterpart doesn’t have the final say, that’s okay, so long as it’s mutually understood that the process is exploratory at this point. Such conversations can be valuable, but you don’t want to be a position of making commitments when your counterpart can’t give you a firm yes or no.
Last July, I posted “Got-to-Check-with-my-Boss Gambit.” In it I discussed what to do if a counterpart initially claims to have authority, but at the end reverses himself or herself. I wrote:
What you say depends on your own nature and style. If it were me, I might pause for a few seconds, looking them in the eye before saying, “That’s not what you told me earlier. What am I to make of that?” It would express my displeasure along with a willingness to play hardball myself.
If that’s too confrontational, you might instead say, “Okay. We’ve covered a lot of ground here. I should probably check with my people, too, and see if they have any problems with what we’ve come up with.” Fair is fair, and now they should think about possibly losing some of the gains they already won dealing with you.
Final thoughts. For other Jazz of Negotiation material on hard bargaining check out “Bait and Switch?” and “Dealing with a Bad-Faith Negotiator.” You can hear Deepak himself in our Negotiating the Impossible podcast, discuss that book plus his sci-fi novel, The Peacemaker’s Code.
Housekeeping
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