Career Negotiation, Negotiating in Life, Negotiating Tips, Business Negotiation April 20, 2010

What do you expect?

Everyone has expectations about all sorts of things, including business negotiations. We expect things to go our way or we expect that the other party will respond a certain way. And then things don’t go as expected and we are disappointed or frustrated.

Expectations are not the same as aspirations. Merriam-Webster defines aspiration as: “a strong desire to achieve something high or great.” Aspirations are our highest goals, and we usually are motivated to pursue those goals. Expectations, on the other hand, involve the anticipation of how a situation will unfold, what we think will happen.

Assumptions are closely related to expectations because they involve projections. When we make an assumption or have an expectation, we are using our perceptions about what might happen in a given situation. Assumptions are based on our assessments and ideas—in a sense, they are educated guesses. In negotiation, we are taught to test our assumptions. And we should also challenge our expectations.

Going into a business negotiation with unrealistic or unwarranted expectations may result in an outcome we are not planning for or are unhappy with.

As Peter Bregman writes in Harvard Business Review blog entitled “Don’t Let Your Expectations Fool You:”

“...how easy it is to mistake our expectation for reality, the past for the present, and our desires for fact. ... There's a psychological term for this: confirmation bias. We look for the data, behaviors, and evidence that show us that things are the way we believe they should be. In other words, we look to confirm that we're right.”

Next time you go into a business negotiation, ask yourself what you are expecting. And then, try to confirm the reality versus the expectation. Bregman suggests this:

“Instead of looking for how things are the same, we can look for how they are different. Instead of seeking evidence to confirm our perspectives, we can seek to shake them up. Instead of wanting to be right, we can want to be wrong.”

Read the blog post here: http://blogs.hbr.org/

Have you ever been fooled by your expectations for a negotiation?