Negotiations: trust or verify?

From time to time, we have to negotiate or participate in the negotiation process. If trust arises between you and the opponent, it is much easier to come to an agreement and agree on all the desired points. How to build trust and not confuse it with manipulation, says Galina Eremenko, CEO of the Ukrainian Center of Mediation at the Kiev-Mohyla Business School.

We all strive to trust, but sometimes there is a fear of being too vulnerable to the unfair behavior of others.

At the same time, trust is a resource that can be obtained additionally almost “from the air”. When it arises, we:

• spend less time making decisions;
• direct less effort to introduce additional control procedures;
• exchange information, instead of holding it as an instrument of influence;
• labor productivity is growing up to 40%, etc.

All this is very important, especially for low-resource businesses. “There is no economy more profitable than the economy of trust,” says Stephen Covey Jr. in his book “Speed of Confidence. That changes everything.”

Is it worth unconditionally trusting everyone and everything?

Five rules of trust

Trust is something that is completely voluntary, sometimes for reasons that are completely incomprehensible on a conscious level, we either give ourselves or receive from others.

There is an opinion that trust can be “won”. This is actually not the case.

How to make the right choice - trust or not, and what should be taken into account in interaction with others?

We recommend five simple rules:

1. Do not step on the rake twice. If you have negative experience interacting with someone you or other people have, this is an occasion to think about whether an undesirable situation can happen again. One of the pitfalls of negotiations is the fact that people are in a state of "naive realism", which we sometimes call "all problems happen to neighbors, I will be fine." Pay particular attention to preparing for negotiations and checking your partner for reliability.

2. Develop communication skills. Experience shows that in about 70% of cases, the cause of a broken trust is a communication defect. We see a picture of what happened, draw conclusions, and on the basis of judgments and assumptions, which are usually bad, begin to act - often in an attacking style. What do we get in return?

Always use the chance to find out how your vis-a-vis sees the situation. Very often this is a misunderstanding, not a lie.

3. Give less in order to get more. This statement is attributed to Alexander the Great. This is done in order to verify how the partner adheres to the principle of reciprocity in a relationship. If this is a one-way game - that is, you give away something valuable, and the person doesn’t even say “thank you”, be careful.

Remember, you can give not only objects of the material world, information, but also that it seems like it costs nothing - for example, attention, respect, etc. This approach is often used when selling goods or services. It is believed that when you give something back, you turn on reciprocity mechanisms and have the right to wait for reciprocal steps from your partner.

If he does not “engage in reciprocity”, it is extremely unreasonable to give even more. Awareness of this will save you from unpleasant situations. Such people are unlikely to conduct “cooperative” negotiations with you, and therefore, it is worth thinking about “deterrence and balances”.

4. Agree on guarantees. If the agreement is based on a fragile, just restored trust, it is worthwhile to discuss in a very tactful form what bad things can happen if one of the parties violates the agreement. You yourself need to know for sure what will be a guarantee of compliance with the agreement for you, and ask about what can be a guarantee for the other side.

5. Try to be as accurate as possible when making arrangements. Make it clear that everyone clearly understands what the parties agreed on, and also work out steps to implement the agreement: what, when and who needs to be done so that the decision is implemented. For example, if negotiators have not agreed on who calls whom first and when to formalize the agreement, this may give rise to assumptions about the motives of the future partner. In this case, speculation can, on the one hand, turn out to be the worst, and on the other hand, have nothing to do with reality.

Remember: negotiating with an opponent is always difficult if there is no trust between the participants in the negotiations. But you need to trust with a cold mind.