Everyone wants to have
influence; not everyone wants to build the relationships that enable it.
There’s a natural flow to being
influential.
Influence
goes hand in hand with agreements. If you want to persuade someone to
take a particular course of action, you need some agreements about what
needs to be done and who will do it. That means taking time to reach an
understanding about what is important to each of you. And that means
building a working relationship.
Positional bargaining happens when one persons lays out
a case and the other counters with an argument in favor of his or her
own position. This sets up a “mine is bigger than yours” scenario which
most often leads to conflict where:
- The side wielding the
most power, wins
- The loser resents the
loss
If you are “in it”
for the long run, think about this:
Unless you’re willing to meet with a
parole officer regularly, you can’t get wha you want by beating up who you need.