Introduction to Negotiation Strategy
At Oak Spring University, we provide corporate level professional Negotiation Strategy and other business case study solution. Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace case study is a Harvard Business School (HBR) case study written by Emilio J. Castilla. The Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace (referred as “Merit Biases” from here on) case study provides evaluation & decision scenario in field of Leadership & Managing People. It also touches upon business topics such as - negotiation strategy, negotiation framework, Gender, Motivating people.
Negotiation strategy solution for case study Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace ” provides a comprehensive framework to analyse all issues at hand and reach a unambiguous negotiated agreement. At Oak Spring University, we provide comprehensive negotiation strategies that have proven their worth both in the academic sphere and corporate world.
What’s my BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) – my walkaway option if the deal fails?
What are my most important interests, in ranked order?
What is the other side’s BATNA, and what are his interests?
This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For their companies to remain competitive and successful, many executives strongly believe that they need to recruit and retain top talent. And to do so, they must foster meritocracies -hiring, rewarding, and promoting the best people, based on their merit. The most progressive companies have thus created formal systems for ensuring that job applicants and employees are judged solely by their efforts, skills, abilities, and performance, regardless of their gender, race, class, national origin, or sexual orientation.When managers believe their company is a meritocracy because formal evaluative and distributive mechanisms are in place, they are actually more likely to exhibit the very biases that those systems may seek to prevent. The very belief that an organization is meritocratic may open the door to biased, non-merit-based behavior when managers make key individual-level career decisions. The good news, the author reports, is that establishing a more meritocratic workplace doesn't require an inordinate amount of time or resources. It is a matter of establishing clear processes and criteria for hiring and evaluating employees. It is also a matter of monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of such company processes and bestowing an individual or group within the organization with the responsibility, ability, and authority to ensure that those formal processes are fair. The collection and analysis of data on people-related processes and outcomes -often referred to as "people analytics"-can enable companies to identify and correct workplace biases. The author conducted a longitudinal investigation of the translation of employee performance evaluations into compensation decisions at a large service organization in North America. He found that, over the long run, women and minorities received lower salary increases than white men with the same performance evaluation scores, even after controlling for job, work unit, and supervisor effects. The company's solution was to adopt a set of organizational procedures that incorporated both accountability and transparency into its performance reward system. The intervention consisted of introducing three key changes. First, a performance reward committee was appointed to monitor the fairness of pay decisions. Second, all senior managers had to follow a formalized process for assigning rewards based on employee evaluations. This process required the senior managers to briefly justify how much was awarded to each employee in their work unit. Third, the performance reward committee was granted the authority to modify pay decisions made by senior managers. After the new system was implemented, the author found significant reductions in the gender, race, and foreign nationality gaps for merit-based pay rewards. In fact, any remaining differences from such biases were negligible. Follow-up interviews with executives and managers at the company suggested that both the accountability and transparency mechanisms had been effective in reducing those pay gaps.
By interests, we do not mean the preconceived demands or positions that you or the other party may have, but rather the underlying needs, aims, fears, and concerns that shape what you want. Negotiation is more than getting what you want. It is not winning at all cost. Number of times Win-Win is better option that outright winning or getting what you want.
Options are the solutions you generate that could meet your and your counterpart’s interests . Often people come to negotiations with very fixed ideas and things they want to achieve. This strategy leaves unexplored options which might be even better than the one that one party wanted to achieve. So always try to provide as many options as possible during the negotiation process. The best outcome should be out of many options rather than few options.
When soft bargainers meet hard bargainers there is always the danger of soft bargainers ceding more than what is necessary. To avoid this scenario you should always focus on legitimate standards or expectations. Standards are often external and objective measures to assess the fairness such as rules and regulations, financial values & resources , market prices etc. If the negotiated agreement is going beyond the industry norms or established standards of fairness then it is prudent to get out of the negotiation.
Every negotiators going into the negotiations should always work out the “what if” scenario. The negotiating parties in the “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace” has three to four plausible scenarios. The negotiating protagonist needs to have clear idea of – what will happen if the negotiations fail. To put it in the negotiating literature – BATNA - Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. If the negotiated agreement is not better than BATNA then there is no point in accepting the negotiated solution.
One of the biggest problems in implementing the negotiated agreements in corporate world is – the ambiguity in the negotiated agreement. Sometimes the negotiated agreements are not realistic or various parties interpret the outcomes based on their understanding of the situation. It is critical to do negotiations as water tight as possible so that there is less scope for ambiguity.
Many negotiators make the mistake of focusing only on the substance of the negotiation (interests, options, standards, and so on). How you communicate about that substance, however, can make all the difference. The language you use and the way that you build understanding, jointly solve problems, and together determine the process of the negotiation with your counterpart make your negotiation more efficient, yield clear agreements that each party understands, and help you build better relationships.
Another critical factor in the success of your negotiation is how you manage your relationship with your counterpart. According to “Emilio J. Castilla”, the protagonist may want to establish a new connection or repair a damaged one; in any case, you want to build a strong working relationship built on mutual respect, well-established trust, and a side-by-side problem- solving approach.
According to
Harvard Business Review
, there are three types of negotiators – Hard Bargainers, Soft Bargainers, and Principled Bargainers.
Hard Bargainers – These people see negotiations as an activity that they need to win. They are less focused less on the real objectives of the negotiations but more on winning. In the “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace ”, do you think a hard bargaining strategy will deliver desired results? Hard bargainers are easy to negotiate with as they often have a very
predictable strategy
Soft Bargainers – These people are focused on relationship rather than hard outcomes of the negotiations. It doesn’t mean they are pushovers. These negotiators often scribe to long term relationship rather than immediate bargain.
Principled Bargainers – As explained in the seven elemental tools of negotiations above, these negotiators are more concern about the standards and norms of fairness. They often have inclusive approach to negotiations and like to work on numerous solutions that can improve the BATNA of both parties.
Open lines of communication between parties in the case study “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace” can make for an effective negotiation strategy and will make it easier to negotiate with this party the next time as well.
Emilio J. Castilla (2018), "Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace Harvard Business Review Case Study. Published by HBR Publications.
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