احساسات

6

Emotion

A woman in my class at Columbia Business School, Lisa Stephens, had a five-year-old daughter who fell in the kitchen one Saturday morning, gashing her forehead on the sharp corner of the kitchen table. The child, Aubree, was hysterical. The child’s grandfather, Lisa’s father, was hysterical.

Aubree clearly had to go to the hospital to get stitches. But she refused to go, clinging to the table for dear life. No one could pry her little fingers off the kitchen table.

Lisa was about to become hysterical, too, when she suddenly stopped. She said to herself, “Wait a minute. I’m taking a negotiation course. I’m going to negotiate this.” So Lisa walked over to her daughter and touched her gently on the arm. “Does Mommy love you?” Lisa asked. “Yes,” her daughter sniffled, calming down.

“Would Mommy do anything to hurt you?” her mother asked. “No,” her daughter said.

“When we get to be big people, do we have to do things sometimes that we don’t like to do?” her mother asked. “Yes,” Aubree said.

“Mommy has stitches,” Lisa said. She showed her scar. “Granddaddy has stitches,” she said. Lisa’s father showed Aubree his scar. And within five minutes, her daughter let go of the table and walked to the car by herself.

Here are some things that we know for sure about this event. First, Aubree’s refusal to go to the hospital was entirely irrational. It was in Aubree’s interests to go to the hospital, and get there quickly. But, as in millions of negotiations every day, she wasn’t being rational.

The second thing this story shows is that we must start a negotiation thinking about the pictures in the heads of the other party. Lisa’s goal was to get Aubree to the hospital without traumatizing her further. The mother realized that the picture in Aubree’s head was “I’m hurting and alone, I need love.” So, having considered What are my goals? and Who are they? the mother thinks, what will it take to persuade Aubree? So Lisa asks, “Does Mommy love you?” The question shows her daughter that her mother understands that her daughter needs love. Lisa draws her daughter out as Aubree answers the question.

Lisa then realizes her daughter is probably thinking, “Okay, Mommy loves me, but I’m in pain.” So her mother asks, “Would Mommy do anything to hurt you?” And Aubree realizes that her mother is thinking about her daughter’s pain, too.

This whole process is incremental, starting from the mother thinking about the pictures in the child’s head to achieving the mother’s goals. It doesn’t take very long—it happens step-by-step. And in the end, and within five minutes, Aubree walks to the car of her own free will, rather than being dragged kicking and screaming—a more common and more traumatic way to do it.

In sum, what Lisa gave Aubree was a series of emotional payments. They directly addressed Aubree’s fears and showed her that her mother understood. In other situations, the emotional payment could be an apology, words of empathy, or a concession. It could just be hearing out someone who is upset.

Emotional payments have the effect of calming people down. They get people to listen and be ready to think more about their own welfare. They start from irrationality and move people, little by little, toward a better result, if not a rational one.

EMOTION AND NEGOTIATION

Emotion is the enemy of effective negotiations and of effective negotiators. People who are emotional stop listening. They often become unpredictable and rarely are able to focus on their goals. Because of that, they often hurt themselves and don’t meet their goals. Movies often show scenes of impassioned speeches, suggesting these are highly effective. Whether that is realistic depends on whether the speaker is so emotional that he or she is not thinking clearly.

Emotion, used here, is when one is so overcome with one’s own feelings that he or she stops listening and is often self-destructive. The person can no longer focus on his or her goals and needs. Empathy, by contrast, is when one is focused on the feelings of the other person. It means being compassionate and sympathetic. In other words, emotion is about you, empathy is about the other party. Empathy is highly effective. Emotion is not.

Genuine displays of emotion—love, sadness, joy—are of course part of life. But it’s important to recognize that these emotions, while real, reduce listening, and therefore are not useful in negotiations where processing information is critical. People feeling such emotions are almost always absorbed in the moment, for solace or gratification. The goal is not necessarily reaching the best outcome. The long term, and the broader world, often recede. The feelings can be needed and important, but not effective to reach well-considered results. Indeed, emotions have often been used to push people to do things they later regret, including testing physical limits, which can be dangerous, since emotional people are less immune to self-harm.

