Do Business Well

Deadlock and its near cousin, breakdown, are uncomfortable. Nobody enjoys them. They erode or undermine the trust that has painstakingly been built up during the early stages of your negotiation; they bring you face to face with the risk of losing your hoped-for outcomes. But, like most things in life, they have, hidden within them, an opportunity. For the way that you handle them will make a significant difference to both the outcome of your negotiation and the way that people see you as a negotiator. Handle them well and it’ll be a turning point — for both the negotiation and your career as a negotiator. Handle them badly and both will suffer.

The gateway to success in handling deadlock and breakdown lies in your recovery programme which, like all the other recovery programmes, follows a sequence of steps or stages. The simplest sequence for these is:

Stage one: Keep your communications open

Stage two: Heal the rift

Stage three: Find a way to move forward together.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Stage one: keeping your communications open

This, the first stage in your recovery programme, is not just important — it’s essential. Without it you’ve little hope of finding a way back, your negotiation’s adrift with no one to throw you a rope. With it, you’ve the beginnings of something that may lead to a successful outcome. Keeping a communication window open is a must whatever happens — even when the other side stages a walk-out. Doing it isn’t the easiest of tasks — you may have to swallow your pride, stand back from your feelings — and you’ll need to draw on all of the communication skills that you’ve used during the earlier stages of the negotiation. You might find all this a little easier to understand, and do, if you look at the alternatives: that is, what might happen if you don’t communicate.

For when you don’t keep your communications with the other _side open, you’ll lose the deal that’s on the table, a deal which, while it isn’t perfect, is better than what you’ve got now. You could also find that failure to communicate leads to the other _side taking action against you — by going on strike or withdrawing services. You might find that the other side will make a deal with someone else. If you can live with any or all of these then there seems, on the face of it, little or no reason for you to communicate with them. But there is — first, because you’ll need to tell them that conclusion, politely and clearly, and second, because you never know when you’ll next be sitting across the negotiating table from them again.

If, however, you’re setting out down the road to recovery, the _communications with the other side should be aimed at getting them back into talking mode. A letter, an e-mail, a telephone call or an informal lunch — these are all perfectly good ways of effecting a reconciliation. The one that you choose will reflect your relationship with the other side. But, however or wherever it’s done, this overture must be:

* blame-free, and

* aimed at getting the talking going again.

Once this happens, you’re ready to move on to the next stage.

Dear Alice…

Dear Alice,

It’s been a couple ofmonths since you asked me to respect your wish to break offcontact between us. In that time I’ve been doing some thinking — thinking about what I want from my lift and, most importantly, about you and me. One of the things that I’ve realized is how important you are to me.

I’d like to be able to talk with you about this and, hopefully, how it might help us to find a way of being together again.

Perhaps we could have some lunch together?

John

Stage two: healing the break

It isn’t easy to come back into a negotiation, particularly aft_erthe disappointment and difficulties of an earlier breakdown in discussions. So, if the other side does agree to restart, first words are important. It is obvious, but nevertheless well worth stating, that these first words should be welcoming, constructive and helpful. Allocating blame or suggesting, however indirectly, that you were right and they were wrong are prime examples of ho_wnot to do it. What you want to achieve is finding a position or situation in which you can work together to solve a mutual problem. This problem is the obvious one of deciding how you’ll move forward. ‘One step at a time’ is not only a good motto here — it is also a good action plan. Examples of the sorts of questions that you and the other side need to answer and that typically mark the steps you’ll take are:

* Do we want to continue to negotiate together or was the breakdown irretrievable?

Can we resolve our difficulties ourselves?

* Do we need outside help to move forward?

The answers to these and other questions take us into the third and final stage.

Stage three: finding the way forward

The questions that you’ve asked and answered in the previous stage will get you off to a flying start here. If you’ve jointly decided that you can move forward together, then the process is a familiar one. But the offers and counter-offers can only start when you’ve both been up-front and honest about the issues that pulled you up short before.

Once you’ve done this, then the sort of tactics — such as fragmenting, trading concessions, `splitting the difference’ etc. — can get you up and moving. Take care though, for trust is often an early casualty when breakdowns occur and that trust will need to be carefully rebuilt.

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