Negotiator, Know Thyself

For years, businesspeople have completed behavioural profiles. Some discover they're naturally collaborative, while others find they're competitive, analytical, relationship-focused, fast-paced, cautious, structured or spontaneous. It's useful information, but there's a problem.

Negotiations rarely happen under perfect conditions. Deadlines, commercial targets, competing stakeholder views, uncertainty and unexpected new information all influence how we interpret what's happening around us. It's often in these moments that the gap begins to appear; the gap between who we think we are and how we actually behave.

I was reminded of this after a negotiation exercise I recently ran. One team described the negotiation as highly collaborative, while the other described it as ultra-competitive. Two opposing teams had experienced exactly the same negotiation, yet left the room with two completely different versions of the truth.

Neither team was lying.

Each was simply interpreting the same negotiation through a different lens.

Most behavioural tools measure preferences. They ask questions such as:

• How much information do you like before making a decision?

• How much planning do you naturally do?

• How comfortable are you under time pressure?

• How important are relationships to you?

They're all valuable questions because they help us understand our natural tendencies. However, negotiations don't measure preferences. They reveal behaviour.

Over the years I've seen countless examples. Negotiators who describe themselves as highly collaborative suddenly become surprisingly combative when they feel cornered. People who pride themselves on careful analysis rush to closure because time is running out. Relationship-focused negotiators avoid necessary conflict when the other side is being deliberately unreasonable, while analytical negotiators become so absorbed in the detail that they lose sight of the bigger opportunity.

None of this happens because people are dishonest. It happens because most of us are far better at remembering our intentions than observing our behaviour. More importantly, we often fail to recognise the situations that are influencing those behaviours in the first place.

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Preference Isn't Performance

Many negotiators can describe their preferred style. Far fewer can describe the situations that most influence the way they actually negotiate.

You may see yourself as collaborative, but what happens when someone questions your credibility? You may believe you're commercially tough, but what happens when you begin to fear losing the deal? You may pride yourself on your preparation, but what happens when unexpected information changes the negotiation completely?

These aren't simply questions about personality.

They're questions about behaviour.

Ultimately, behaviour is what determines outcomes.

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The Missing Piece

Every negotiation presents a unique combination of personalities, uncertainty, organisational politics, incentives, relationships and new information. Our brain doesn't simply observe these things; it interprets them. Those interpretations influence our thinking, our emotions and, ultimately, our behaviour.

Sometimes the influence is obvious. Sometimes it's so subtle we barely notice it -

A challenge to our credibility, an aggressive opening, time pressure, fear of losing the deal, a difficult personality or organisational politics.

None of these situations are inherently good or bad. However, each has the potential to influence how we behave if we're unaware of what's happening. This is where emotional intelligence becomes particularly important. Many people assume that self-awareness simply means being able to describe themselves.

"I'm collaborative."

"I'm analytical."

"I'm relationship-focused."

That's certainly useful, but it's only part of the picture.

Genuine self-awareness goes much further. It means recognising the situations that influence our thinking, our emotions and our behaviour, and noticing them early enough to make a conscious choice rather than simply reacting.

One negotiator may become defensive, another more accommodating, while someone else becomes impatient or retreats into analysis. None of these responses are necessarily right or wrong, but they all influence the quality of our decisions if we're unaware of them.

Behavioural profiles help us understand our natural preferences, while emotional intelligence helps us recognise the situations that influence our behaviour. Together they provide something far more valuable than either offers on its own: the opportunity to make better choices.

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The Best Negotiators Aren't One Thing

The strongest negotiators I've worked with over the last twenty years don't fit neatly into a single box. They can be collaborative when collaboration creates value, competitive when competition is required, patient when patience pays, direct when directness is needed, analytical when the detail matters and creative when the negotiation calls for a different approach.

Their advantage isn't that they never become emotional or never experience pressure. It's that they recognise what's influencing them and deliberately choose the behaviour most likely to move the negotiation forward. They don't become prisoners of a preferred style, nor do they become prisoners of the situations they find themselves in. Instead, they adapt because they understand that every negotiation is different and that effective behaviour depends as much on reading themselves as it does on reading the other side.

That's an important distinction.

Many people believe great negotiators possess a particular style. In reality, the best negotiators I've worked with possess something much more valuable. They understand themselves well enough to recognise when their behaviour is beginning to change, and they adapt before that change begins to influence the quality of their decisions.

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A Better Question

Perhaps we've been asking ourselves the wrong question.

Instead of asking, "What type of negotiator am I?", perhaps we should be asking, "What situations are most likely to influence the way I negotiate?"

When does someone questioning my credibility change my behaviour?

When does time pressure cause me to rush?

When do I stop listening and start preparing my next argument?

When do I avoid necessary conflict because I'm worried about damaging the relationship?

When does my desire to reach agreement become stronger than my desire to achieve the right agreement?

Those questions tell us far more about our negotiation performance than any label ever could.

Negotiation performance isn't determined by the description we give ourselves. It's determined by how well we recognise the situations that influence our behaviour and the quality of the choices we make in response. The negotiators who improve fastest aren't necessarily the most naturally gifted; they're usually the ones who become increasingly aware of those influences and progressively better at adapting their behaviour.

One of the reasons we built the Cawdor Companion was to help negotiators observe their own behaviour more objectively. Memory is imperfect, and our recollection of a negotiation is often shaped more by what we intended to do than by what we actually did. By helping negotiators recognise recurring behavioural patterns across different negotiations, understand the situations that most influence them and reflect on the choices they make, we believe people become better equipped to adapt before the next important negotiation.

Over time, something else begins to happen.

As people practise different scenarios, prepare for different negotiations and reflect on different coaching reports, they begin to recognise recurring patterns in their own behaviour. They start to see which situations consistently influence their decision-making, where they perform at their best and where their judgement is most likely to be affected. That's when learning starts to become genuine behavioural change.

Ultimately, this isn't about becoming more collaborative, more analytical or more competitive.

It's about becoming more self-aware, because self-awareness creates choice, and better choices create better negotiators.

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Negotiator, know thyself.

Not simply your intentions, your preferences or even the label you've given yourself. Instead, understand the situations that influence your behaviour, recognise the patterns they create and choose your response deliberately. The quality of your negotiation is often determined long before you make your next proposal; it's determined by the choices you make about your own behaviour.

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