Positional Bargaining: The Soft Or Hard Approach?

I am always on the lookout for things that might prompt an idea for an article, and television shows are as rich a source as any. We can glean an insight into how certain management skills are used by watching them in action on the small screen. For example, Dragons' Den is the place to witness hard-nosed negotiating skills over sums of money that run into the tens of thousands of pounds, and Grand Designs shows us project management in action, including delays and unexpected problems, and their remedy.

My latest television-prompted idea came from a less obvious source, however; I was watching a rerun of an episode from series one of House, the American medical drama, starring our own Hugh Laurie.

In this episode, the meticulous misanthrope, Dr House, observed a slight change in the behaviour of one of his staff. He gauged by her attempts to manipulate her colleagues that she had recently had her nose in a book on how to brush up on your negotiating skills. He informed her colleagues that they had been duped by 'soft positional bargaining'. This was a new term to me, and so I decided to look into it. Here's what I found.

Positional bargaining involves adhering to a set position and negotiating for that single target, regardless of other factors.

By way of example, I give you a couple who are negotiating over their preferences for a pizza delivery. One party is a vegetarian, however, and that person adopts a stance of positional bargaining. She states that they can either order separate pizzas according to their dietary preferences, or a large vegetarian option to be shared, but a single pizza with a meat-based topping is not an option. The immovable goal of the vegetarian, her positional standpoint, is that she has a meat-free pizza.

The other party agrees to share a vegetarian pizza on the condition that they have chilli peppers on it. The vegetarian allows this concession because it does not affect her ultimate goal.

This is a rather simplistic example, although it does demonstrate the point. But this is simply positional bargaining; where does the soft part come in?

Soft bargaining is a negotiating technique that is probably best described by contrasting it against the more commonly used term, hard bargaining.

The fundamental difference between soft and hard bargaining is that with the former, the goal is agreement, where the goal of the latter is victory. While the soft bargainer will allow concessions, his hard counterpart will demand them. Soft bargaining has no problem in disclosing the bottom line, where the hard bargainer will play those cards close to his chest. While soft bargaining allows flexibility to change position, hard bargainers will dig in on their position.

These positional differences throw up one obvious conclusion: in negotiations between inflexible hard bargainers and more vulnerable soft bargainers, the hard option will always come out with the better deal. This is true to a great extent, so is there any room in negotiations for soft bargaining?

The answer is yes, but a lot of thought should be applied before the decision to adopt a soft negotiating stance is adopted. So in what kind of situation would soft bargaining be useful?

If you know what the goal of your opposite number is, and you are happy to concede to it, then soft bargaining can bring about a satisfactory outcome for both parties, without placing any strain on the relationship.

There are many different approaches to negotiating, some more effective than others, but they all have their uses in certain circumstances. Learning which method to apply based on the information you possess is a step on the road to becoming an expert negotiator.