In this final blog of our three-part series about project managing your life, we will look at negotiation and how that correlates to project management fundamentals. This blog series has taken different aspects of everyday life, like hosting Christmas dinner and planning your child’s playdates, to show how project management fundamentals can make a difference in minimizing the stress. Below, we have outlined the types of negotiation and how to apply them with different people in your life.
Sometimes, negotiation with a toddler, roommate, or partner can feel impossible, even more so than how it feels to manage conflict and negotiate with stakeholders in a transformation project. Identifying stakeholders’ interest and influence level (or relationship mentioned above) will help decide on the negotiation strategy.
There are five different types of negotiation:
- Compete: I win, you lose. This is when the negotiator is focused on getting their way and not on the relationship with those they are negotiating. To put it in parenting terms, it’s my way or the highway.
- Accommodate: I lose, you win. The negotiator satisfies the other party’s needs while sacrificing their own. This can be doing your roommates dishes after getting tired of asking them to not leave dirty dishes in the sink for the hundredth time.
- Avoid: I lose, you lose. Avoidant negotiators often defer to a third party as to reduce tension. This can look like tapping the other parent when you’ve had enough of your toddler’s refusal to put their shoes on.
- Compromise: You both win some, you both lose some. Compromising is giving a little and taking a little. This could look like splitting holidays between your partner’s family and your family.
- Collaborate: I win, you win. Work together to find innovative ways to make both parties happy. In parenting, this could be buying a Paw Patrol toothbrush to get your toddler excited about brushing their teeth.
The ideal conflict resolution is to seek a win-win situation while negotiating, which improves relationships and achieves the end goal. Empathy is a key way to maximize both the stakeholder and other parties’ outcomes. When we empathize, we become self-aware and attuned to everyone’s point of view understand the role that emotions can play in negotiation. Empathizing is crucial to successful outcomes while negotiating with a client, partner, roommate, or child, and is just one of the ways mentioned in this series to help PM your life.
We hope you have enjoyed this three-part blog series on PM-ing your life. Want to learn more about project management fundamentals? Visit https://avaap.com/services/business-advisory-services/.