GUILTY!

After I talked negotiation with a group of business people last month a senior leader in the creative industry, looking sheepish, made the following statement during the Q&A session;

“I’m guilty of being a bit of a people pleaser”.

This is something I hear a lot and let’s be clear about this; if you fall into the trap of making concessions in a negotiation to please the other side, it is not ok. You will lose the respect of the other side and you will undermine your own value in the deal. On top of that, you will not even succeed in pleasing the other side! If you make the negotiation too easy for them, they will suspect the deal they got was easy for you. In other words; they will believe you profited excessively at their expense. This will cause problems.

If this is where being a people pleaser leads you in your negotiations, that should be enough reason to stop it; you cannot please people by being a generous negotiator. But guilt is not a helpful emotion. If you’re entering into negotiation already feeling bad about yourself. it is going to have a negative impact on your performance.

Another way of framing “people pleaser” in business is “problem solver”. The desire to solve your customers’ problems, in most contexts, is a great strength in a commercial career. It drives constructive behaviours such as questioning, listening and thinking creatively, which are never inappropriate. I often say this to my clients; “I highly doubt you would be as successful as you are now if you didn’t derive great satisfaction from successfully solving problems for your clients. Do you ever feel guilty about being good at those aspects of your job?”.

You are who you are, and you are ok. We all have strengths and weaknesses,and a strength in one context can be a potential liability in another. The challenge (and the opportunity) is to be mindful of your biases and work around them, rather than letting them affect your behaviour and undermine your value. We tend to hide from things we feel guilty about, which is the opposite of being mindful.

Do you have a guilty secret that’s holding back your negotiation success? Get in touch! I bet that guilty secret is probably driving your success in many ways and I will show you how to harness that strength and improve your negotiation outcomes.