No matter your job, you can expand your role (Lesson in Negotiation)

Expand your role to include meaningful activities. No matter your job label, you have a choice about how to define many of the activities in your role. You can decide the extent to which you want to talk or to listen, to argue or to work together, and to treat others with disrespect or with courtesy. You are free to explore interests with the other side, to brainstorm options that meet your interests and theirs, and to ask the other person’s advice or to offer advice. You can make recommendations about how to structure an agenda. In large part, the bounds of your role are set by you.

Consider the experience of two waitresses working at the same Cambridge restaurant. They discovered that each was trying to write a novel. Both saw the job of waitress as a temporary way to make a living until their first novel was accepted by a publisher.

The first waitress found her job hard work, physically exhausting, and boring. During the afternoon break between the end of lunch and the beginning of dinner, she went back to her apartment and tried to write. But the writing didn’t go well, and she often found herself taking a nap instead.

Each morning before work, she sat down by the computer and tried to write seriously. She found it hard to make her characters plausible and to fill their lives with realistic things to do.

The second waitress also found the restaurant work hard and physically exhausting, but not boring. She considered everyone at the table she was serving as a potential character in her novel or possibly in a later one. She kept two pads in her apron pocket, one for orders and one on which, when time permitted, she jotted notes about the people she was serving. She recorded physical characteristics of her customers, bits of conversation she had overheard, and, at other times, what she imagined the people at the table might be thinking or what they might do when they left the restaurant.

She found it much easier to breathe life into the characters in her novel by observing real people rather than sitting alone at her desk. During the long break between serving lunch and dinner, she wrote up her notes and expanded upon them. When she was writing her novel during the morning before she started work, she found herself putting to good use the people, the conversations, and the ideas that had been stimulated during the previous days and weeks. As her manuscript took shape, her reputation as an attentive and popular waitress also grew. She showed a genuine interest in those she was serving, seeing each in the role of a person with a fascinating life.

Her job was “waitress.” But she expanded her job to include activities that were fulfilling to her. She gathered information about what real people looked like, how they talked, and what she imagined they thought and felt —data and ideas that she could use in her writing. She found her combined roles not only exhausting but also exhilarating.

Just as the waitress chose activities to make her role more fulfilling, you have the power to choose activities that make your role as negotiator more fulfilling. Your role can include the excitement of learning more about others, about negotiation, and about yourself.

Ref: Beyond Reason - Using Emotions as You Negotiate (Roger Fisher)