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The advice to starting a negotiation with a favourable number as a conceptual anchor makes the mistake that a number should be at the beginning of a negotiation
by motohagiography 6y ago
The advice to starting a negotiation with a favourable number as a conceptual anchor makes the mistake that a number should be at the beginning of a negotiation at all. The whole point of a negotiation is not to haggle down to a price, but to discover a "true" price based on seeking out principles. The point of negotiation isn't to simply raise the number like in the haggle, it's to influence their number to be the effect of your principles, so that the result is everyone feels they've got a good deal.
With practice, you can de-anchor discussions simply by re-framing their anchors using new principles.
e.g. Anchor: "Given your current salary is probably around $50k, we think you're way underpaid and we will offer you $52,500, which is a %5 raise just for switching jobs! You can thank me for getting you this incredible deal by signing right now."
Re-frame: "I really appreciate your initial effort on this. We can't disclose my current salary here because my employer treats it as competitive information and I'm still a member of this team so I can't really comment on that. Let's move the numbers discussion out a bit, and get a sense of the value I can provide in the role. However, looking at the glassdoor and city cost of living salary data for your company, the range you suggested is just below the average salary for other people in the role. I can solve one of your major problems with my unique experience out of the gate, which would take at least a quarter to six months in learning curve for your current team."
This simple re-framing is, destabilize the premise (their guess of your salary), add 2 new objective principles of a) competitive information, and b) glassdoor/city data source, then provide them with relief from the instability stress you created using a soft sweetener (offer of hidden value) without even coming back with a number. This is a simplified case, but you get the idea. So yes, anchoring, but now that you see the reframing to your principles (a new anchor), it's much less of an obstacle.
- double0jimb0 6y agoDid this re-framing “framework” come from a book, class, etc.? It sounds well formulated, I’d like to learn more.
- motohagiography 6y agoThanks! "Getting to Yes," from the (former?) Harvard Negotiation Project is the foundation, which describes how to find principles and create options to discover a deal you can all be happy with. It's of an era, but so was Euclid, so you'd be kind of conceptually helpless without it. The idea of negotiation as an empirical process of value discovery, not sure, it might be mine, and the process of walking back the premises and then adding principles is a rhetorical device that originates in Socratic dialogue and seems to have been picked up by critical theory types as a dilution/diffusion technique, but covered and observed in a bunch of different places, some of them probably a bit culty. The idea of negotiation as a dialogue is the artifact of the old stuff, whereas I think it has changed, and while useful, you had to accept the assumption that the affairs of the world were decided by dialogue and reason. It was written before Twitter. Compressing it this way is mine. I've been accumulating notes for an advanced negotiations book for years, maybe it's finally time to write it. :)
- double0jimb0 6y agoThank you for the references and synopsis. I’d be happy to purchase copy of that book!
- ThePadawan 6y agoAnecdotally, I was recently asked "What was your last salary?" in the first call from a potential employer. When I told them I was only willing to discuss my potential future compensation, and not my current one, they immediately declined to interview me further. A bullet dodged without much effort.
- nextweek2 6y ago>A bullet dodged without much effort. What is interesting is that they probably thought the same thing. They clearly wanted someone that would capitulate to things that were asked of them.
- ThePadawan 6y agoI already emotionally distanced myself from that company completely, but as far as I remember, their representative was "the hiring manager for Engineering", but very far from the Engineering department and very close to HR. I honestly assume they simply selected for (as you said) pushovers or potentially liars.