Is Win/Win The Right Objective?
Should Win/Win be your negotiation objective, every time?
The concept of both parties winning equally is beautiful in theory.
But is it a utopian or textbook aspiration of where everyone should be; high-fiving and fist-bumping with their counterpart at the end of the negotiation?
Where you require an ongoing relationship with your counterpart, then a more collaborative approach, with you having an interest in your counterpart also meeting their objectives, trading your concessions with items of value that the other party has, and vice versa, is likely the most appropriate approach.
Well, in these value-creating negotiations (where your aim is to grow the overall value of the deal) you’re still likely to want to get the best outcome for you or your business.
In this case, do you still regard meeting in the middle, equally dividing the new value created, as a win?
Context is everything, but getting the best result may need you to claim more than half of the additional value created. The outcome becomes (big) Win / (little) win.
Then, when it comes to short-term, tactical negotiations, where the ongoing relationship with your counterpart is not important, you enter the realm of value-claiming negotiations.
The overall value of the deal is fixed, and you’re probably negotiating around a single variable (even as part of a wider deal). Your objective here will be to claim as much value for you, at the direct expense of the other party.
This sounds like Win/lose doesn’t it?
But here’s why I don’t think that these definitive labels help us.
You may have claimed the most value from the deal, but if the other party agrees to it, presumably they’re satisfied, otherwise they’d have walked away?
So, you can now see that there might be more appropriate approaches to Win/Win, even in value-creating negotiations.
