Free Essay On "Negotiating Without A Net."

Introduction

The process of negotiation is essentially a part of everyday life. Ideally, negotiation is imperative to one's success in the world of business. Specifically, negotiation skills are beneficial in both formal transactions like negotiating service delivery, lease, sales conditions, and many other legal contracts and informal daily interactions in business. Diane Coutu’s article, “Negotiating Without a Net: A Conversation with the NYPD’s Dominick J. Misino,” talks about crisis negotiation. Coutu starts the article by demonstrating the importance of negotiation in business. According to her, every interaction in business consists of some interaction and its failure can result in an enormous cost to the business. The author gives an example of how negotiations breakdown between the founding families of Hewlett-Packard company and its management resulted into a costly proxy fight within the company after putting its future in doubt.
Concerning the question of skills that one requires to be a crisis negotiator, Misino states that anyone can do since it only requires one to apply common sense. According to him, politeness is what matters for one to be a crisis negotiator. As a result, one ought to keep his/her feelings separate from the work. He also implies that it is important to be sensitive to the needs of the other person when negotiating. By applying common sense, Misino means that a crisis negotiator should first of all ask the bad guy if he wants to hear the truth from him. Asking such a question facilitates an early agreement between the bad guy and a crisis negotiator as suggested by Misino in the article. As a result, the bad guy learns that he can trust the crisis negotiator that there is no one who is going to hurt him. The above-described tactic has helped Misino in negotiating with murderers, hijackers, and hostage-takers without causing any harm.
Regarding the question of the personal qualities that one needs to be an effective high-stakes negotiator, Misino states that one ought to be a good listener. In addition, one should be aware of his/her feelings. Misino goes on and defines crisis negotiation as a roller coaster of both the negotiator’s emotions and those of the other guy. He maintains that active listening entails being attuned to the other person’s feelings, recognizing them, and assisting him to work them through. He calls the technique of doing the above mirroring. The other active listening technique as Misino explains is to be always on the alert for the feelings that are expressed in the words. According to him, the “we” statements can alleviate the bad person’s paranoia and isolation. Misino goes on and tells the author that a negotiator putting himself in a bad person’s shoes during the negotiation is not at all times as helpful as it sounds.
On the subject of what makes a bad negotiator; Misino states that they are the individuals who hate rejection. He goes further and explains that a crisis negotiator experiences frustration and rage feelings hence it is important to acknowledge them and try to control them. He suggests the importance of having a team behind during negotiations to help in controlling the strong feelings. Misino goes further and says that they dropped face-to-face communication except when there was no other way and negotiated by phone. The bad persons are often more comfortable when negotiation by phone than in face-to-face contact since it makes them feel safe. The use of phone also does not allow the bad person to see the inner team machinations of the negotiators. Suicide is the most dangerous situation during negotiation according to Misino since it is the most volatile. One of the biggest lessons that a negotiator learns as Misino puts forward is helping the other person to save the face.
In the article, Coutu describes Dominick Misino as a man who is well-acquainted with negotiation skills. For instance, he effectively convinced the Lufthansa Flight 592' hijacker to surrender at Kennedy Airport. He was a primary negotiator during his last six years of career and never lost a life after handling over 200 incidents as explained in the article. In addition, the article states that Misino taught negotiation skills to business executives, military personnel, and officials in law enforcement agencies. From this article, Misino is a great negotiator as he possesses the qualities of a good negotiator such as open-mindedness, understanding, persuasive, assertive, well thought out, charm and many others. The techniques described by Misino are also applicable to the business negotiations hence the business people ought to apply them so as to succeed in negotiating.