How to successfully negotiate with your boss, partner and friends

It's been a week of negotiations, from gender pay gaps at the BBC to bungling Brexit talks. Phoebe Luckhurst asks the experts how to get what you want
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The British are not natural negotiators. We rarely feel compelled to shout out for our own interests. And at the moment this reticence is imperilling the nation state itself: we are mired in Brexit negotiations to which we are temperamentally unsuited.

Yesterday the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, assured us that “as soon as the UK is ready to clarify its position on finance, we will start to negotiate”, and that he himself is “encouraged by the progress” so far — precisely the sort of shifting, opaque bluster you use to buy time so you can lock yourself in a toilet and breathe into a paper bag.

It’s not just Brexit: negotiation has manifested itself in the week’s noisiest story. Think of all those BBC players who will be spending the weekend with their agents working out a strategy for getting a pay rise. Fairly or otherwise, they must negotiate with an institution that itself must, in turn, negotiate the scandal.

In other words, the art of negotiation has become a matter of national import. So while you watch all this unfold in horrified fascination, you must also steel yourself. Take lessons from the giants: let them fail so you don’t have to. This is how to negotiate.

Work it out

Once a year you shuffle into an airless room and dry-swallow as you make the case that you deserve an above-inflation pay rise. Your boss says something that sounds genial and encouraging, though later, playing it over in your mind, it acquires the cool cruelty of the backhanded rejection. You do not get the pay rise.

“We find anything hard whenever we have to deal with people in power,” explains psychologist Emma Kenny. “People worry that it will put noses out of joint, and that they will be seen as arrogant or entitled.”

She recommends strategising. “Know your worth. Show that you’re doing more, why you’re more equipped.” BBC women, take note. “Men ask for rises and opportunities,” Kenny continues. “Women are people-pleasers and perfectionists. It’s about more than asking — it’s about knowing what you want, interpreting it and being able to ask for it.”

If you hit an impasse, ask what you can do to increase your chances of getting what you want next time. “That way you’re not losing.”

Negotiation is also about establishing boundaries. Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist and couples therapist, says: “People find it is easier to say yes than to deal with building boundaries at work. Sometimes you need to step back and say, ‘OK, what is too much?’ It’s important to know at the outset what you are prepared to give up and what you want. When you’re woolly and grey — that’s when people can take advantage.”

Love match

Your romantic partner is an ally, the person on whom you can rely to help you negotiate life’s complexities and disappointments. Unfortunately, you must often negotiate with them.

Perhaps they are insisting you spend your single week of holiday at their parents’ home, caretaking the in-laws’ decrepit spaniel; or perhaps they are insisting you spend your fledgling first-home deposit on a crackpot get-rich-quick scheme. You must talk them down without sending your relationship down the plughole.

Negotiating is a difficult word to use around romantic relationships, Kenny says. “It suggests a chance that one of you can lose. The ideal is collaboration.” It’s not romantic but if you are finding you need to handle something like work-life balance, then employ strategy in the same way you would when negotiating with your boss. The idea of boundaries recurs. “Don’t have flexible boundaries. Say how you feel and be strong. If you aren’t, that’s a flexible boundary, and it will happen again,” says Kenny.

Burke recommends practice. “Imagine it as a situation where you are out of your comfort zone, and rehearse different outcomes.”

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Social lifelines

We have all felt that sweet flood of joy when someone cancels a plan we never wanted to get involved in in the first place. Moreover, we have all agreed to something that we have no intention of following through on. This is all normal — if you’re doing it, you can be assured all your mates are too. But if you are a habitual people-pleaser, compulsively agreeing to things that fill you with horror, you might need to start negotiating your social life better.

For a start, stop being scared of your friends, suggests Burke. “It takes a while to learn that most people will respect your boundaries — that it’s OK to say no. There is this unconscious belief that, ‘if I say no to people, they won’t like me’. These people have a different code for themselves than they have for others. Take a reality check.”

Be straight with people — cheerful but firm. Instead of agreeing to something thoughtlessly, think about whether you want to do it. Take time: do not answer the text immediately. Speak up if something isn’t convenient. And consider the position from a reverse position — as Burke observes, if you don’t automatically excommunicate a friend if they say they can’t meet you, they won’t do so to you.

Burke has a cautionary tale. “I have seen people who are burnt out by the toll of pleasing everyone. Eventually, people like that will erupt — and someone only asked if you wanted to go for a drink.” A lesson, perhaps, for Davis and Co.

Follow Pheobe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst

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