#86

A Master Class in Negotiation with Simon Horton

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Simon Horton is the founder of Negotiation Mastery, a center of excellence in the world of negotiation. He has taught the subject of negotiation all around the globe, to hostage negotiators, top banks, law firms and many other blue chip global players. He is a Visiting Lecturer at Imperial College and at the Royal College of Art, and has taught at Oxford University, Birkbeck, and the Skolkovo School of Management in Moscow. His long list of famous clients includes Goldman Sachs, Nike, Pepsi and Lloyds amongst many, many others.

His first  book, ‘The Leader’s Guide to Negotiation’ was published in April 2016 by The Financial Times and his most recent book, ‘Change Their Mind: 6 steps to persuade anyone anytime’ won a ‘Highly Commended’ award at the Business Book Awards 2023.

Summary

02:40 How Simon has based his career around negotiation

• First career was in asset management, but was very uhappy doing it
• Decided to do NLP Therapy – uses perceptual, behavioral, and communication techniques to make it easier for people to change their thoughts and actions
• It got him fascinated by how the brain works, and so built his business around that
• Negotiation was the most obvious bottom line application of psychology

05:58 Is negotiation now more vital than ever?

• We’re living in divisive times
• We seem to be slowly getting better at managing conflict, both at a global level and micro level
• The existential threats are getting bigger through social media

08:29 Can the principles from high stakes negotiations be applied to people’s everyday lives?

• We’re negotiating all the time 
• ‘Micro negotiations’ take place a dozen times a day
• If you get good at micro negotiations, you get your outcome and you build the relationship at the same time
• This skill can help you in every area of your life
• Simon’s first book was about win-win negotiation

16:02 What Simon learnt from writing his second book

• Simon’s first book is more about giving a framework for negotiating
• The second book is much more about the soft skills involved in relationships and communication

25:15 Persuasion versus manipulation

• Manipulation has a connotation that there’s something underhand about it
• Generally, the political approaches to influence are generally either use force or lies
• The ethical approach is much more powerful and involves a lot more listening
• “I’d like to get this and you’d like to get that, how can we both get that?”

35:39 Being clear on long-term goals

• Make sure all your goals are lined up
• The problem is that it’s easy to focus on what we lose out on

36:59 Cheeky asks

• The thing about the cheeky ask, as opposed to a more fair ask, is that you know you might not get it
• It helps to bring a bit of a laugh into it, a bit of a joke, or something that’s self-deprecating

43:05 Looking out for subtle clues

• Step into the shoes of the other person – the other person is going to see it very differently to how you see it
• Too often we go back to our rationale, louder, but it doesn’t work
• Think: “what are their goals? What are they trying to achieve?”
• If you know somebody’s values, you can frame your message in terms of their values, and they’re more likely to say yes

49:04 Personality types and profiling

• A very popular profiling test is the OCEAN Big Five, as well as Myers Briggs 
• The main thing is to think about what type of language might work for a certain type of person

53:36 Is there any advice around multicultural negotiations that people need to specifically take into mind?

• Be careful with generalizations, as they are often not representative of the given individual
• Treat the person you’re talking to as an individual

57:16 How do you negotiate with people across video channels?

• The big benefit of video/ digital communication is that you don’t need to travel
• Human connection is the big thing that is lost
• If you meet somebody, you’re going to trust them more
• Consciously think which is the best channel to communicate with, as often we have had the illusion of communication

01:00:11 What’s the difference between the two shift and support responses?

• The shift response is where you listen, but then you shift it to you
• The support response is about listening and asking them more questions
• Hostage negotiators are exceedingly robust in their outcome – they don’t actually negotiate
• They take a very soft approach to achieving it through building rapport
• Their results is built on their listening skills

01:03:53 Techniques for there to be no power shift

• We’re reframing negotiation to being a collaborative problem-solving approach

01:08:48 Co-creating the solution

• If you view the person as an opponent in the negotiation, it means that they’re against you and all of the energies in that conversation are against each other
• “they’re my partner, they’re not my opponent”
• Focus your energies instead on the problem

01:14:58 Finding the right moment to just get the agreement over the line

• There isn’t a definitive optimum moment when to strike
• “The best negotiations don’t seem like a negotiation at all”
• They should seem like a nice conversation and they just naturally find that way to a solution to an agreement

Links Mentioned:

• The Leader’s Guide to Negotiation by Simon Horton
• Change Their Mind by Simon Horton
• Negotiation Mastery
• Guardian Masterclass – How to get what you want: A masterclass in negotiation with Simon Horton