In contrast to the above, the emotion strategies in Getting More are designed to enhance relationships both personally and in business. The premise of this chapter is that it is possible to be dispassionate and compassionate at the same time.

“By reducing the emotional content, I learned that negotiations are not tests of sentiment, but rather an opportunity to systematically define the path to success,” said Umber Ahmad, a former Goldman Sachs vice president profiled in a documentary about up-and-coming women in Wall Street finance. She added that the tools of Getting More are particularly important in showing many women how to be more dispassionate.

Here are some of the things that cause emotions in a negotiation. When the other party:

Misrepresents: lies about themselves or the facts, makes false accusations. Breaks commitments/agreements or won’t make them. Devalues the other party by insulting, threatening, being hostile, causing loss of face, going over their head, questioning their authority or credibility, blaming them. Is greedy or self-centered: makes excessively high demands, oversteps their authority, doesn’t reciprocate goodwill (doesn’t thank you for a gift). Is undisciplined: doesn’t adequately prepare, is inconsistent, loses control, personally or professionally. Dashes the other person’s expectations: fails to show up for a meeting, treats others unfairly.

When people get emotional, here is what happens. Instead of focusing on goals, interests, and needs and effectively communicating, emotional people focus on punishment, revenge, and retaliation. Deals fail, goals are unmet, judgment is clouded, and people don’t meet their needs. Emotion destroys negotiations and limits creativity. Focus is lost. Decision-making is poor. Retaliation often occurs.

Emotion in negotiation has received increasing attention since 1990. Researchers, teachers, and practitioners began to realize one had to address the emotional side of people, not just the rational side. The results of this attention have generally been mixed and not always helpful.

For example, there has been a trend suggesting that it is okay to feign emotions, such as anger and approval, to get others to do what you want. This is, of course, dishonest, and usually manipulative. The tactic aims to get other people emotional so they are scared or flattered into doing something they would not otherwise do, and which too often is not in their best interests.

The tactics are called things like “strategic emotion,” “false-positive feedback,” “a display of fury to extract a concession,” “on-demand emotional expression,” “tactical emotions,” “impression management,” “strategically angry,” and “emotion manipulation.” These are variations of “good cop, bad cop”; they destabilize situations and make them unpredictable; they often aim to get the other party to make a mistake, such as disclosing information that can be used against them.

That’s why people hurl insults or wave obnoxious banners at sports figures during games. The object is to get the players angry and emotional so they get distracted and lose focus on their goals: that is, to execute effectively to win the game.

Most of the advice on using emotion to manipulate a negotiation doesn’t consider the long-term effects on the relationship, which usually ends when the manipulator is found out. Credibility and trust take a big hit. If you find the other party displaying false emotions just to get you to act in a certain way, I suggest that you never deal with them again if you can help it.

View anyone who feigns emotion to get something out of you as a cheat. In the most extreme case, terrorist leaders convince some of their followers to blow themselves up to satisfy an emotional need for revenge or a heavenly reward. In whose interest is this? Not bystanders who become victims, and not the person blowing up himself or herself. The beneficiaries are terrorist leaders, who get political aggrandizement without physical harm. They get additional funding from others who are equally emotional.

Some people point out times when they have used emotions as negotiation tools and they have worked. The problem is that they are risky and unpredictable in terms of the results, and cynical and untrustworthy in terms of attitude. They destroy relationships. Demands to “take it or leave it” increase rejection rates, studies show. People perceive them as unfair and will sometimes reject good deals out of spite. Only half as many offers are accepted when negative emotion is used.

One can see this in business. A customer of Richard Holland threatened to switch vendors because of a price increase. Yet even after the increase, Richard’s prices were less than those of other vendors. “When the other person is mad at you, they may do things just for spite,” said Richard, an industrial account manager.

So Richard decided he would be much more empathetic to customers about their rising costs. He asked customers how his company could add more value in exchange for a price increase. It worked. Empathy and consultation were emotional payments.

