Negotiations: Featuring interview with Professional Athlete Greg Dilligard

Contract negotiations can be one of the most stressful conversations in business. However, when you’re able to hone in on a few techniques and utilize effective communication skills, one will see that you can have more successful negotiations than not. I’ve been blessed to meet a lot of entertainment, media and sports professionals throughout my life. To get an inside look on how the pros do it, I was able to reach out to a fellow Illinois State Alum.

Greg Dilligard is a professional basketball player. He currently plays for Aguada in Uruguay. He has been playing professional basketball for six years and in four different countries. He has two agents that have been helping to negotiate his various contracts throughout his career. Being a professional athlete, negotiations are a “necessary evil,” he said when we spoke via Skype.  

“I have one agent in the states and another here in South America. They both work together in the off-season to work out the best deals for me. They bring the options to me and we all figure out what the best opportunity for me will be.” Normally, the bulk of the negotiations are between the interested team’s board members, the coach and his agents. However, he was able to directly be involved in a negotiation when he wanted to leave a particular team in the middle of a season.

In this particular situation, Greg found out that the coach for the team he was playing for wanted to release him midseason in order to pick up another player. Greg contacted his agents and they started negotiations with another team that had previously showed interest in him. A verbal agreement was set and Greg made the decision that he wanted to move to that team. Before an official contract could be signed, the team he was already on set up a negotiation meeting. The coach of the team that he was already on had a change of heart. They wanted to see if they could work out a new deal to have him stay on the team. Greg and his agents were able to come into that negotiation with a best alternative to the negotiated agreement, or BATNA. Unless his current team came up with an “out of this world” offer, he was moving to the new team.

Greg and his agents did not appreciate the fact that they had to hear about the team’s original wish to release him from a third party source. They didn’t feel that it was very professional. Although Greg wasn’t very happy with his coach at the time, he was able to separate the person from the problem. He could have approached the negotiation angry and allowed emotions to control the conversation but they knew that would not contribute positively to the negotiation. The team’s offer ended up not being better than his BATNA and he was amicably released and able to sign with the new team that year.

Greg was also able to give me an interesting story where he was victim to a dirty trick during negotiations. During off-season negotiations with one team, another team became interested in him. The second team contacted the team that he was in negotiations with and asked for an injury report on him. He had fairly recently come off knee surgery but was cleared to play. The first team gave a false injury report on him in order to keep him from even starting negotiations with the second team. Greg found this out after he agreed to the play for the first team. The potential contract from the second team was actually for more money but he found out too late. One thing he and his agents learned from that situation was to always ask questions. On their end, the lines of communication closed suddenly with the second team. If they asked a few more questions, they may have been able to intercept the false injury report before signing any contracts.

Greg says that he prefers to leave the negotiations to his agents because of situations like the two he described for me. It takes a patient person to be able to look at all sides of an argument objectively and communicate in a way that will mutually benefit all parties involved. I’m grateful to have been able to speak to him regarding his personal experiences and learn from them as well.