In this episode of The Confident Negotiator Podcast, RED BEAR Senior Consultant Krisztina Lőrinczi, based in Hungary, shares insights from her 24 years of experience in negotiation training. With a wealth of knowledge gained from coaching professionals across 44 countries and delivering training in six different languages, Kris explains what sets RED BEAR workshops apart. She discusses how her international experience has shaped her approach to preparing participants to not only learn negotiation principles but to apply them successfully in their professional and personal lives.
Kris also emphasizes the critical role leaders play in ensuring negotiation training sticks. From motivating their teams to reinforcing key skills over time, she highlights how leaders can create a culture of negotiation within their organizations. Tune in to this episode to learn practical strategies for cross-cultural negotiations and discover the habits of successful negotiators and leaders.
Transcription of the Video:
Rob Cox: Hello everyone and welcome to The Confident Negotiator Podcast, the number one podcast about how to become a world-class negotiator. I'm Rob Cox, and with me today is RED BEAR Senior Consultant, Kris Lőrinczi. Kris, thank you so much for joining us today.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Thank you so much for inviting me to your podcast.
Rob Cox: It's great to have you on. Now, Kris, you have been training professionals on how to negotiate for 24 years now. You have been a business and life coach for 14 years. You've taught in 44 different countries, all over the world, in six different languages. You've written a book about leadership. You've trained professionals at RED BEAR now for over 10 years, and you were on the Hungarian National Acrobatics and Gymnastics team. We're incredibly honored to have you on today. I know everyone's excited to hear from you, so let's dive on in. Given your extensive background, what in your opinion, makes RED BEAR workshops so special?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: I am an absolute believer of the RED BEAR workshops because the structure and the principles participants learn in the workshops are easy, very easily applicable back at work, and they stay on the mind of the participants so they learn principles and models that they can remember and then use them back at work right at the end of the workshop.
Rob Cox: Excellent. It's the hands-on interactivity that makes the learners so excited about the negotiation workshops that really drives it. Thank you for that, Kris. I think that's fantastic. Now, you literally wrote a book on leadership. What are some habits of good leaders when it comes to negotiation workshops?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: I'm so glad you're asking that question, Rob, because I am passionate talking about it because what I see most of the cases, what I see not happening is the following. Most of the participants are sent to workshops and they don't know why they are sitting there or they don't know why they are participating in a virtual workshop. So in my opinion, the first responsibility of a leader who is sending team members to a workshop, to a session is to sit down with them to let them know why they will participate in this one or two-day event, because a lot of times I see participants who don't know. They don't know why they are there. They think it's a punishment, so they don't think it's a motivation. They think it's a waste of time, so the first responsibility is to really let participants know what is the reason they were sent to a workshop.
And leaders can do it in a very motivational way. So leaders usually have regular meetings so they can just say, "Hey, we have this great opportunity and you will participate in an extremely engaging, highly interactive event. You will love it because you are not just going to learn something for your work, but also for your private life." Who has got private in his or her private life negotiations, and then everybody's raising hands, right? So this can be done in a very motivational level. And then as trainers and facilitators, we have a much easier job at the beginning. We don't have to spend time on explaining what is going to happen there.
Rob Cox: Excellent. So good leaders make sure that their employees understand why their company has made the investment in negotiation training. They make sure that they're motivated to be there, they make sure that they are motivated to stay engaged. I love it. That's what you typically see in your best workshops.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Absolutely. And nowadays, a lot of workshops take place in the virtual world, and what we see is a lot of participants don't switch on their camera. So a good leader is letting participants know, "Look the trainer will not speak a lot. It's not a lecture. So you will be asked a lot of questions. You will be put into breakout rooms. You can try yourself out in a lot of negotiations so please put your meetings aside and your plans and be ready on the camera because this will be like a classroom event."
Rob Cox: Excellent. Now following those RED BEAR workshops, Kris, coaching and reinforcement is so important, right? How can leaders make sure that what their employees learn in the RED BEAR workshops stays fresh? How can they make sure that that content that they're learning stays fresh with their employees?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: I'm glad we are staying at the topic of responsibility of leaders. So it's extremely important that leaders also understand the principle, and for example, the tension model that participants learn. What can they do? RED BEAR offers a fantastic reinforcement program for leaders. It's a half-day event where if they did not participate in the event, they learned the main techniques, they see the skills that participants are learning or learned in the event, and then they can reinforce it. So for example, they learn how to coach their team members and we share with them what we suggest them to do. So for example, in their weekly meetings, they can ask participants to share their success stories when using the RED BEAR principles. So we have a lot of ideas how to keep this fresh and alive because what happens naturally, even after the best training, the learning fades away, a bit or a lot, depending on a lot of different factors. So we have leaders to reinforce the message.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Those coaching reinforcement workshops are of course so critical and leaders have got to be on top of that for sure. And of course, anything about how leaders can create a culture of negotiation both for sales and procurement teams?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Absolutely. So RED BEAR has this amazing, two-page planner, and participants learn how to use it in the workshop, and we also teach it to leaders how to use it and that creates the same language within the company, within our client's company, and that way they speak the same language, have the same vocabulary, have the same approach and mindset. So that also helps leaders to reinforce the message.
Rob Cox: Excellent. So making sure that your teams are using their negotiation planners, actually planning for negotiations ahead of time, not doing it on the fly, right? Making sure that you're planning ahead of time and having that same vocabulary as a team, absolutely critical to creating that negotiation culture. Excellent.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Absolutely. And if I may highlight one of the topics, right? So one of the rubrics you see on the planner to, I haven't mentioned that yet, but RED BEAR negotiation workshops are extremely interactive and it's an experiential learning approach, meaning participants first run a role play, for example, in pairs or in teams, and then we discuss what they are learning from that. Now, what participants experience is that they are most of the time in the telling mode instead of asking, right? So it's very hard A, to ask questions and B, to come up with those questions on the fly. So what you see as one of the parts of the planner is, okay, what questions are you planning to ask? Right? So we encourage participants to write down five to seven questions, otherwise they won't do that spontaneously. There are jobs and professions like psychologists, coaches, trainers ask a lot of questions, but sales and procurement people don't ask enough, and we know that expert negotiators ask two, three times more questions than average or not good negotiators.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Having a plan even for the questions that you're going to ask in a negotiation. So important in creating that culture of excellence. So thank you for that, Kris. Let's stay on the topic of leadership. Are there any common habits between what great negotiators and great leaders do?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: I love your question, Rob. Thank you so much for that. And yes, there is an overlap. Let me give you a few seconds to think, their audience, if you can come up with something, but maybe in the overlap of the two circles. So it's a word that starts with an N, and that word is something common, a common habit of both negotiators and leaders. So the magic word is needs. So in negotiations, it's an absolute must. It's the basic, the most important responsibility of every negotiator to explore the needs. The unconsidered or underestimated needs of the counterpart, because only knowing that you can position yourself advantageously. So you build your positioning statement, you build your offer, you build your approach to the negotiation based on the needs. If you know the needs, great, but don't assume if it is a long negotiation. Last week I was running a workshop and somebody from Germany mentioned, "Yes, Kris, but this exercise is not relevant for me because I've been working with this partner for 15 years." And then I said, "Do your kids change? Does your wife sometimes over the decades change? We all change. Sometimes you don't know ourselves because we go through changes." So it's extremely important to avoid the mistake of making assumptions, push them aside and ask, explore the needs of your negotiation partner. And the same goals for leaders.
How can a leader keep the team members motivated? By understanding their drivers. Why they come to work? How can a leader achieve that they don't think, "Oh, it's Monday morning. I hate Mondays. I wish it was Friday." How can you achieve that for the team members, Monday is almost as valuable as the start of the event. So if you understand the drivers, the motivators of the team members as a leader, we achieve, let me exaggerate, 80% of your jobs. And of course it requires deep conversations, honest conversations, and genuine curiosity, like in sales and procurement conversations.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Thank you for that, Kris. Again, great negotiators, great leaders all understand their counterpart's needs. For leaders it's understanding, like you said, what motivates their employees, what drives them, and using all of those negotiation principles to find that out through those questions, through understanding. I think that's fantastic. Thank you.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Yes, because people could just say on the surface, "Yeah, I want this, you want that. We have the tension." By the way, the attention model, we talk a lot about how to achieve a breakthrough in attention, and every negotiation has tension, right? It's a natural element of every negotiation. So what is the breakthrough? How can you come out of this? So it's important in both types of conversations and actually in an easy conversation like this one, I asked you, Rob, so what are your needs when we run this podcast, right?
