Never walk into a negotiation knowing only what you want; walk in knowing what you will do if you don’t get it. Photo: corporatelearning.com.
In her continuing advice on negotiation strategy, Michelle Gibbings says it is important to know where acceptable alternatives lie if initial talks hit a roadblock.
Early in my career, I was involved in a high-stakes negotiation that required far more preparation than I had expected.
Before we entered the room, we prepared the issues, mapped the stakeholders, tested our assumptions and rehearsed how the conversation might unfold.
At that time, I thought that succeeding in a negotiation was mostly about being persuasive in the room. I thought it meant having the right argument, presenting the strongest case, staying composed under pressure and holding your ground when you needed to.
However, there is one lesson I have learnt and carried with me ever since: Never walk into a negotiation knowing only what you want; walk in knowing what you will do if you don’t get it.
That difference matters. Negotiating strength does not come only from your title, confidence, or ability to advocate for your position. It also comes from knowing your alternatives, understanding your limits and doing that thinking before the pressure starts.
In negotiation, that has a title: BATNA or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It is the best realistic option available to you if this deal does not proceed as you intended. It is not a bluff, an ideal outcome or the worst-case scenario you are trying to avoid. It is the option you would genuinely pursue if you can’t secure your desired objective.
When you know your BATNA, you have a reference point. Without it, it is much easier to be pulled by hope, fear, pressure or the desire to get the deal done. The person with the stronger BATNA can have more genuine leverage than the person with the more senior title.
For example, a junior employee with a competing job offer and little pressure to stay may negotiate from a position of real strength.
A senior leader who cannot afford for a deal to fail, and has no credible alternative, may be negotiating from a position of hidden weakness, however confident they appear.
This is also where two other negotiation concepts matter: Your reservation value and the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA).
Your reservation value is your walk-away point. It is the threshold below which your BATNA is better than the deal on offer. The ZOPA is the space between your walk-away point and theirs. If that space exists, agreement may be possible. If it does not, no amount of charm, pressure or persistence can make the deal genuinely sound.
That is why preparation matters so much. You need to know what you want, but you also need to know what you will do if the answer is no.
Think about a leader preparing for an important negotiation. They spend most of their time focusing on what they want to achieve: the pricing structure, terms, preferred outcome and points they are prepared to argue — and are surprised when the negotiation falters.
I have worked with leaders who describe exactly this experience. Their preparation felt thorough because they knew what they wanted, but they hadn’t done the other side of the analysis.
So, when the other party applied sustained pressure on a key term, they conceded more than they intended, not because they were weak, but because they hadn’t mapped their alternatives in advance. Without those answers, you are effectively negotiating without a floor.
Now, picture a different version of that same conversation where the leader has done the BATNA work. They have mapped credible alternatives, strengthened the best one and arrived at a clear sense of their walk-away point.
Consequently, they enter the conversation with a different quality of composure. They know when a deal is better than their alternative, and they know, with equal clarity, when it is not.
You build your BATNA by identifying your options, testing how realistic they are and strengthening the best one before the conversation starts, remembering that the quality of your BATNA is only as strong as the quality of your thinking behind it.
The next level of discipline is to think carefully about the other party’s potential BATNA. In your preparation, ask yourself the following questions: What will they do if we do not reach an agreement? What alternatives do they genuinely have? What pressures are shaping their position? Where might they have more or less room to move than they are signalling?
Once you understand that negotiation strength comes from more than what you want, your preparation changes. You stop preparing only for your preferred outcome. You start preparing for the full terrain — your alternatives and limits, their alternatives and limits, and the space in which agreement may be possible.
Michelle Gibbings is a Melbourne-based workplace expert and an award-winning author. She’s on a mission to help leaders, teams and organisations create successful workplaces — where people thrive and progress is accelerated. She can be contacted at [email protected]. This article first appeared at https://www.changemeridian.com.au/latest-news/.
