How to Negotiate with Abundance not Scarcity

This week our topic is about the mindset and approach to negotiating across your business ecosystem, whether you’re a business owner, you lead a function, you’re a director or leader.

Ecosystems are your external stakeholders — clients, customers, partners and government. And your internal stakeholders — staff, resources, functions and different people you have to coordinate to deliver your external results to your client.

As we go into the future and we face big challenges and threats like climate change (and the pandemic), we cannot negotiate with a win-lose mindset, we have to start thinking differently about how we negotiate and how we do deals across those ecosystems so that the outcomes are more sustainable for you and for them. 

2 Ways Of Thinking About How You Negotiate

Which do you use most often?

1. Scarcity Mindset

Think about a recent time when you’ve had to negotiate with a customer or client. What were you thinking as you entered the room or picked up the phone?

A scarcity mindset says that “resources are limited” and “I need to win”.

I’m not arguing that scarcity mindset or win-lose negotiations don’t have their place, they only work well when time or resource is limited.Scarcity mindset is short term, it’s win at all costs, which is if I win you lose and often ROI focused – “how do I maximise the utility for my entity through this conversation?”.

2. Abundance mindset

This way of operating considers “how do we build a solution to where everyone gets what they need?”.The assumption behind this way of doing things is that everyone can benefit and is sustainable in the long term for all stakeholders.

It’s like a balanced scorecard approach that benefits all stakeholders. 3. How?

Impact of Scarcity

If we only focus on our own needs we can create an arm’s length relationship with partners and suppliers, and often the short term binary outcomes have later consequences. The competitive more masculine approach often excludes a diverse range of people out of the negotiation process.

Adundance is more a win-win, it’s thinking of all the parties as a team, how do we work together to get a systemic solution that helps meet everyone’s needs. It can take more time but it ultimately has a more sustainable outcome and is more collaborative in the way it works.

How to do more of this abundance type of negotiation

If you were to design and plan out that communication, how would you structure the Why, What, How and So What into that communication. Let me know, love to hear from you.

1. Engage prior to understanding the needs of all parties
2. Co-design a range of possible solutions
3. Model the consequences/benefits of each approach
4. Mutual decision making and testing implementation

Your next negotiation…

I’d love to hear from you is with a negotiation or conversation you got to have this week, how could you take a more abundance type approach to that conversation? Tell me more about the outcome…

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When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.

If you are a 50 person plus business, have budget to develop your organisation, and you have challenges with teamwork in your top 3 levels of leaders than we may be a good fit to work together. For more information, click below to watch a short video on my teamwork model and read testimonials from previous clients.

Let’s talk further about teamwork in your organisation…