Let’s look more specifically at what the introduction of emotions often does to a negotiation. First, they destabilize the situation. You are much less sure of how the other person is going to react. The outcome is less predictable when the parties are emotional.

Emotion reduces people’s information-processing ability. That means they don’t take the time to explore creative options. They don’t look at all the facts and circumstances. They don’t look for ways to expand the pie. As a result, they don’t get more. In fact, emotional people, studies show, care less about getting a deal that meets their needs than about hurting the other party.

It is true that positive emotions have been shown to increase creativity and the likelihood of reaching an agreement. But such negotiations are often conducted at a pitch and with a fervor that are risky. You’ve seen an ebullient group suddenly turn on someone or something that had previously been the object of their affections. That kind of instability should worry you. Try to conduct negotiations that are calm and stable. Warm feelings, perhaps, but laced with solid judgment. The emotional temperature needs to come down if you want to meet your goals and solve thorny problems.

What about the strategy of good cop, bad cop? This is a favorite tool that participants in negotiation courses say they use. The police use this tactic to try to destabilize a suspect by causing emotion. They hope the suspect will make a mistake and make an admission (against their goals and interests). So, yes, anger and emotion work in a situation where you want to try to harm the other party and get them to make a mistake. Unless that’s your goal, you probably don’t want to use anger as a negotiation tool.

Another problem with using emotion on purpose is that the more you use it, the less effective it becomes. If you raise your voice or shout once a year, it can be very effective. If you do it once a month, you become known as “the screamer,” and you lose credibility. This applies to walking out of negotiations as well.

A tone change is fine once in a while. If you are normally quiet, every once in a while you might raise your voice. If you are normally a pretty loud person, once in a while you might be especially quiet or soft-spoken. But such tactics must be well-thought-out and measured.

Negotiations are more effective when they are stable and predictable.

EMOTION-PRODUCING TACTICS

To listen to many negotiations, one would think that threats are the method of choice. But threats are one of the least effective negotiation strategies. Threats cause people to get emotional, making them less able to see things clearly enough to do what you want them to do. Since emotion makes people less resistant to self-harm, your target will likely not care as much about your threats as you would like them to.

Studies show that people who threaten are only half as likely to reach an agreement as those who don’t, and with the very same facts. So why do people threaten? Lack of negotiating experience or skill. When people try to force you to do things, you lose face. In some cultures, loss of face has driven people to acts of violence, including murder and suicide. Losing face, in turn, is tied to self-esteem and self-worth. So threats cause loss of face: the result is resistance.

Related to threats is another common but ineffective negotiation tactic, “take it or leave it.” It causes people to get upset and fewer agreements result.

Here is a study on the “take it or leave it” approach. Researchers told a subject that he or she would be given $10 to divide with another person—but the other person had to agree to the split. If the other person rejected the offer, both parties would get nothing.

When the other person was offered $1—meaning the offerer would get $9—75 percent of the other people rejected the offer. Now, this makes no rational sense. It is better to go home with $1 than with nothing. But the unfairness of someone else getting most of the amount available caused them to act emotionally, against their goals and interests.

On the other hand, 95 percent of the other people agreed to the split when it was done 50/50. But when $3 was offered, two-thirds of the other people rejected that.

As such, you must take irrationality into account when deciding how to approach others. If the other person is likely to act irrationally, you need to offer emotional payments. You need to make adjustments.

One example of adjustment is “collaborative threats.” In a normal threat, you tell the other person: “If you don’t lower your price, I’m going to someone else!” Often the other person will become emotional and respond with something like, “Go jump in the lake!” Although it would be better for them to lower their prices and keep you as a customer, you made them react emotionally by flexing your power with them.

Another way to frame this is to say, “I really like you guys, I’ve been buying from you for some time. But now some of your competitors are offering us more value. We’d like to stay with you. What should we do?” The same threat to leave is inherent, but you are asking for their help. How do we stay in business together? It is framed in the context of a relationship. And it opens the way for more creative solutions.

