Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure, and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance, and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture, and teaches part time on the topic at Ohio University.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:00
Negotiation. It’s a leadership skill we rarely talk about, but leaders do it constantly when making large purchases or forging a business partnership, sure, but also discussing salary promotion even what to serve at the holiday party. Big deal or small? How do you negotiate successfully? That’s what our guest, Greg Moran shares in this episode. We also discuss negotiating in our new online innovative leadership community. Details are on our website at innovative leadership.com this is innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Greg Moran, who is a C level digital strategy and change leadership expert with extensive global operations experience. We’ll be talking today about negotiation and dealing with conflict. So Greg, what is your thinking that helps you be so effective?

Greg 1:11
I’m not sure I can claim effectiveness throughout my career, but I would like to think I’ve learned a couple of things over the years working in multiple industries and being on the buy side for a long time with major enterprises and working with some of the biggest suppliers in the world, whether it’s software or for services as a CIO or other services in various different roles that I’ve had over the years. What I don’t think it makes sense to do is for us to kind of rehash all of the many, many books on the art of negotiation for your audience, they probably have had plenty of exposure to that. Had internal classes on them, those sorts of things. So you know, what have I learned about how to put those to use in the most effective way? The first thing that I would focus on is really, what is your mindset going into a negotiation experience. Sometimes that can be tough, because sometimes your negotiating partner, so to speak, on the other side of the table is trying to set a context that may not be ideal for partnership. And sometimes you’ve got to just take a deep breath, look beyond that and decide how you’re going to show up in that negotiation. I’ll use as examples that I think folks might recognize. You know, Oracle is famous for being, for example, a very tough negotiator, particularly when you’re doing big deals. And I’ve done $400 million deals with Oracle, that’s an organization that looks at negotiation as an adversarial thing, and particularly when you’re doing deals of that size, they have a very specialized team that they bring in. It’s an example of where you’re up against a professional. That is all they do for a living, and this is something you’re going to do occasionally as part of your job. You’ve got to approach that with some respect for the fact that you’re dealing with somebody that this is their profession. And for you, it’s not your profession, it’s just part of what you have to do in fulfilling your duties. For me, that mindset that I learned over the years was most effective was to start with the mindset going back to seven habits, and Stephen Covey is this concept of going in with an abundance mentality. And oftentimes it’s even cast this way by the other negotiating party. There’s an assumption of scarcity. Only one of us can come away with what we want. I decided that it was more effective. It takes discipline, but way more effective to just hold to the premise that we can find a win win for both of us, holding that premise, as you come into a negotiation of any kind, is hard, but it’s really essential, because the second you flip the bit to we’re into a scarcity mentality. It affects how you employ any of the many techniques that we alluded to earlier in this conversation, right around how you you know, art of negotiation, and all of that that mindset affects how you employ those techniques. And so the first point that I would make is discipline yourself to a win, win mentality. Then looking for shared common ground takes on a very, very different feel than if you’re looking for common ground, because you want to use it as a point of leverage to extract more from the other person, and sometimes a way to approach that is to ask, just simply to ask, what’s most important? Do I think that the answer you get back is entirely trustable, no, but it’s an indication, and it’s a move that sets a tone around the conversation that’s a little bit different than if you come in starting with here’s what I have to get out of this,

Maureen 4:48
Just the idea that you are one coming in with the abundance mindset, that there is a path forward where we can both win, where we can both thrive.Then being open and honest and sharing what you need and inviting them to share the same with generosity of spirit that you’re approaching them with a generosity of spirit, the conversation is to find how we both succeed, because leaving you looking stupid isn’t the way to start a business partnership.

Greg 5:22
Yeah, absolutely. And setting somebody up to fail inside of their own organization is literally going to just put you back at the beginning. Sometimes I would be very explicit about what I thought a win win needed to look like. A great example of that is I almost always started with the premise of I need you to make money on this deal. I need you personally to make money on this deal, and I need your company to make money on this deal. Because I’m looking at this as a long term partnership. And the only way it can be a long term partnership is if it’s profitable for you and it’s profitable for your company, if I can’t afford the price that you give me, my commitment to you is that we will work together to find ways to bring that price down, but not in a way that means you don’t make money, because I know that that leads to changes in our relationship over time that ultimately make it harder for me to extract maximum value out of This relationship. I’m working with a client now who’s been very generous. I give them so much more hours that I don’t bill and am on call, they get priority because of the treatment and the mutual respect that we have for one another, right? When you set up that premise, exactly what you just said, begins to happen, right? You find that the relationship is now generative. It’s mutually beneficial because the same thing is happening on the other side. They’re looking for ways to make you successful and to take advantage of what you bring to the table. The first big headline is disciplining yourself to that abundance mentality, that Win Win mindset, as you go in, and there will be lots of opportunities for you to flip the bit. But I keep using the word discipline because it takes some level of mental toughness to say I’m not moving off of my premise. We can find a win win here.

