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Hey, I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of negotiating anything.
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Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation.
Hey, and thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, hey Kwame, glad to be here.
Glad to have you and I feel like this is a long time coming.
We've gone each other for a few years.
I followed you on. You've been a big part of my negotiation.
I'll say training and growth and churing.
So it's awesome to actually be invited in and be a part of this.
Thanks. Yeah. You know that Ryan and I text all the time, mostly in the fall and winter with increasing hostility and then eventually concessions.
Yeah. How about college football fandom?
I think probably of you a beer or two from couple Penn State losses along the way, but it's your thing.
Yeah, man. This is funny.
This is great. But see, this is an example.
Wind wind, right? We have a Penn State knitney line and a house-state buck I wear together.
We're working together.
This is great. That's right.
That's right. So listeners today, what we're going to talk about is negotiation training.
But Brian has a really interesting perspective on negotiation training.
And one of the many things I really respect and admire about you, Brian, is that you took that element of what you do very, very seriously.
And as a leader in the procurement space, you were always making sure that not only you kept up on what was new and evolving in the space of negotiation, but you also made sure that your team was always keeping up on the forefront of negotiation.
So can you just tell us a little bit about your mindset around practice and training in general?
Yeah. So again, it grew, I'll say, per canically out of need, right?
An awareness. And so I've always looked at that as, hey, this is an opportunity to continuously learn, which I think is a Jeffersonian principle that for any UVA fans out there, that life is just a continuous learning journey and you need to stay on it.
So that's part of it. But then also, really looking at what's the core skills that were needed for myself and my team's roles.
And they're negotiating every day.
We were negotiating, still aren't negotiating every day on, everything from deliveries and things that might seem small to millions, tens, millions, hundreds of millions, dollars worth of contracts and making sure that that adds value back to the organization.
So seeing that that really should have been a core is a core skill required for strategic procurement and strategic sourcing, supply chain, everyone up, you know, categorize that.
Then you really have to dig into it.
So as I looked at it and I started to learn, you know, there's different learning techniques, right?
Listening, reading, you know, et cetera.
So everybody learns a little bit different, but I learned quite a bit from listening to the podcast and then forcing myself to read books, which, you know, sometimes that's a challenge for me to stay engaged in a book through them, cover to cover.
But, you know, getting maybe team members, it was a team negotiation.
You know, team members didn't work in sync through certain portions of it.
Maybe other places they did great.
So trying to capture that and share it with the team and make sure that we're learning through that.
It's still a journey. I don't have it all figured out.
I'm learning, you know, and each team I join or lead is going to be different, you know, to some degree.
So, you know, what works for that team and how do we do that?
You know, it's critical.
I mean, I jump in by the name of Mark.
He's a director of strategic procurement, I think, for Target.
He turned me on to the, you know, Mark.
I do. Mark. What are you talking about, Mark?
We're going to have to give him a shout out in this episode.
Yeah. Oh, appreciate that.
But he turned me on to the negotiation cards from the negotiation club.
I think found that as a great little tool to continually, you know, challenge my team with and use that.
Listen, in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, that was number two.
I didn't understand why.
Mark is why because he was making himself and sending it to his team.
This is really funny. But Brian, what I love about this response is that you're showing the importance of leadership in this process of continuous improvement when it comes to negotiation because in your organizations, the training didn't happen without you pushing it both ways.
So, you were pushing it to your leaders, helping them to recognize it was a priority.
But you were also leading by example with your team by investing in your own continuous improvement, sharing free resources and sharing books and things like that.
You're showing them that negotiation is important and we can and should do better.
And I think the thing is we're all busy and a lot of times we can get so caught up in constantly negotiating on work or whatever it is that we're doing, then we don't take the time to slow down to get better at that skill.
Right. And you need to allocate specific time in order to do that.
It takes a commitment. And I think that's just really important to point out.
Yeah. Done this a couple times with my teams.
And really if you say, okay, if we want to dedicate 2% of our 40-hour work week to train, can you set aside 2% of your 40-hour work week for training?
It's 2%. Okay, well, how much is that?
