Negotiation is about more than getting what you want. Effective and efficient negotiators focus on finding and removing the things in the way of agreement.

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We negotiate every day. If you’re leading any project or organisation, and not deeply involved in the technical work, you’re likely negotiating with team members, customers, suppliers, or partners. Or your kids.

Negotiation shares many aspects with leadership:

• At its core, it’s about defining a path that enables progress together.
• It involves confirming a shared and motivating purpose.
• It requires understanding and meeting others’ needs.
• It provides group cohesion, either in a transaction or an enduring relationship.

Some people love negotiating, while others hate it. Done well, it involves empathy, active listening, persuasion, and self-control. Despite all this, negotiations can still fail to achieve cooperation or desired outcomes, which can be frustrating and painful.

There are excellent books and lessons on negotiation, such as Chris Voss’s “Never Split The Difference.” Chris, a former hostage negotiator, deals with life-or-death negotiations. His lessons from high-stakes scenarios apply to many other situations, providing techniques for approaching and succeeding in negotiations. I won’t summarise his book here, but you should definitely read it.

Negotiations can be extremely challenging. You’re dealing with your own expectations and managing those of others who are relying upon you, you need to communicate well and understand what matters to other parties in the discussion, and you need to find your way to something that everyone can accept. Or else you need to walk away.

I’ve been part of many frustrating negotiations and discussions as a younger, impatient person. After numerous instances of wondering why the other party was slow, irrational, or indecisive, I looked deeper into the situation and developed my own rule:

Desires get people talking, but constraints dictate what happens.

What does it mean?

Two things:

1. There may be enough interest and desire to start the conversation, but that doesn’t indicate alignment or agreement.
2. Hidden constraints dictate what different parties actually can and will do together.

Why does it matter?

As Chris Voss says, “Getting what you want out of life is all about getting what you want from—and with—other people.” A good negotiation is an efficient process to discover the following:

• What the other side wants.
• What they will accept.
• What they can agree to.
• What you can agree to together.
• Confirming the agreement.

Mutual intentions start the conversation: it’s in the parties’ interests to talk, indicating some alignment of desires. However, what the parties can accept and agree to are different things. It’s similar to uncovering and identifying objections in a sales process. Negotiation is a form of selling, and like selling, you can choose how to approach the process.

Habit 5: seek first to understand before being understood.

Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

It’s easy to fixate on getting what you want. But when you focus solely on your desires, you can miss constraints preventing the other party from agreeing to something that seems logical to you. You might also miss opportunities to make better and faster agreements together.

What can you do to negotiate better?

Four simple things to improve your negotiations:

1. Know your own constraints. Understand what you can and cannot accept.
2. Be curious. Ask exploratory, open questions and treat it as a discovery process to understand the other side’s perspective and what matters to them. Get them talking.
3. Be open to possibilities. Listen carefully and give the other side room to think. They may suggest a better pathway than what you had in mind.
4. Adopt an adaptive mindset. Once you understand what the other side wants, will accept, and can agree to, figure out how to reframe what you want to reach an agreement. The necessary changes can often be quite small, sometimes just a change in language.

Bonus negotiation tips

• Be super-clear on what you can and cannot accept, and stick to it.
• Know when you need to walk away, and be okay about it. You don’t have to accept what the other side wants, and sometimes walking away changes the dynamic in your favour.
• Yield to overcome. Sometimes the other side needs to feel like they’re in control.
• Use your own constraints – real or manufactured – to channel towards what you desire.
• Appeal to a higher authority. Even if you’re the one who decides, sometimes it can help to make it seem like you have constraints from others.
• Buy, read, and apply the techniques in Chris Voss’s book!