COLLECTIVE BARGAINING REPORT
Book on ‘intelligent negotiating’
should be mandatory reading
As we enter a new year, another group of PBA
Locals will have contracts expiring, which means
it will soon be time to begin preparing for negoti-
ations with the employer. In addition to the infor-
mation that we will present at the Collective Bar-
gaining Seminar in February, those members who
will sit at the bargaining table should understand
their own negotiation skills and work to develop
them effectively.
MICHAEL
To that end, I highly recommend a book by
FREEMAN Charles Craver, titled The Intelligent Negotiator.
Available on Amazon, I believe it should be man-
datory reading for every member of a negotiations team.
From the book:
“The key to successful negotiation is possessing intelligence. But
intelligence doesn’t mean just having smarts. It means knowing
your opponents inside and out: how they respond under stress,
what tricks they try to pull to catch you off guard, and how to ne-
gotiate a fair deal that makes both sides happy. It means knowing
what they will ask for before they ask, what they are willing to give
before they give, and where they will draw the line before they walk
away from the table.”
Excerpt of a review by Negotiator Magazine:
“The Intelligent Negotiator is a book that fulfills the promise of
its title. Craver provides the reader with the techniques and skills
to become a true master of the craft. Unquestionably, The Intelli-
gent Negotiator will prove invaluable for the beginning negotiator
and a solid source for refining the skills of the more experienced
practitioner. Refreshingly, in a field in which so much has been
written and is often unacknowledged, Craver credits and draws
upon the research and findings of its authors. Additionally, al-
though he has a preferred approach to negotiations, the author
provides a fundamental negotiating skills book that does not rest
upon the adoption of a singular negotiating style.”
“Don’t even try to adopt just one negotiating style or philoso-
phy,” Craver tells his reader in the first sentence of his book, “for
there is no single approach that can effectively govern all bargain-
ing transactions.” The intelligent negotiator, in Professor Craver’s
view, is a person who is comfortable working within a suite of ne-
gotiating styles. The reader who understands that premise is on
the way to wisdom.
The experienced negotiator knows that no matter the hopes,
not every negotiation expands the pie. Negotiators come in all
stripes, driven by different motives. Success in negotiation re-
quires that its participants understand and adapt easily to the
reality of functioning within an arena encompassing widely dis-
parate styles.
What the intelligent negotiator must master
Craver notes three major approaches that the intelligent nego-
tiator must master. The first is the Competitive-Adversarial. This
is the stuff of win/lose negotiations, the zero-sum game in which
the pie is presumed to be fixed and one participant wins more if
the other loses more.
The second, he defines as the Cooperative-Problem-Solving
approach. In this style, the parties seek to expand the pie through
engaging in a joint creative enterprise and thereby enable the
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NEW JERSEY COPS
■ JANUARY 2019
participants to realize a win/win outcome. The intelligent nego-
tiator recognizes that this second style has inherent rewards and
significant risks of exploitation, depending upon the true com-
mitments of the parties at the bargaining table to the cooperative
negotiating style.
Both styles remain predominant in negotiating and Craver in-
troduces the reader to some of the research on the effectiveness
of practitioners of these two dominant negotiating styles. It is in-
teresting research.
Craver cites a study on the negotiating styles of practicing attor-
neys conducted by Professor Gerald Williams of Brigham Young
University some 20 years ago that may surprise many readers. Ac-
cording to Williams’ research, most practicing lawyers do not use
an adversarial style in their negotiations. Two thirds of attorneys,
as viewed by their colleagues, used a cooperative approach, and
only 25 percent of the lawyers were seen as practitioners of an
adversarial style of negotiations.
There is much that the negotiator can draw from these find-
ings, not least of which is that the intelligent negotiator must be
able to adapt and operate successfully in an arena of diverse ap-
proaches. Reliance on a singular style, as Craver well illustrates, is
a recipe for disaster.
Given this, Craver offers a third style as the best primary style
for the intelligent negotiator. The Innovator approach, as the au-
thor calls it, is a hybrid of both preeminent negotiating approach-
es. Its hallmarks are beginning with principled offers, matching
one’s counterpart on how much and what is disclosed, relying
on objective criteria and recognizing that the primary goal of the
negotiator is to obtain beneficial results for themselves, and sec-
ondarily for the opponent.
How to succeed in practicing the art
The core of the book, however, is far from a discourse on a sin-
gular approach but rather the teaching of the underlying funda-
mental skills and techniques that every negotiator, regardless of
his or her approach, requires to succeed in practicing the art. The
book, therefore, is an intelligent negotiator’s guide to the practice
of negotiations.
Craver explores the process thoroughly and leads his reader
through the tough issues confronting every negotiator with con-
cise and well-reasoned advice. The author shows the reader the
importance of setting high goals, even increasing them before
negotiations begin. He gives the reader solid advice on how to
construct an opening offer and educates the negotiator about its
critical impact on the psychology and course of the negotiations
to follow.
The reader learns how an opening offer operates as an anchor,
its role in bracketing the negotiating settlement range and its use
in framing the other party’s perception of gain and loss in the po-
tential agreement. If these concepts are not clear to you, they are
clearly explained in Craver’s work.
There is far more in this volume, including strategies for multi-
item negotiations, techniques for handling absurd positions,
some careful advice on reading body language and a host of top-
ics that the intelligent negotiator must know. It can serve as a
valuable negotiating skills guide for any style of negotiations.