In April we headed over to the NFU Telford office for negotiations training with Alistair Gibb from Cedar Associates. This was our second training session with Alistair (who also delivered Leadership training in December) and yet again it didn’t disappoint.
We started the day by understanding the many different ways in which we can influence people. Examples such as communication, leadership and financial incentives helped us understand the positive ways. Examples such as bullying, lack of communication and blackmail helped us understand the negative. After this the group moved onto developing rapport, the art of listening and asking the right questions.
We were now ready for our first task: buying a car! The room was split in two (buyers and sellers) and each was given a brief including the spec of the car, budget, loan availability and target price to achieve. The task was great fun and it was very enjoyable hearing who’d managed to get the best deal for their car. The target price on the car for both was around £7000 and the scope of prices achieved by the group ranged from £6,000 to £8,500. The great thing about the task was that it helped us to understand that when negotiating you have various tools at your disposal and if you don’t use them all in unison (i.e. listening and asking the right questions) you might not always get the best outcome.
After lunch we moved onto our next task called ‘Red-Blue’. This involved being split into groups and whilst it’s not the easiest to explain the purpose of it was for both teams to end up in profit. The brief didn’t say we were to compete against each other, but the temptation was to fall into the trap and some of the groups finished the game both putting the other into debt! It was an incredibly powerful way for Alistair to show us how if we don’t all pull in the same direction and communicate our actions can have severe consequences. I think most people could relate to this whether it is mother/father and son/daughter on the farm or different departments within a business. If we don’t try and work together and communicate, finances can quickly spiral out of control.
It was a great day had by all and we learned that successful negotiating is much more than simply bartering over a price; it’s a very real skill.
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