Leigh Thompson - Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table

Praise for

Negotiating the Sweet Spot

Any relationship, be it personal, business, or otherwise, needs interactions that yield consistent win-win results if it is to succeed over time. Dr. Leigh Thompson has applied her expertise in comprehensive research to take this why we recognize and explain the what behind it and the how to achieve it. Translating this research to application, Dr. Thompson, the educator, uses her mastery of guiding students from theoretical knowledge to effective application by providing a toolkit of easy-to-use hacks and relatable anecdotes. Negotiating the Sweet Spot will certainly spend more time open on my desk than it will sitting on my shelf.

STAN RUSSELL,

Executive Director of Alexion Pharmaceuticals

Thompsons Negotiating the Sweet Spot provides valuable lessons for navigating conflict in personal and business life. Each of the stories and best practices in this book leads the reader on a deeper dive into how to resolve, finesse, learn, and thrive when seated at the negotiation table of life.

LIN SHIU YI,

Owner of Technigroup Far East
and Owner and CEO Cell Viable

Leigh Thompson has done it again. This time, she applies years of research and classroom experience to the negotiation process. Thompson distills the behavioral science into simple methods we can all use. Negotiating the Sweet Spot is a must-read for practicing attorneys and others who want to negotiate more successfully in all aspects of their lives.

KAREN MCGAFFEY,

Partner and National Environment, Energy,
and Resources Practice Chair at Perkins Coie LLP

Navigating conflict is a sore spot for many of usboth in and out of work. This book makes it possible to rise above compromise and create options better than any one person might imagine. Finally, we can see the skills involved and how to build them in easy, practical ways. Now the sweet spot is not only possible, but we have a set of tools to get there!

ALISON NIEDERKORN,

Executive Leadership Designer,
Facilitator, and Coach at Google

In sales on a daily basis, I face the challenge of building trust, accelerating customer success, and maximizing deal sizes. The tools in this book are a breakthrough in the field of negotiations and have had an immediate impact on my bottom line and business relationships, and at the same time have added immense value for my clients to achieve a true win-win at the end of a deal cycle.

DENNIS RAISCH,

Senior Enterprise Account Executive at Salesforce

Thompsons evidence-based, tangible, and practical tools have guided me in countless professional negotiations to levels of success that I could not have ever imagined. In Negotiating the Sweet Spot, the revelation that the universe of negotiations is vastly larger than just the ones faced in a boardroom will broaden your appreciation, as it has mine, of how to maximize mutual benefit and build strength into not only your professional but personal relationships.

KEVIN A. KELLIHER,

Director of Business Strategy
and Operations at Frontier BPM Inc.

2020 Leigh Thompson

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by HarperCollins Leadership, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus LLC.

Book design by Aubrey Khan, Neuwirth & Associates.

ISBN 978-1-4002-1744-1 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-1743-4 (HC)

Epub Edition May 2020 9781400217441

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934156

Printed in the United States of America

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Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

Please note that the endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication

This book is lovingly dedicated to my students who have shared with me their triumphs, challenges, and defeats at all of lifes negotiation tables. Their stories have shaped my research, teaching, and the pages of this book.

Contents

THE CONCEPT OF WIN-WIN HAS BEEN AROUND FOR DECADES. It sounds good. Sounds fair. Sounds like good business. Sounds good for relationships. Actually, it sounds like a no-brainer! But does it work? Do people actually reach win-win outcomes in business and in personal life?

Unfortunately, the answer is most often no. My research has revealed that people routinely fail to capture maximum potential gains in their personal and workplace negotiations. For example, my simulation studies show that, on average, talented managers leave about 20 percent of potential mutual gains untapped. Thats akin to taking 20 percent of the value of every business deal and dumping it into the trash. So, in a typical $100,000 business deal, about $20,000 goes down the drain.

My next question to the managers in my studies is about how often they negotiate. The most typical response is once-a-week or once-per-month. If we figure that in, we are now up to $200,000 a year in waste, or even more! And if we think about ten years of a career, a conservative estimate of the lost value associated with failure to reach win-win is about $2 million! Now, if you are a leader or manager and have, say, ten direct reports, we are now approaching $20 million of lost value when you include their failures to achieve win-wins! You can see where this is going. What may seem like a drop in the bucket is actually an ocean of losses!

We can calculate the same lost value when partners, friends, or family members consistently fail to satisfy one anothers needs and end up disappointing themselves and hurting people they care about. Indeed, when it comes to our personal relationships, the stakes involved with maximizing the value of any kind of interaction are often much higher than in our professional lives. When we leave value on the table, the relationship can sour and, sometimes, dissolve altogether.

Learning how to get to that maximum value can mean the difference between successful and failed relationships, along with the ability or inability to actually enjoy our leisure time or balance our work and personal lives. Remember: Many people are conflict-avoidant when it comes to their personal relationships; unwilling to rock the boat, they keep the peace, often by second-guessing what their partners and loved ones want. In the meantime, the other partner is doing the exact same thing, resulting in suboptimal outcomes on multiple dimensions. The good news is that you dont have to be a licensed clinician to learn the strategies in this book and use them to maximize the value of your relationshipssomething I call finding the sweet spot.

Traditionally, win-win negotiation has focused nearly exclusively on money and other economic resources, like services, products, market share, and financial returns. In this book, the term sweet spot expands the scope to reflect all the things that people care about in business and life, which are not always measured in dollars. Thus, the sweet spot refers to money as well as to intangible but infinitely valuable non-financial resources. When people find the sweet spot, they maximize value however they may define it: happiness, peace of mind, contentment, satisfaction, relationship stability, and trust in their personal relationships and business dealings. So, lets set aside win-lose framing and instead focus on the sweet spot.