Wanted to notate and save this advice on negotiating and leadership from Alexandra Carter
The best leaders ask themselves the right questions to cultivate self-awareness. Questions
help you define the problem to be solved, uncover your needs, and
grapple with your emotions so that they don't come back to bite you in
the room. Feelings help you explore prior successes, and also to create
an action plan. Questions are a very powerful tool in a negotiation and
especially useful for an expert audience. When you raise the right
questions, you're going to get the information you need, and it will
give you a target to aim at. If you don't ask questions, you are aiming
in the dark.
Always start a negotiation by defining the right problem. Many
people start their negotiations in the wrong place, by tossing out
solutions. Start with, "What's the problem I'm trying to solve?" I was
recently counseling a really promising start-up company. They'd had two
rounds of financing, and they were getting ready for their next one.
COVID hits, a segment of their business disappears, and, all of a
sudden, they say, "Alex, we're going to reach out to every distributor
we've talked to in the last two years." And I was like, "Whoa. Whoa.
Whoa. What is the problem we are trying to solve here?" Depending on
that answer, I'm going to counsel you differently. If you told me you
wanted geographic distribution and just had to hit big everywhere, okay,
maybe do a blitz, but even then, I would still question it. If you told
me you needed to achieve the best product
velocity in your key markets, then you’d need a totally different
strategy.
One of the questions that I think is especially useful is: "How have I handled this successfully in the past?"
Asking yourself about a prior success is indispensable before you
negotiate with somebody else. If you go into a negotiation with somebody
else having just thought about a prior success, you are likely to
perform better, because you have primed your mind for creativity,
expansion, flexibility, and the ability to think on the spot. The second
reason is because the question acts as a data generator. If you think
about a prior success and you write down in detail the strategies you
used, you're going to find at least a couple that apply to your current
situation. Even in a novel situation, you have been through things
before, and you can find strategies to help you in your current
situation.