It's doable. You can do it or 5%, whatever you want to say.
And you really break it down to numbers and it's like, all right, well, let's invest in ourselves.
Let's invest in the team.
Let's show each other that one week we care about the team members and care about their skills and developing them.
And it's just a way to also make sure that people are putting in some time, like elitivity and embracing creativity is critical.
I love this. This is so much here.
So being a different smaker, taking the time to prepare and taking preparation very seriously and then creativity, I think of all of those things.
I mean, they're all very important.
The preparation is for me foundation for all of those things because we can be a lot more creative when we've taken the time to prepare.
We can make a difference in the lives of somebody else if we've taken the time to prepare and we can do that with a lot more precision.
And one of the things that I thought was fascinating about our call last week was that when you were talking about training, you mentioned that you considered training as part of the preparation process.
That was fascinating. So can you tell the listeners about that too?
Yeah. Okay. So training is part of the preparation.
You're developing, you're learning one.
So you're having that formal training and learning, developing new ideas, right?
And then being able to test them is important.
But this would be as much of a question for you as a trainer or as a leader.
How do you take, make sure that you're getting what you learned in the classroom setting, right?
And apply it in real world situation.
Or how do you make it not just one time event, but it becomes part of your fabric of how you, in this case, negotiate or lead problem solve that's all tied together here.
Yeah. I think really in order to do it, well, you have to have a good collaboration between the trainer and the leader.
And so for example, for you and me, we chatted all the time leading up to the training and we talked afterwards too.
And so again, I think that can be almost lost sometimes because sometimes people are trying to check boxes.
I did my training for the decade.
And I'll be good. And so we have to make sure that we're constantly implementing things.
So I want to be able to take, you know, give some examples here to maybe make it relevant.
So right 2018, I talked about the story of tariffs, right?
We realized, hey, we're going to have to start negotiating on a lot, you know, a lot of different contracts.
All the suppliers are going to want price increases and our company is not going to want it.
And we certainly don't want to pass it on to our customers.
We can avoid it. So, you know, we can stay competitive, right?
Or have a competitive advantage if our competition is out there passing on price increases.
So in that point, gone through Red, Chris Bosses, book, you know, nobody split the difference or about splitting the difference, right?
Never split the difference.
And then, you know, I've gotten some good things off of your podcast.
And so, as a team, we started to try some of these tactics like, you know, the compassionate curiosity, empathy, the key call it, I'm trying to remember how he phrased it, but tactical empathy, you know, and silence, late-time DJ voice, these types of things, right?
We started using it in our negotiations.
And we actually started seeing some immediate results of, hey, we're making, you know, we can see these, they do work.
Like they're not just some gimmick.
I'm not saying they work all the time, but, you know, I would say out of everything, you know, those coming up and working to develop good, open-ended questions and just keep asking those open-ended questions really proved to be quite successful.
Yeah, we didn't win all of them.
Which is great. And that's the thing.
A good training should be practical, of course, should offer strategies and tactics, but it should be delivered in a way that is simple and easy to apply.
Because that's what we're seeing there.
If somebody can go through a training and then immediately put into action and immediately get results, then that means that they've learned it in a way that has the requisite level of simplicity for it to actually be practical and utilize in the tough situation.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I'll say we've used, I've seen either applied it myself or through my team, used different tactics and techniques through our negotiations.
Sometimes they work sometimes, you know, I'll say that that may not have made a difference, but it does add some level of confidence to the negotiator when they're actually employing something.
Opening or asking open-ended questions, I mean, you just can't go wrong with that.
Being empathetic, you know, it works, I don't want to say it works, but it, again, you can't go wrong with being empathetic and trying to consider the other people's point of view.
Yeah, I've done that all the time.
I'm sure I haven't. You know, I'm sure I've failed at different points.
I know we had a negotiation with a major supplier that it was over, I'll say a couple million dollars of air freight and who was responsible for it?
And the supplier claimed, hey, I can't take it.
Like, if I take it, I'm going out of business.
I'm going bankrupt. And it was an overseas supplier.
You know, were we being empathetic?
