Let’s Make a Deal: Negotiating During COVID-19

 

By Lynda Bourne

Eighty percent of the posts I’ve read about dealing with COVID-19 fall into three general categories:

1. Stay safe and obey the rules.
2. Stay motivated.
3. Get legal advice, and document delays and damages.

While many of these posts contain good advice, to my mind they are all focused on threat mitigation. While minimizing threats is important, these approaches miss the opportunities inherent in unstable times. You need to do more than minimize threats to come out of the COVID-19 crisis in the best shape possible.

There are two factors that will help you get through this: your innovation skills and your negotiation skills. I discussed innovation in my previous post, Innovation and Design Thinking, Part One. In this post, I’d like to focus on negotiation in a time of uncertainty.

Of course, to be able to negotiate you do need to stay safe (the first category above). You also need to understand the current situation (the third). But, if you want some control over your future, you also need to be willing to have serious negotiations with the people who matter.

This is a very different situation than normal negotiations with employers, clients, subcontractors and suppliers. The traditional framework of negotiation involves having defined outcomes in mind, deciding on your “walk-away point” (best alternative to a negotiated agreement or BATNA) and using a range of negotiating stances and tactics to achieve your desired outcome. In the era of COVID-19, no one knows what the future holds, and everyone is suffering inconvenience and damage to different degrees. But we are all in this together, and playing hardball for short-term, illusory benefits is unlikely to help anyone.

For example, in normal times landlords around the globe tend to play hardball with tenants—you pay your rent or you are evicted. However, in Australia the government has now made it illegal for landlords to evict business tenants who are unable to pay their rent for the next six months (with the possibility of an extension). The objective of this measure is to ensure the tenant still has a business when the current lockdowns are over and that the landlord still has a tenant capable of paying rent in the future. There are government incentives and guidelines to encourage both parties to negotiate a workable agreement. Compare this to the normal business-as-usual alternative: The landlord evicts the tenant, the tenant goes bankrupt and the landlord misses out on 100 percent of rental income for two or three years until the market recovers.

The imposed solution has everyone sharing the pain. The tenant still has to pay some rent if possible, the landlord will receive less income, the banks support the landlords (after being asked by the government), and the government is paying some of the overall costs if there is an agreement. (Similar measures have also been introduced for private tenants.) This won’t save every business or every commercial landlord. But it will significantly reduce the damage to most businesses and the overall economy. At least, the government hopes this will be the outcome—no one really knows, given the unique situation we are all in.

So, how does this concept translate to your own situation during the COVID-19 crisis? Obviously, everyone and every business is in a unique situation, but there are some useful ideas you can apply at both the business and personal level:

1. Start talking. You will not be able to influence your situation by passively accepting everything that happens to you. And more importantly, the only effective way to negotiate in the current situation is based on achieving a win-win outcome (while recognizing that the win may be a reduced loss). The ability of good negotiators to influence outcomes is not limited by contract terms or organizational position.
2. Be realistic and adaptable. For some projects, the negotiation will result in shutting everything down with minimum costs all around. For example, I seriously doubt anyone will be interested in a new cruise liner terminal for a few years. This can be done cooperatively with costs minimized for everyone or arbitrarily with the likelihood of massive legal costs as the solution is fought through the courts. For other projects, the question may be how to stall the project for a period, and for others it may be how to accelerate or adapt the project to the new normal. In any of these situations, proactive win-win negotiations are likely to deliver better outcomes.
3. Accept change is inevitable—even after the negotiations. Every negotiated agreement needs to be part of an adaptive and evolving approach that recognizes circumstances will change unpredictably. The only thing that taking a hard “win-lose” approach to a negotiated outcome is likely to achieve is cutting off possibilities for a better outcome as the situation changes. Collaboration is likely to deliver far better results than confrontation.
4. Be innovative. In Australia, the smart rental agents and facilities managers are dealing with their massive loss of income by innovating processes to help landlords and tenants reach agreements and maximize government receipts. What’s in it for them? In part, a new stream of fees for services rendered and being in the box seat to carry on managing the facility once the lockdowns are over. Win-win-win.
5. Be agile and adaptive. Vast areas of business will never return to “normal,” and many jobs will be permanently lost. But there will be a new normal, and there will be new jobs. It doesn’t matter if you are a person looking for work or a business looking for clients—the ones that succeed will be those that adapt fastest to whatever the new normal looks like.  But remember: Agility is not anarchy! Useful agility is based on research and assessment of what the future may hold. The problem is that no one knows for certain what this will look like—so being a pragmatic risk-taker is essential.

People and organizations that come through the current situation ready to succeed in the post-COVID-19 world will be resilient, adaptive and collaborative. Great negotiating skills and innovative thinking will be essential.

Still, a little luck will go a long way. As I discussed in my post Probability vs. Luck: Lessons Learned From a Day at the Races, luck will also play a major part in deciding who comes out of this in the best shape. But, to quote Coleman Cox: “I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.”

How are you preparing for the post-COVID-19 future?