Know your Own Success Criteria

And, not all our criteria will be equally important:

For example: You might be far more interested in getting a high selling price for my house than whether I feel comfortable about talking with the buyer in the future.

If you want the other parties to regard a negotiation as a success, you will need to deliver some (if not all) of their criteria. Even if you don’t want the other party to achieve success, knowing their criteria will help you understand their conduct during a negotiation.

Seek to ascertain the success criteria for each negotiating party – if not in advance, then as early as you can in any communication.

An advantage to delivering at least some of the other party’s success criteria is that it will substantially increase their commitment to follow it through rather than seek a way out.

Common Success Criteria

Some criteria between the parties will be common – in our house sale example, we both want to move to a new house. This perspective can be invaluable:
If negotiations get ‘difficult’, discussing common success criteria will help to move the communication forward.

Conflicting Success Criteria

This is a reality. For example: in our house selling example, one wants to sell at the highest price, the other to buy it at the lowest. It is this conflict which embodies what needs to be negotiated.

Changing Success Criteria

What a negotiator regards as a success in one negotiation does not necessarily apply in another.

Nor can we assume that success criteria are fixed during a negotiation.

During a negotiation, parties can – and do – change their criteria for success and/or their relative importance.

For example:

In negotiating the sale of your first home, your main criteria for success might be to get as much money as possible. When you sell your next house, the timing of the sale might be more important than a small price change. But if something happens during the second sale to change that priority you might decide to place timing below that of sale price.

And the same runs true in business negotiations. An employer might seek an improvement in productivity in the first round of pay negotiations but in a later one seeks to change the employees’ working hours. They then might seek to change the working hours as a top priority for something else during that negotiation – perhaps reduced overtime rates. So, there is a significant risk that anyone might change their success criteria between or during negotiations.