“No, I wear men’s suits. I got this out of a bin.”
— Michael Scott, Dunder Mifflin Inc.
Here’s an inadvertent but brilliant negotiation lesson from the TV show The Office:
Michael Scott, the regional manager, is about to have a salary negotiation with one of his employees, Darryl. Michael is dreading the negotiation, and he’s preparing with some awful negotiation tactics he got from Wikipedia. But when the actual negotiation starts, it all falls apart quickly.
Darryl states his demands.
Michael lamely tries to refuse, and then:
Darryl notices that Michael is wearing “lady clothes.”
Could it really be that Michael is dressed in a Hillary-like women’s pant suit?
Let’s see.
The buttons are on the wrong side.
There are no pockets on the pants.
And the label inside the jacket reveals it’s made by the MISSterious label.
The thing is, though unintentional, this is straight out of the book of expert negotiation coach Jim Camp.
One of Camp’s tenets was:
In a negotiation, only one person can feel unokay, and that person is you.
In other words, contrary to conventional wisdom, you don’t want to dominate or lord over the other person when you negotiate. Not if you want a negotiation outcome that sticks. Instead, you want to make the other person feel okay — with themselves, and with the interaction.
One way to do this is to be unokay yourself.
For example, by accidentally dropping your papers all over the floor.
Or forgetting your briefcase at home and asking for a pen and paper.
Or, as Michael did, by inadvertently dressing in a women’s pant suit.
Does it work?
Camp used to swear by it. And by the end of the The Office episode, Michael winds up getting a raise for both himself and Darryl. As he says, “win-win-win.”
Personally, I haven’t tried these unokay gambits myself. But the underlying message — make the other person feel okay — is something I regularly use when talking to potential Upwork clients, and it’s served me well.
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