Trust in negotiation? – Can you buy it?

Can’t buy me love? Can’t buy me trust? If I have to buy it, I would rather not have it.
But if you’re doing business, there is no question about it – you cannot not trust.
You must trust - or do everything yourself.
A better question is - how much will I pay for trust?
And what risk will I accept when trusting others? Unskilled negotiators target price so exclusively that they fail to make trust a negotiable item…
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Let’s start at the beginning…
When negotiating trust, we are really negotiating mistrust. What’s the difference?
Trust assumes things will go well. Mistrust ensures things will not go wrong. Skilled negotiators manage mistrust.

Does this sound cynical or mean-spirited? We would like to trust. It sounds like a good thing - positive relationships, pure like love, it’s quicker, less combative. But like love, we know that broken trust can end in tears – so much so that we wish we’d never begun.
It’s this sting in the tail – the consequences of failure – the financial, emotional and relational scarring - that makes us cautious in the beginning.

Trust is often thought of as competence (ability), character (integrity) and credibility (track record). Trust sounds like an emotional issue, but it is very practical:
• can they / can’t they? (skills/knowledge)
• will they / won’t they? (how much monitoring is necessary?)
• alert to obstacles or not? (learned by experience)
• solo or team player? (collaborates or not)

With some clients, we will choose not to do business with them. We may forego a profitable agreement because the road to get there looks too dangerous and the risk of failure too high…mistrust.
For the clients we do engage, we make decisions about how much to trust them. Skilled negotiators manage the steps to trust, making them part of what is agreed at the negotiation table. Unskilled negotiators ignore these steps, believing that face-value trust is enough.

So, what are the steps to trust?
For trust to grow, or mistrust to shrink, smaller steps (many of them) must be made and completed - mini-achievements, repeated often, that demonstrate consistency, and that are so consistent, we are confident to make a (small) leap of faith and say “predictable”.

These steps vary in size, in proportion with the overall gain/loss. That is, as trust is being developed, the greater the gain/loss, the more important are the steps and the time invested in monitoring them. The smaller the gain/loss, interim steps matter less, and the less time and effort is dedicated to monitoring them.
Takeaways - consider:
1. The size/value of the agreement: for big ones, build in plenty
of steps that allow you to see each other at work along the
way – to assess character, competence and credibility. This
allows you to intervene early if things are not going well, and
gives substance to the celebrations when you succeed.
2. The relationship history: how well do you know them? The
better you know them, the less monitoring you have to put in
place.
3. The relationship future: the prospect of future agreements is a
natural influence to promote reliable conduct. One-off
agreements leave one party, or the other, vulnerable to
a “snatch and grab” tactic. Build in steps to let them know
you are watching.
4. The market: the more volatile, the more steps / milestones are
needed in order to share experiences and constantly re-assess
risk together.