Know Your Needs and Wants

Once you know your value, you need to know what you need and want. Sound easy? It isn’t.

Let’s think Pirates of the Caribbean.

Elizabeth Swann has been captured by the pirates and negotiates for them to cease fire on Port Royal. The pirate captain asks “what is it that you want?” She replies “for you to leave and never come back.”

The captain agrees and the first mate orders cannons stopped and stowed and flags unfurled for sail. Elizabeth realizing they are about to set sail with her still aboard demands the captain put her ashore. The captain replies “your return to shore was not part of our negotiation nor agreement.”

Knowing what you need and want means being clear to yourself and others about what your expectation is. Your needs and wants will only be met as far as you can identify them.  And you must be clear about what is a need and what is a want, both to yourself and others.

At work, my primary need is to deliver results.  What I want is time.  Everyone has needs and wants for which they look to me and my team for help.  It would be tempting to gain time by pushing work back to requesters, asking them to do it themselves or cherry picking projects.  However, my other need is to build solid relationships across the organization that help me ensure results long-term.  So I turn to the economic theory of comparative advantage to determine how much responsibility to assume. The requesters are not experts at what I do. That’s why they ask me to do it.  However, they are experts in their own area.

When I look to where I spend the majority of my time, I found that most of it is spent trying to uncover the information necessary to make decisions, and then ensuring the entire organization is on the same page. Therefore, I ask that requesters give me the information. My expectation is also that they have the buy-in from all affected functions in the organization. This allows us each to be experts at what we should be, divide work appropriately and deliver the best we both have to offer.

To figure out your needs and wants, it’s best to take a few minutes and envision the best outcome. Think it through, and ask yourself these questions:

• What do I really expect to have happen? What does it look like? Feel like? Sound like?
• What do I NOT want to have happen? Think the worst. What would make the worst happen? (And make sure you account for that!)
• What assumptions have I made? What am I taking for granted…because you may be the only one who is taking it for granted! 

Elizabether Swann learned this the hard way…several times in Pirates of the Caribbean. But she soon caught on. Knowing your needs and wants is the difference between being set free on a deserted isle in the Caribbean with no food or water and being set free safely back in your home harbor.

Tune in next when we explore rule 3 of negotiations–how to find out what others need and want. Hint: Observation!

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