Maureen 7:15
Greg, when you walk into a negotiation or a conversation like this, you’ve said discipline, which to me, comes back to I practice it. It’s not the thing I try for the first time when I’m walking into a negotiation with Oracle. It’s something I’ve done repeatedly in small situations. And so it can become habit, not a one off. And I think you do build that muscle as you realize what creates value for both organizations and both people.

greg 7:48
Ultimately, it is personal, right? Like, if I fail to negotiate an effective price for my organization, I’m at risk. It’s not just the company, and the same thing for them. You know, if I’m dealing with a senior salesperson or an account executive for a major supplier, they’ve got to deliver a successful deal or they’re at risk. So one of the things that I also keep in mind is it’s all personal at one level. You know, it has implications for us as individuals, and I think that matters. And then what I often try to do is make the business equation we need to reach the enemy, not the other person. So if we can both get focused on the problem we’re trying to solve, then we both are looking at each other as our partner in solving this problem. To provide a specific example, just moving on with the Oracle. Example, when I was at Ford, Oracle was transitioning from per server pricing to per CPU pricing. The technical side of that doesn’t really matter. It’s just that we were moving from paying a certain amount for a given server to having to pay something similar to that same amount for each processor in the server, and it had the potential to quadruple the cost of Ford’s footprint, right, which was substantial, as you might expect. That was an untenable solution. There was no way that we were moving directly to per processor pricing and quadrupling the cost of the software to Ford Mar company. That was just not a workable solution for anybody who’s worked in manufacturing. I mean, when you’re doing well, it’s a 3% margin game. The starting point for my budget every year was 10% less than last year. That’s the starting point. You know, you may get challenges beyond that that you’re given to get your costs down. So you’re not going to find an offset for half a billion dollars, I had to enlist the person who was negotiating on behalf of Oracle in helping me solve for this fundamental problem. It can’t cost more. It’s not costing you more to produce the software I understand the problem that you are solving for and that you’ve got or software being leveraged across a lot more CPU than it used to be. But let’s focus on that problem together and see if we can’t come up with a workable solution by enlisting your negotiating partner in focusing on the problem that you both had to solve for for a deal to be struck. It changed the dynamics of our conversation. It wasn’t adversarial. It was, well, here’s what I can do to work on that problem, and I then come back and say, well, here’s what I can do to work on that problem. So that was another tool that I often use to redirect the energy away from the person across the table, and both of us focused on the problem we were solving for Greg, that sounds so simple, and yet my assumption is it’s not common negotiation, particularly vendor negotiations, are often set up as adversarial. It gets back to that discipline point you’ve got to reframe it. That was, I think, an important part of my own learning as an executive was that I look at early in my career, I was not always approaching negotiations through that lens, and I had some very tough negotiations that ended up, in all honesty, less favorable than they could have I remember. I remember telling one vendor when I worked at bank one back in the day, I would rather light my hair on fire and fall flaming onto this table than buy your software. And it was fun and it was funny, and we all got a good laugh out of that, but it probably didn’t help us get to a good deal any faster. That’s a big headline. It’s this whole mindset. Mentality, is there anything you do personally to prepare before you walk into a negotiation. First of all, I like to work with my team to make sure I understand what success looks like for us, like really know at a detailed level what will work and what will not work, because oftentimes, and this is just a function of corporate structures, you end up negotiating a deal because the size of the deal is such that you have to be the approver, but it doesn’t mean you’re the technical expert on the topic. There’s often a case where when I’m getting pulled into a negotiation, it’s because of the size of the spend, not because I’m the technical expert or really understand the problem. So one is, do your homework. Really understand what success looks like. Two set your team up for success. And that’s part of the mindset. Part of the reason I was motivated for the discipline is ultimately, if you come up with a very adversarial deal and you browbeat them, and you get a successful one year deal where they’re losing money, you’re just putting your team in an awful situation, because, as you pointed out earlier, that vendor is not particularly motivated to make you successful. They’re going to spend as little as they possibly can, time and resource wise on that deal, because they’re losing money on it

Maureen 12:55
And having been on the other side of that, not doing the negotiation, but delivering the services where my role was to get us out of the project. Yeah, we just negotiated a bad deal and we couldn’t back out. So we had to perform out at a minimal rate.

