NEGOTIATING ACROSS CULTURES
BY MICHAEL GATES
Negotiation is something we all do every day – both at work and in our private lives. But we don’t often sit back to think about the process. It’s natural, isn’t it?
Well, actually, no.
We are influenced and blown off course by our biases, both psychological and cultural.
And in many cases we would do better to use counter-intuitive research results from science and others’ past experiences to guide us rather than rely solely on our own instinct.
By understanding how easily we fall into decision-making traps and why, and by putting ourselves into the shoes of the other party – both psychologically and culturally – it is possible to achieve better outcomes.
A key skill for negotiators is to discover the underlying interests of the other party instead of focusing on positions or perceived positions: understanding the other’s culture can be a useful guide.
My own first experience of what can go wrong if you don’t take culture into account was my first sales negotiation with a Finn, before I was in the cultural field. Finnish males can be incredibly silent and, faced with this, I kept dropping the price…and dropping the price.
Eventually Pekka agreed on a price on which I would make very little profit.
Fortunately things went well over the next year and I was able to increase the price and volume.
He eventually told me that he had been very happy with my original offer, but had been trying to formulate the right sentence in his head in order to agree to it (‘interested of….interested for….interested about…’) Before he remembered the correct preposition after interested was ‘in’ I had dropped the price…….so he decided to wait a little longer.
The point is that in Finnish culture – as with most Asian cultures – not losing face is a core need, so he didn’t want to make a grammar mistake. He was also from a culture completely comfortable with silence. Yet I interpreted the silence as a deliberate negotiation tactic to make me uncomfortable.
So, rule 1 is to understand the values of the other party.
American values could be summarised like this: