Negotiating with Danes: How to catch the curveballs

Cultural expectations play an important role in all kinds of negotiations; do you know how Danes negotiate differently than people from other cultures?For foreigners in Denmark, unspoken rules and subtle cultural differences serve up curveballs in all kinds of negotiations, whether it be about a pay raise, the selling price for an apartment, or a détente with a noisy neighbour.

 “Generally speaking, culture is a huge filter and misunderstandings happen very easily because the parties have different interests. So you have to take cultural differences seriously – but in a curious way,” negotiation expert and author Malene Rix told The Copenhagen Post.

 Rix’s clients include some of Denmark’s biggest companies, unions and cultural organisations. But above and beyond her professional credentials, she has a personal outlook on how cultural differences affect negotiations, because she lived abroad for years before returning home to Denmark.

 In multicultural situations, as in all negotiations, Rix said, “the job is to find out how you and I, as different as we may be, can still find a way to proceed together. In a negotiation, you are sitting across from somebody who is different, who wants something different, who thinks differently, and who has different interests.”

 Full article is available here.

 Source: The Copenhagen Post Online, September 2011