Team Negotiations

When planning for our Connecticut Valley negotiation, we rehearsed or "war gamed" with the kinds of rebuttals we would receive for our top choices on how we wanted to spend the budget. As far as strategy, we established that I would be the voice for the trust and that my team mates would essentially supervise.  Before we started our negotiation we established our shared goals which fortunately had already been aligned before we started.  Our intra-team communication was nothing cryptic.  If my team mates had thoughts or suggestions that they felt were pertinent to the negotiation, they would request a caucus to discuss their thoughts with me on how to move forward.  

    When it came time to negotiate with the other three boards, we had an unexpectedly simple time agreeing on what we wanted to invest our funds in. None of us met any significant resistance compared to what we overheard from the other groups. Each of the board representatives were comfortable openly discussing their reasons for investing in the renovations we felt were necessary, and we were all willing to cooperate with each other to agree on the most profitable outcome. 

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