By reframing and, essentially, giving them the problem, you have reduced the emotion and improved the result. You’ve made the situation a common problem to solve together. You have valued them more.

CONTROLLING EMOTION

So how do you control emotion in a negotiation? There are two kinds of people to think about. You and others. I’ve talked a bit about the other person’s emotion already; we’ll pick that up again shortly. But let’s address your own emotions.

If you are emotional, you are no good to anyone in a negotiation. If you start to get emotional, stop! Take a break; calm yourself down. If you can’t, perhaps you are not the right negotiator, at least not at that time. Take a longer break until you can calm down, or enlist the help of someone else. If you try to negotiate when you are upset, angry, or otherwise emotional, you will lose sight of your goals and needs. And you will make yourself the issue.

You can try to take the issue away by saying, “I’m feeling emotional now, so I might not mean everything I say.” This works best if they then empathize. Exquisite preparation is a defense against losing sight of your goals. If you start to get upset, reviewing the materials you have prepared may calm you down.

Lower your expectations. If you come into a negotiation thinking that the other side will be difficult, unfair, rude, or trying to cheat you, you won’t be likely to have dashed expectations—and you won’t be as emotional. When you lower your expectations of what will take place in a negotiation, you will be rarely disappointed—and you might be pleasantly surprised. Getting yourself psychologically prepared is important.

You might feel, “Hey, I shouldn’t have to do things like that.” Okay, maybe not. But we live in the real world, not in the “should” world. If you follow these tools, you will gradually make your negotiations better. Other people will behave better. The results will be better. Slowly, the world will become better. The human race has lived a certain way for thousands of years. Don’t expect it to change overnight.

Remember that great expression “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” When everyone else around you is angry, it doesn’t help to join them. Don’t let your emotions match theirs. A colleague once said, “Just because you’re in an insane asylum doesn’t mean you want crazy doctors.” Say to yourself, “They’re trying to get me to take the focus off my goals.” Don’t let others manipulate you into getting less, or getting nothing at all. Getting mad at someone destroys your goals. It’s like saying, “I’m mad at you, I think I’ll kill myself.” Don’t let the other side cause you to hurt yourself.

I once saw two attorneys with their clients outside a courthouse. One attorney was screaming at the other attorney and his client in an endless tirade. The attorney on the receiving end just stood there with his client, silently listening.

Finally, the attorney who bore the brunt of this looked at the other attorney and said in a light voice, “Good try!” It completely destroyed the effectiveness of the outburst.

So you can control your own emotions. Dealing with the emotions of others can be trickier.

DEALING WITH EMOTIONAL SITUATIONS AND EMOTIONAL PEOPLE

Recognize when others are acting against their goals/needs. Try to understand the other party’s emotions and perceptions. Find the cause of their emotion and their needs and goals. Consider whether your negotiating style is contributing to the situation. Make emotional payments: concessions, apologies, empathy. Try to create trust. Avoid extreme statements—they just produce more emotion. Use third parties and their constituents to help you. Apply their standards. Correct erroneous facts.

The first step toward dealing effectively with the emotions of others is to recognize when they are being emotional. It is not always obvious. Brits and Swedes, for example, are culturally less emotive than Brazilians and Italians, but that doesn’t mean any individual in those cultures is less or more emotional. Some people are calm outside and seething inside, and vice versa.

The key is whether the other person is acting against his or her own interests, needs, and goals. You have probably watched people do exactly the opposite of what benefits them. You ask yourself, “What’s wrong with them? Can’t they see this won’t help them?” They can’t. They have lost focus on their goals and needs. They are being emotional. They aren’t listening clearly.

To persuade them, you have to begin by increasing their ability to listen. That means you have to calm them down. You have to become their emotional confidante. Try to understand their emotions. What gave rise to them? What can you do to calm them down?

You’ve had heated discussions with your friends, partner, or spouse. The more you tell them to calm down, the madder they get. That’s because telling them to calm down devalues the legitimacy of their emotions. And when people feel devalued, they become more emotional.

So empathize with them. Try to understand the cause of their emotion. It doesn’t work to simply tell them, “Be rational” or “Be logical.” If they wanted to be logical or rational, they would be. They want to be emotional. So commiserate with them. This will usually calm them down enough to have a conversation together. The more you listen to them, the calmer they will be.

You have to figure out what kind of emotional payment they need. It’s an oft-repeated request from women to men: “I don’t want you to solve my problems; I just want you to listen to them.” For many women, being listened to is the emotional payment. Anything that values their emotions through some demonstration by you is an emotional payment. It could be a compliment. It could be a touch on the arm. It could be just listening. It’s different for every person. So first you have to try to understand the pictures in their heads.

I first discovered the impact of emotional payments about twenty years ago when I was involved with the Harvard Negotiation Project. Both there and elsewhere in the negotiation industry, people were talking about negotiation strategies for “reasonable people,” “rational actors,” and “wise negotiators.” All around me, however, I saw evidence of irrationality driving decisions: from children to businesses to governments.

Students, professionals, and others kept asking how to deal with irrational and emotional people. I then realized that almost all the studies were dealing only with the world as it should be, not as it was. So I started developing tools and strategies to deal with emotions.

Shortly after that, I mediated a high-society divorce in New York. The husband had hired male lawyers to whom he was paying a lot of money. The wife had hired female lawyers, who were working pro bono. The assets, which had been large initially, had been whittled down through legal fees and losses in the stock market.

When I was asked to assist, the couple still had about $400,000 left in assets. The husband was basically ready to just give his wife all the money as the divorce settlement. The divorce was a continuous drain on his business. But she refused to take it. She was so angry at him that she wanted to rake him over the coals in court, embarrassing him and leaving everyone with nothing.

She was clearly emotional. She was acting against her own interests. So I thought about what I could give her that she would recognize as an emotional payment so she would take the money.

One day, as I sat with her, I said, “You know, if you take this settlement offer, it will be all the money he has.” She thought about this for a moment and said, “Do you mean to say, if I take this settlement offer, it will be all the money that son of a bitch has?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I’ll take it.” She wanted, in her own mind, for him to feel pain—and this was an emotional payment for her.

To find out what the other party might consider to be an emotional payment, you need to focus hard on the pictures in their heads. How do they view the world? What are their needs and perceptions? How would they like to hear things framed? Do they need concessions? If so, what kind? A simple apology? An elaborate apology? No apology, but flowers? In other words, emotional payments are very specific to the person and the situation.

Spencer Romney, a Penn Law student, was on the phone with his wife, Lisa, a dentist. She was trying to tell him about her stressful day. “I was with friends, and distracted,” he said. “She got mad, hung up, and refused to answer my calls.” When he got home, he immediately started to give her a foot massage, without saying anything. Then he asked her about her day. Crisis solved.

Only when you get the other person to start listening can you do things that will begin to bring them back. What standards have they used before—standards they might now accept? Using standards first would be too much for them to handle in their emotional state. First, they have to be ready to handle possible contradictions. And you must avoid extreme statements, including threats. They are emotion-producers.

One idea is to get them talking about themselves, so they can vent or express their feelings. Try guessing at things that may be bothering them. They will often tell you that you are right or wrong. Ask questions. The mere act of considering a question takes energy from their emotional fit, as with the child at the start of this chapter. Articulating what you think is the other party’s pain, even if you are wrong, will have a calming effect even as they look inward to see if you are right.

Jim O’Toole and his wife, Anne, were having an argument about how little time he was spending with her and their two children. He had a full-time job and was pursuing an advanced degree. “For once I decided to take the time and just let her tell me her side of things completely,” he said. As she talked, she became calmer. So did he.

Clearly, they all wanted to spend more time together. “Then I reviewed my current obligations and how it would provide a long-term benefit to all of us,” said Jim, now president of a paper distribution company in Chicago. “She was much more understanding than in the past.” With their argument over, they had begun a new communication process for the future.

Doctors are beginning to see that apologizing to patients for mistakes, or for less-than-perfect care, goes a long way toward avoiding lawsuits. Traditionally, attorneys and insurers have seen any apology as an admission of liability. This is not necessarily true. Things can happen that only with hindsight seem wrong. And even if there is liability, you can be sure that if medical professionals empathize, the patient or the patient’s kin will be less out for blood.

In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Ziyad Al Saleh was in the process of buying a food industry company. The owner was reluctant to sell, even though he knew the offer was a good one. “He was fearful of losing control, and thus emotional,” Ziyad said. The solution was to first talk with the owner about his fears. They also offered him a key position in the firm, with some job security. Third, they gave him a vision of global expansion. Finally, they pledged extra compensation if he could help turn the vision into reality.

The owner saw that with additional people, he would be able to accomplish something he had been unable to accomplish on his own, due to his lack of size and resources. So he agreed to the deal.

Mark Robinson, a student at the University of Southern California Business School, drove to a jewelry store with his wife to pick up her engagement ring, which had been repaired. The store was in a fairly tough area of Los Angeles. It was hard to find a parking space relatively close to the store. Mark saw someone walking toward a parked car. So Mark pulled ahead of the car, patiently waiting for the parked car to leave.

After what seemed like an eternity, the parked car left, pulling around Mark waiting to back in. As he started to back in, another car came up from behind and pulled into the space. Inside were two tough-looking guys. Mark decided to negotiate the situation. His wife was horrified. “My wife wanted me to drop the matter,” Mark said. “I, on the other hand, focused on the other driver. Maybe he didn’t see me. Maybe this was negotiable.” Calmly, Mark got out of the car and walked over to the two tough guys. He went to the driver’s-side window, smiled, and waved. “Hi!” he said. After a few seconds, the driver rolled down the window. “Yeah?” he said.

“I spoke to him like we were acquaintances,” Mark said. “I said, ‘You probably didn’t see me patiently waiting for the space. But I’ve been here for a long time. Would you allow me to have the space?’ ” He gestured to his wife. “I was hoping not to look bad in front of my wife,” he said. “It’s up to you. But I appreciate anything you might do.” The two guys looked at each other and then at this guy. Clearly, he wasn’t a threat. He accused them of nothing. Moreover, he gave them a chance to be magnanimous.

“Okay man, we’re cool with that,” one said. Mark shook the driver’s hand. The driver then started his car and pulled away. Surprised? Well, Mark had given them a big emotional payment. One that the guys could tell their friends about—how they helped some guy not look bad in front of his wife. “My wife was in shock for some time about the power of this process,” Mark told me afterward.

If this feels uncomfortable or dangerous to you, then don’t do it. But the student presented his argument in a way that carried very little risk. He tapped into the other guys’ psyches. So if you feel this tool won’t work in a given situation, ask yourself if you are using the right tools.

A student at Wharton was held up at gunpoint in West Philadelphia. He gave the robber his wallet, saying, “I’m probably not even worth wasting your gun on, it will make too much noise. You’re the boss.” In the end, the robber gave the student back his driver’s license and student I.D. card. They were not usable to the robber, and the student said, “We all know those SOBs in the bureaucracy give everyone a hard time over this stuff.” (Common enemies.) Why did he do that? When do you think the last time was that the robber heard anyone say to him, “You’re the boss”?

One use of emotion in a negotiation is to bond people together. People who have been through an emotional ordeal tend to bond together. This is true if the experience is a negative one, such as a war, an accident, or danger, or a positive one, such as winning a big sporting event. While it can be a basis for team-building, used wrongly, it can leave lasting scars. It is like playing with fire.

What about when you have tried to get through to the other person and are unable to? Think about third parties. Who might the other person or party trust enough to listen to, if not you? Do they have friends, colleagues, or constituencies who might be able to calm them down? Are there third parties you can blame, in an attempt to unite the other person around common enemies?

If all else fails, are there more rational people on the other side you can appeal to? For example, if you are dealing with a company or a team, rather than an individual, it may be easier to find more cooperative people. Going over the head of the emotional person carries with it the risk that he or she will retaliate, and that you will destroy the relationship. In personal situations, this is not advisable. In business situations, it sometimes is necessary.

If you have an emotional, extreme person on the other side in a business negotiation, ask every other member of the other team if they agree with each and every word, in tone and substance, that was just said. Make your tone one of trying to understand the situation. It is not accusatory. If there is any hesitation by the other side, ask for a break. (Telling the other side to take a break is too aggressive.) During the break, hopefully members of the other side will calm down the emotional person, or exclude them from the negotiation.

You also need to recognize when someone is using emotion to manipulate a negotiation, and do something about it. I tend to mistrust general praise. “You’re a great teacher,” in my view, is just a throwaway line. “In what way?” I want to know. “What specifically did you learn that’s valuable?” I want to see if they are just jockeying for position (or a good grade). Are they trying to manipulate me, or sincerely expressing appreciation?

If you see the other side playing good cop, bad cop on you, ask them directly, “Are you playing good cop, bad cop with me?” Call out the bad behavior. Or you might want to say, “I see that your approaches to me are very different. One is nice, the other is not. Do you want to take a break and get your approaches straight?” This also shows why manipulation is risky. Good negotiators will call it out and the manipulator will lose credibility.

Deadlines and time limits are often used to hurt the other party emotionally. With deadlines looming, people are less able to process information, less interested in expanding the pie, and less creative. If someone imposes a deadline on you, ask if they would like such negative things to occur. Better yet, find out any deadlines in the beginning, so you can manage your time and not settle for a lesser deal. Having enough time to be creative is essentially having enough time to get more.

Some negotiators suggest that you start with an extreme demand, to leave room for concessions. When you make an extreme demand, the other party will almost always say no. The thinking is that you can then make a more modest demand, which seems more reasonable and acceptable.

This is just another manipulative tactic. If someone tries that on you, say something like, “So how come you changed your first offer so much?” Put them in the hot seat for trying to manipulate you. The net result of such tactics, though, is that trust and the chance of a deal both go down. Be careful of being too aggressive in naming bad behavior, as noted earlier.

Then there are food and gifts—cookies, trinkets, or more. Lunch at a fancy restaurant. This is supposed to soften up the other side and make them indebted to you. To break the ice in a negotiation, it’s fine. In trading items, it’s fine. But you have to evaluate the source. If the other side is being genuine, okay. But make sure they don’t later try to exact a concession in return.

Ask yourself if their actions seem genuine. If you think they are feigning an emotion, ask yourself what kind of relationship you’re going to have if they are acting this way.

Such manipulative tactics are often used by hard bargainers.

I went to Springdale, Arkansas, for negotiations with Tyson Foods, the giant food company, on behalf of a Russian client who owed Tyson millions of dollars. They did not try to kill me with kindness. Quite the contrary; under the guise of showing me around, they gave me a tour of the chicken-processing plant.

I heard one of the executives whisper to another before the tour, “Should we show him the kill room?” The other said, “Absolutely.”

I’ll spare you the details of the tour of this slaughterhouse. Afterward, they took me into a conference room in the slaughterhouse where they had a lunch of—you guessed it—Southern fried chicken. I made sure that I had steeled myself and expressed delight at the offering. I also made sure I ate more Southern fried chicken than anyone else in the room.

These kinds of manipulative tactics are meant to take advantage of unskilled negotiators. They don’t work on skilled negotiators. Displays of rudeness, fake emotion, anger, and other bad behavior such as violence can be gotten away with if the negotiator has a vast amount of power over the other party. Remember, not all negotiations are solvable.

To deal with such emotional violence, first try to use the tools in this book: find their needs, use standards, try for a relationship, use third parties that could influence them, make emotional payments, understand their perceptions, and so forth. They may not be conscious of their behavior and may be willing to listen to you. Or they may be Machiavellian and not care.

