Essay About Types Of Goals And Challenging Goal

Aim High, Improve Negotiation Results
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WHAT TYPES OF GOALS do you set for yourself when
preparing for a negotiation? Your answer to this question
could very well be affecting your outcomes.
Consider contract talks between the Major League
Baseball club owners (MLB) and the Major League Baseball
Players Association (MLBPA) throughout the 1990s.
Again and again, attempts to hammer out labor agreements
led to acrimony, distrust,
and strikes–until MLB negotiator
Rob Manfred set a specific,
challenging goal for the
association. “Our goal,” Manfred
stated in a 2002 interview
reported by ESPN.com,”remains
to get an agreement before any
days are lost” to a work stoppage.
This goal led the MLB to change some of its negotiation
practices, such as building stronger relationships by
having in-house staff conduct talks rather than outside
counsel. These steps paid off. In 2002, for the first time in
30 years, the MLB reached a deal without losing a single
day to a work stoppage.
As the MLB learned, goals can powerfully influence the
negotiation process and outcomes. Hundreds of studies
have found that people who set specific, challenging
goals–such as “reach a deal without a work stoppage”–
outperform those who set modest or vague goals such as
“Ill do my best.” In this article, Ill explain why setting
specific, challenging goals works and show you how to set
such goals for yourself.
Why it pays to aim high
Goal setting affects performance. In a review of goalsetting
research, scholars Deborah Zetik and Alice
Stuhlmacher of DePaul University found that when
negotiators set specific, challenging goals, they consistently
outperform those who set lower or vague goals. Interestingly,
this link is equally true of self-generated goals (when
you say to yourself, “Im going to finish that report by Friday”)
and other-generated goals (when your boss declares,
“I want that report from you by Friday”). Perhaps not
surprisingly, performance improves when negotiators are
given rewards for reaching a goal, such as a $10,000 bonus
for billing 2,000 hours. Even an unrewarded goal, however,
such as running five miles today, boosts performance.
Why are specific, challenging goals better than modest,
vague ones? First, because negotiators who set specific,
challenging goals exert more effort and work more persistently
than do those with modest or vague goals.When you
visualize and commit to a goal,
youll also be better positioned
to anticipate the actions you
need to take to attain it. In
short, goal setting both motivates
and guides behavior.
Suppose youre planning the
purchase of an industrial property.
Setting the ambitious goal
of acquiring the property for $6 million could prepare you
to anticipate the sequence of concessions needed to arrive at
that price.As a result, you may consider your opening position
more carefully than if you entered talks merely aiming
to do your best.
Setting an appropriate goal
Its time to set a challenging, specific goal for your upcoming
negotiation. But how challenging and how specific
should it be?
When setting a goal, begin by seeking out relevant
benchmarks and records. In some settings, such as the purchase
of a condominium in a large building, comparable
figures–recent sales of similar properties–are readily
available. In others, you can find information about your
counterparts reservation price–the point at which he
would be indifferent between a deal and no deal–by
researching a departments purchasing budget or the
invoice price of a new car, for example.
Once youve identified the relevant data, its time to set a
specific goal.Researchers have found that negotiators typically
do best when they set a goal between the 85th and
90th percentiles of historic performance. A sales manager
might consider setting goals for her sales team that fall
between the 85th and 90th percentiles of past performers.
What about negotiations in which the issues are
4 Negotiation