Please sit down, I will bring you a coffee, were the first words with which an official from a major company greeted me.
It was the day we met. In the meeting that we would have, I represented a client who rented a premises from the company.
We talked about stray oxen until we got down to business. The monthly rental amount had to be negotiated, as the company wanted to renew, using a contractual option, the contract for five more years.
The official insisted on knowing the value sought by my client. Once this, he could start his work to lower the claims of the other party.
I was not in front of Mr. Company. The one who was meeting with me was an official who reports to a chain of hierarchical positions. Mediating the meeting I expressed the figure intended by my client causing a (exaggerated) reaction of fright from my interlocutor. At this point a new official had joined, the chief of whom was meeting with me.
Both were concerned about the distance between the requested value and the current royalty and also with the market value that they had obtained through a specialized real estate agency. The current value of the rent is three times less than said market value. The figure requested by my client is four times higher than the current value.
Between jokes, which are never just jokes, I thought that I believed that the company's position to maintain such a low value had not been "prudent" knowing that the market value was much higher. We are to lower the market value, if we do not achieve it, we do not justify our work, expressed one of the officials with a wide smile of pride.
We met again a week later. We started with the same lost oxen from the previous time and when we started to deal with the rent issue, he told me that the chief in charge of the branches expressed his position of not paying more than double what they were paying. The branch is not profitable, he said with a pained face.
I took this comment as an impossibility to continue our meeting, so I told them: "if it is not in your best interest to continue with the premises, there is nothing to negotiate." With so much handling of values and the opinion of the branch manager so far removed from the position of my client, I sincerely believed that there was nothing to negotiate.
They spent two hours praising the company as a tenant. They listed the advantages (solvency, guarantees, maintenance, etc.) that it represented for my client. I listened in silence to what turned out to be a proselytizing monologue in favor of the company as a tenant.
When the meeting was adjourned, I expressed to them that I felt that they were trying to put something outside of the company that belonged to the company: the decision to continue, or not, with the location. In addition, he perceived that they were not considering the "other" and precisely that "other" was, nothing more and nothing less, than the owner of the premises. I was also surprised that they ignored, precisely, the story that linked them to my client.
We conclude that they should evaluate the will of the company. Once this, just, we would meet again. Without this, we would only fall into inconductive meetings.
My client is an injured client. Proof of this is that he has hired me to negotiate with the same company that coercively (justified by the country's situation) urged him to accept a decrease (five times less) in the amount of rent in 2002, with the promise of review it once the country's situation stabilizes. Despite having sent two document letters requesting such a review, he never received a response. When they made a visit, they told him that the time was not right.
The risk of my client is that the company leaves the premises. The risk of the company is that they must leave the premises because it is an unprofitable operation. Risk is part of each party's business.
If both parties assume their own risk, it is possible that an agreement will be reached, otherwise, the agreement is impossible, to such an extent that the company, through the official, threatened to stay and continue paying what they are paying until such time as reach a court settlement. He even went so far as to express: "I can block your funds" (it was no longer the company's, but its own).
I suppose this threat is a blunder from the officials and not from the company. Threats are a clear sign of helplessness. An unequivocal symptom that Narcissus is enraptured with his image and that at any moment he throws himself into the lake where, inevitably, he will end up drowning.
We fill our mouths talking about negotiation techniques and we forget the fundamental: we negotiate with another and if we do not take it into account, we run the risk of being alone, following a verbose manual verbatim.
Let's juice the situation:
This is a real case. Without trying to cover the topic, it occurs to me that it may be useful (for me and for circumstantial readers) to use it as a teaching sheet.
Companies often prefer that their officials use procedures manuals to carry out their functions. They set out what should be done in certain circumstances. This is used for customer service, for the sale of products, receipt of claims, negotiations with suppliers, etc.
Going through the predetermined steps makes it easier for us to travel along "certain supposed paths", but not for everyone. Life, thank God, confronts us with uncertainties that remind us of our ability to create possibilities on the go. Of course, the training to accept uncertainty is not as simple as the one aimed at teaching how to read and memorize manuals.
Two friends meet. José tells Juan that he was studying logic. Juan asked him to explain what it consisted of. José asks him: do you like fish? Juan answers yes. Then José asks him: do you like flowers? Juan replies yes. José keeps asking him different things and concludes that Juan liked women.
That same day Juan meets Pedro, who tells him that he is learning logic. When Pedro asks him to explain what it consisted of, Juan asks him: do you like fish? Pedro, he answers no. Juan, immediately said to him: then you are homosexual.
In the case of the company in history, it is strange that they do not use at least a couple of different manuals. One for new contracts and another for renewals, in which they could include different possible cases: happy owners, disgruntled owners, rents close to market values, rents much lower than market values, owners represented by third parties, etc.
When we negotiate, there is much more at stake than simply negotiating on a specific issue. The fighting spirit is awakened. The emotional charge we put on him is so great that we turned it into a tragedy in which we kill or die. In the case presented, neither the negotiators on duty nor those above them, who had already killed the other party, were never revived. It is not possible to "negotiate" with a dead person. If they had taken into account the existence of my client, they would have considered that it was very possible that "this" owner was not the same as "that" who had been killed in 2002.
If we negotiate piecewise we have to do it in circumstances that do not offer a return, much less that in that return our interests are at stake.
The procedures of certain warriors, disguised as negotiators, often become boomerangs. Negotiating is not killing, negotiating is not leaving the wounded. It is an art that cannot be learned only with manuals. It is an art that requires a high knowledge of us, in order to recognize the one in front of us.
Negotiating without considering the other is relatively easy until the other is not bothered and acts accordingly. We can come to feel with an unlimited power that drives us to feel that we are masters of what is foreign (neighbor). Given the reaction of the other, we can justify our behavior by arguing that the other does not understand reasons. What reasons? Those that we sustain and that we try to impose on others.
When we negotiate we have to be clear that not everything is negotiable. The product of the negotiation must be made up of shared reasons, of mutual convenience, of consensus, including, maintaining (respecting) the disagreements. A negotiation should not mean the search for the submission of the other to a reason of their own. A negotiation opens the doors to new reasons, ours and those of others.