Greg 13:14
That’s how I think about that particular aspect of it. The other thing that I would recommend is, if you start with an abundance mentality and you really do want the other party to have some success, the other thing is, do your homework on what success for them looks like, and talk to them oftentimes, particularly with these larger negotiations, when they’re kind of selling you on it, they will bring in a more senior person to demonstrate their commitment to You. And that happens all the time. Companies like Ford that looked like our account executive was Bill Gates. Well, Bill wasn’t going to negotiate the deal, but Bill came in and participated in conversations. Well, in that case, it was pretty easy to figure out what was important to Microsoft, because we were talking to the CEO. So you take advantage of that. So, you know, we have a dinner with Bill Gates. You spend the time not grilling him, but trying to understand his business, understand what’s important, like what matters to him in doing business with a company like Ford. And there are always nuggets in that that you could use in the negotiation to offer that success up to the person you’re actually negotiating with because you already know it’s super important to them. I remember the same thing with Michael Dell, when we were looking at doing a big deal with Dell, and I ended up having dinner with Michael Dell at a conference that I’d gone to. We’re just sitting together at a table, and it let me really get inside his head about what he was trying to accomplish with Dell over the next couple of years. So out of that, I was able to extract these nuggets of what’s important to them as a company, and then I could come into the negotiation and put some of those things on the table, right off the bat, like I know this is very important to you, I got to tell you straight up front, we’re happy to make that happen for you.

Maureen 14:56
Let’s shift to that difference in negotiating and tactics that you start by giving someone a win rather than withholding the win, and the mental shift that creates in the person that you’re making an ally rather than an adversary.

greg 15:14
It kind of takes me back to something I learned from the Human Performance Institute, which is the emotion that opens us up to the greatest possibility is gratitude. The emotion that closes us off to the most possibility is fear. The power of this particular technique of putting something on the table that you know is important to them as a company and or them as an individual, is that you immediately put them in a frame of gratitude. They’re already in a place of wow. I did not expect to be, quote, unquote, given a gift at the beginning of this negotiation. And so they’re starting from this premise of gratitude, which means their emotions are open to possibility. It’s in that frame that you can probably make the most progress at solving what you’ve now framed as our mutual problem to solve.

Maureen 16:04
You’ve agreed on the problem. You’ve gathered information about what a win looks like for them, and now you’ve attended to their emotions to put them in a physiological and emotional state of favorability and abundance.

Greg 16:20
Yes, you’re now in the realm of possibility. Whereas if you’re entering the room with fear, and that fear gets reinforced in the opening gambits, you’re now in a survival mentality. And so your body is focused, your emotions, your mind, all of your capabilities, are focused on the narrowest set of things that you need to survive is unlikely to produce an optimized outcome. That’s when you get into those intense conversations of like, this is where I got to be. I got to be here on margin. But you haven’t really looked at all the underlying drivers of margin, and you haven’t tried to find all the levers that you can pull that can make that margin work at a lower price point, and there’s always tools you can employ. To me, it’s like you just change the conversation and you’re focused on the unsolvable part of the problem instead of the solvable part of the problem.

Maureen 17:11
There were always levers, and that sounds like abundance. There’s always a path forward, right? It’s more of a scavenger hunt than Whack a Mole.

Greg 17:20
A simple example of that is there’s often a huge focus on price, but price is not the determinant of success in a deal. Ultimately, for me as the buyer, the price is what I pay, but what’s important to the seller is not necessarily the absolute price, but how much money they’re going to make on the deal. So if you shift the conversation away from kind of the top line price to how much do you need to make on this deal, and how can we make that happen for you? Now you’ve got all these other levers to pull in a complex deal. There’s services, there’s all kinds of other things that you can look at in the stack that creates that cost and that margin that you can work together on, and now you’re again problem solving together. So Greg, what do you want our listeners to walk away with two big headlines, mindset, abundance mentality. And then number two, put your negotiating partner in a frame of gratitude out of the gates, to open up possibility in the conversation. And I heard a third one then, that those two create a joint problem solving opportunity as you’re helping them and yourself find the best now we can almost call it a math problem. We’re solving a math problem for the right variables. If you do those two, the third one can happen. If you don’t do those two, it probably isn’t going to happen.

Maureen 18:45
Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your decades of wisdom with our listeners. I’m happy to be here, and I hope it’s helpful

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