Yeah, were we trying to understand their situation?
We were, but it was very difficult to try to work through what was fact and what was fiction.
You know, when you're talking about another company's financial position, you know, overseas, but not where I worked.
So, you know, I think that was definitely another lesson learned from that example.
You know, and I think as you said in your podcast, you know, there's not necessarily losses.
You don't lose. You learn, you know, that was a big learning opportunity.
So, okay. Yeah. So, you know, having that counsel to help alleviate some of the workload and stress and find, I'll say guidance and creativity, being able to explore ideas that maybe you get into a really difficult situation, stressful crisis mode, you tend to become more tunneled vision.
And it's difficult to think creatively in that scenario.
The other part is splitting work.
So, we had one team doing all the financial evaluation, the coordination with executive team, and the negotiation skills.
They may not. But, you know, most of them I found to, but then again, how to structure a formal negotiation and, you know, setting batten as zone of, you know, possible agreements and you're trying to work through to create a solutions that really is critical.
And if they don't know that going in, particularly prior to a crisis, they may struggle to want to engage on learning that in the middle of the crisis.
Yes. It is so true. I mean, when you think about people in crisis and their natural responses, we have flight freeze, educate yourself is not.
So, the resistance is can be anticipated.
But again, it goes back to that whole creation of a learning culture.
The spirit of continuous improvement for everybody, every part.
We just below the price that we had just negotiated with the new supplier.
And I'm like, well, we don't need to do testing now.
We got savings and we can save the money from the testing.
It was very disheartening, but I didn't have that full buy in from the internal stakeholders.
I thought we did, but it wasn't there.
It was shallow. So, it was probably more of, yes, but I heard yes, but I didn't, you know, there was no, I didn't pick up on the fact that there was probably a but there somewhere.
And I needed to flush out that and get that full commitment because it was really about a strategy.
I mean, cost savings were important, but it really was about a strategy of having multi sources of supply.
And you know, that I'll say it helped us maybe on a cost standpoint initially, but then we're still stuck with one source of supply.
And it came back to divide us again.
This is the lack of alignment on a clear strategy.
I think companies, I'll say this company I worked for at the time.
I believe they've learned a lot since that was like 2016.
So the challenges that we faced from 2018 and tariffs through COVID ramp up the disruption of supply chains capacity constraints and where we are today.
So many, I think leaders now realize that, you know, there is a need to have risk mitigation built into the cost of the product because at the end of the day, you can't get the product you need, you can't build, you can't sell, you can't make revenue.
It certainly is a lesson that I've learned numerous times, but I think a lot more people in the business world now see that.
Definitely. Oh, Brian.
Some of your most recent ones that just really resonated was one with Seth Freeman.
I think I immediately went out and bought his book on Amazon.
So Seth, you got at least one book sale out of the interview with Kwame Kennell, the Swedish, there's not Swedish, he was a Scottish, I think hostage negotiator.
Actually, I was going to start out this podcast by saying I was a hostage negotiator.
But I learned so much from him.
I mean, Matthias Schrainer, one of his podcasts, this is maybe four years ago.
I don't know a number of years ago, you had him on and he's engaging him in the podcast and I'm like, holy cow, he's describing the negotiation tactics that were used against us by a German company.
Maybe it was they had gone to his training, maybe they had maybe was coincidence, but I'm like, that's exactly what just happened to me two months ago.
And I was like blown away by it and I was like, I've learned so much from that.
So yeah, I appreciate the podcast.
I hope this goes on for a long time and I hope more people get to listen and really learn, like I've learned as much as I have from you and the guests that you've brought on Kwame.
So thanks for sharing that.
Oh, man, that's great. I appreciate that.
It really means a lot to me.
And yeah, that's the goal.
Just get this out to as many people as we can.
And I'm excited to get this episode out to as many folks as we can and other leaders in the business world.
And I'll definitely shout out those folks.
Let them know. Yeah, those episodes were great.
And I do remember that call when you said Kwame, I knew after I heard him say I knew that.
Yeah, maybe I'll get to his training sometime.
Was it Schranner Institute or something?