Rob Cox: That's right.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: What do you want me to consider? So it's a wider topic, so yeah.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Well, thank you for that, Kris. Switching gears a little bit, you're based in Hungary and you speak six different languages. Thank you for doing this podcast in English. I appreciate it. That's for me, so I appreciate it. You train negotiators all over the world for RED BEAR. Are there any cultural differences when it comes to leadership and communication?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Absolutely, and I love working with different cultures and sometimes in one workshop I work with 15, 18 different cultures and nations and that colors that enriches the entire event. So because I'm conscious of the time, let me highlight three points. So one is relationship. So in some cultures you cannot even talk about serious topics before you build a relationship. You want to know if the person has kids, how old they are, what they study, what their goals are, if everybody's healthy in the family. So sometimes small talk, you can call it small talk or you can call it deep talk, depending on your mindset. So those cultures that value good, deep relationships, they don't call it small talk, right? So they want to start asking by asking questions. How was the weekend? What did you do? So that's the relationship aspect. And there are cultures that are jumping straight into the topic of, "Okay, let's get to the subject. We want to discuss the price." And then of course, a great negotiator never starts talking about the price, but that's another topic.
The second one, after relationship is communication. How direct or indirect you want to be, right? Again, so there are some nations, cultures that are very direct and to a culture that may be sensitive to this, they might feel like, "I'm hurt. The way you are talking to me, I feel hurt, and I don't even want to continue." We might think that's the best way of communicating, not beating around the bush, but being direct, right? So yeah, relationship, communication, and then the third topic that I would highlight here is harmony versus confrontation. Some cultures are very much into keeping a great harmony. No feelings should be hurt, no people should be hurt, and yeah, losing face is a topic that's very important for them. So being careful, not saying no. So it's very difficult sometimes to negotiate with cultures that say yes, but it doesn't mean actually a yes for other cultures, right?
Rob Cox: Oh, interesting.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: So harmony versus confrontation, and some countries they are absolutely, or cultures, they're absolutely fine with being confrontational. They don't think they are negatively confrontational. They think, "Okay, I'm just raising topics, issues." Because they may come up anyway so it's just better to talk about them frankly and in an open way.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Again, relationships, communication, both direct and indirect, and then harmony versus confrontation. Those are three great aspects to consider in different cultural negotiations, Kris. Thank you very much for that. Kris, you've been so generous with your time. I really do appreciate it. Is there anything else that you'd like to say before we wrap up?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: What should I highlight? I have so many thoughts, so let me highlight maybe one thing. So I am probably, you can feel it. I'm very passionate about negotiations and of course also about leadership. Let me go back to negotiations. So negotiation skills are universal skills, and negotiators say that in 91% of all the negotiations, they see the conversation as a waste of time.
Rob Cox: Wow.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: What does it, yeah. It's very shocking, right? What does it mean? You sit down with someone and you think, "He is a nice person? Yeah. Okay. But he could have sent that to me in an email. Or I knew that information already. There is nothing, there is no insight for me. I have not learned anything from this conversation." So 91% of all negotiations are considered as waste of time in the eyes of the counterpart. So are these good or bad news? In my opinion, these are great news. Why? Because there is a lot of space for improvement, and that's what is the passion of us, of all of us at RED BEAR, because we love to teach and train and practice negotiation skills with our participants.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Kris, thank you very much for your time again, and it's been so great to hear from you how you help RED BEAR create world-class negotiators. I can tell from your passion and how you've answered all these questions, that's just there. So thank you very much. In your opinion, this is my final question: What should a leader do if they have a question about negotiations or business improvement?
Krisztina Lőrinczi: If there is a question, please don't keep that for yourself because here we are for you. Pick up the phone, drop us an email, send us a line and we are super happy to discuss. We have seen so many cases that don't even try to find the question or the solution because we are very happy to share our opinion and experience and suggestions with you. So just get in touch with us.
Rob Cox: Excellent. Kris, thank you again for your time. This has been The Confident Negotiator Podcast. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.
Krisztina Lőrinczi: Thank you. Bye.
