Last week, Trust Factor covered how working partnerships are essentially an ongoing act of negotiation, where two parties attempt to establish and maintain a common ground—or “values exchange”—that benefits them both. Doing so is an exercise in vulnerability.
“Very often, common ground is about help. It’s found by being vulnerable and saying what you’re having issues with. That can actually instigate quite a lot of good feeling between two parties,” says Annabel Shorter, a senior consultant at negotiation consultancy Scotwork.
But often, select parties involved in a negotiation are unwilling to take that vital step of being candid about their needs. Unsurprisingly, when one party believes its needs aren’t being met, communication deteriorates quickly from there.
Ironically, the primary reason that a negotiating party might be afraid to share their needs is out of worry they won’t be met. Freddy Burgess, associate partner at consultancy The Gap Partnership, says that often people suffer from a “fear it will be held against them if they share too much, and fear that they’ll give away that negotiation.”
“If that’s true, then you haven’t done the work you needed to build trust, respect, and partnership before you get to the table,” Burgess says.
For Burgess, one of those initial acts of building trust comes during what he describes as defining the “guiding principles” of a negotiation—where two parties determine what their objectives for the partnership are.
If that stage is skipped, it’s easy for either side to feel as though their counterpart is trying to extract a win over them (which, in some cases, they might be), and then talks are liable to devolve into a confrontation rather than a collaboration.
“Often we might ask a [client], ‘Who is your adversary in the negotiation of the partnership?’ And, often, the answer is, ‘The person I’m negotiating with.’ But, if you’re working in a collaborative space, the real adversary is the problem that’s on the table,” Burgess says.
Of course, it can be easy for either side to lose sight of the fact that they’re in a partnership when, Shorter says, negotiations are inherently about conflict. Rather than shy away from that fact, Shorter advises clients to recognize that when their business partner raises an issue, they’re likely going to feel affronted by it. Recognizing that early helps prevent the receiving party from overreacting. On the flip side, Shorter also has advice for negotiators issuing proposals, rather than receiving them.
“A key question to ask yourself is, ‘What would I think if this landed on my desk?'” Shorter says, urging that negotiations, like all relationships, need to be handled with empathy. “If the answer is, ‘I’d be outraged,’ there’s a 99% chance that your partner is going to be thinking exactly the same.”
If you’ve managed to negotiate your way through the fraught stages of establishing a relationship and concluding a negotiation on the table, the next step to maintaining that trust is the most important, yet easily overlooked.
“It’s scary how little of a corporate negotiation might actually get implemented afterwards,” Burgess says. During negotiations, many companies simply neglect to establish who will be responsible for taking action on which tasks, how their progress will be tracked and measured, and how often their partners will be updated on progress. Without that actual work, the trust and goodwill built during the early stages of a partnership erode quickly.
“Once you get to the point where you have agreed and you’ve walked out of the room, that’s when the work really starts,” Burgess says.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
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TRUST EXERCISE
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