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Press, Journal Article
44
The Treasurer
March 2016
www.treasurers.org/thetreasurerBehavioural skills
Self management and accountability
Your negotiations can only
progress if communication
lows and those who are
directly or indirectly involved
are allowed to make decisions.
Understanding the role
of empowerment in your
negotiation is fundamental to
managing the relationships and
communications that stand
between you and progress.
However, with
empowerment comes
exposure, and this brings
with it risk. It is this risk that
organisations seek to control
by empowering individuals
with limits, or caps, beyond
which they must escalate
to higher authority. Too
much empowerment and
any individual can become
dangerous or vulnerable, and
so can the organisation they
work for.
The complete skilled
negotiator will understand
empowerment in terms of:
How it can be used to
protect you;
How it afects your ability
to be creative;
How it afects your ability
to build value; and
How it afects the
other party’s thinking
and behaviour.
Essentially, it is the degree
to which you can negotiate
and make decisions without
having to refer or escalate
them to a higher authority.
In other words, empowerment
relates to the scope and
range of variables and the
authority within which you
have to negotiate or operate.
If you regard empowerment
as simply a gauge to broaden
or narrow your trading
opportunities, or to provide
‘stop limits’ up to which
you can negotiate, you can
start to get a feel for how
empowerment can work
for
you, as well as
against
you.
To negotiate collaboratively
requires the scope or
empowerment to work
with many variables and
possibilities. Limiting this,
as many organisations
do, can help protect you
from the escalation and
disempowerment tactics
sometimes used by others.
Great negotiators tend
to be unsung heroes. Great
deals become so over time
as the contract delivers the
value it was intended to
ofer, rather than necessarily
at the time when the deal
was completed. Negotiators
often work as part of a team,
which can involve specialist
lawyers, corporate treasurers
and others. Because the last
person to become involved in
the negotiation dealings is the
boss, the act of negotiation
is usually, and appropriately,
delegated further down the
NEGOTIATING IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS IN BUSINESS.
NO OTHER SKILL OFFERS A BETTER CHANCE OF OPTIMISING
PERSONAL SUCCESS AND THAT OF YOUR ORGANISATION.
STEVE GATES EXPLAINS HOW TO EXERCISE YOUR POWERS
The fine art
of negotiation
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