If none of these work, try to remove yourself from the situation. Don’t be a punching bag. They are trying to hurt you and don’t care about you. Manipulative tactics run the risk of creating instability. When the person being manipulated comes to their senses—and I say when, not if—they will know they’ve been manipulated. These kinds of short-term strategies eventually backfire.

Even if the other side is being extreme, your remaining calm will give you more options. With a little humor, sometimes, and questions, you can turn an entire crowd around.

Stuart Meloy, a former student, sent me this anecdote. “A couple of years ago,” he said, “one of my wife’s horses ran away and came to rest on the property of the most disagreeable redneck in our county, in the middle of his birthday party. When I showed up, he came out into the yard, drunk, demanding payment for damage that the horse had allegedly caused to his truck.

“Very quickly we were surrounded by his family and friends, most of whom had been drinking. Frankly, I was concerned for my safety. But then I thought of your teaching and calmly asked him to show me the damage. He pointed to a dent on the driver’s side. The man is a logger and his truck was covered with dings and dents.

“So I just started asking questions without any judgment or emotion,” Stuart recalled. “Are you sure it was this dent, and not that one? What about these other dents? If the horse caused this dent, how did it get rusty so fast? By the time I was done the crowd was roaring with laughter and he retreated. We got the horse back without further incident.” He added, “I use these tools constantly.” PERSONAL STYLE

A pleasing style can be helpful in opening communication and, essentially, not making emotion the issue. We generally like to give things to people we find pleasing. It is very useful to think about the impact and use of one’s personal style in negotiations.

The importance of style is in how it affects the other party’s willingness to meet your goals. One could imagine a situation where a nice person on your side might resonate with a sweet person on the other side. Or vice versa. The weakest member of your corporate team might be the best negotiator. Their style could give the other side a sense of comfort and confidence. So the real question to ask is, “Which person on my team is the most likely to get the other party to meet my goals?” Studies have shown that the more powerful people are in a negotiation, the less attention they pay to the other side’s needs. And that means the less successful they will be at expanding the pie. It’s ironic. Most companies pick the most senior person to negotiate, when some of the most junior members might be better.

I cofounded a medical services company in Florida. We raised millions of dollars, mostly from investors from the Deep South. I knew more about negotiation than anyone else in the company. But I did no negotiation with the investors. All of us knew that no matter what I said, the potential investors would think of me as that aggressive guy from New York.

I don’t like this kind of stereotyping, but I have to realize that it exists. And this book is about reality, not pipe dreams. So others in my company, also from the Deep South, did the actual negotiation. They consulted with me offline for tools and strategies, but I was not present at the negotiations.

Of course I would have loved the chance to change the investors’ perceptions of me and New Yorkers. But the negotiation was not about me. Our goal was to raise the money (and we did).

One way of improving as a negotiator is to find out how you come across to others. All sorts of diagnostic tools are available to assess one’s style. The more I have used them, the less helpful I think they are. How do you reduce a person’s entire personality to a score or a number? People have different styles, and act differently with different people and in different situations.

Moreover, people can change their style based on the needs of the situation. However assertive you might be otherwise, you might be a sweetheart when confronted by a man with a gun.

But we can still draw some conclusions about personal style. I ask students to assess themselves and others qualitatively in various situations. This gives us enough information to make recommendations on what to do differently.

Some people are better in a crisis than others. Some people love pressure; others hate it, or freeze in the face of it. Some people’s first reaction is to accommodate others. Some people run from conflict; some run toward it.

I try not to make such personal differences more than they are, since it’s only one part of a negotiation. But it can be helpful. And I’ve seen people change as they learned better negotiation skills: for example, screaming less and becoming less emotional. This doesn’t make them different people; they are just able to make better use of their skills.

One executive’s self-assessment showed he was noncollaborative and confrontational. When he saw this result, he stood up in front of the class and started screaming at me. “What are you talking about! I’m a collaborative guy!” Everyone laughed. His behavior undercut his beliefs. I wish he’d taken it as constructive criticism.

A personal assessment is not meant to make you feel bad. It is meant to give you more information about yourself to enable you to become a better negotiator. The more information you have about yourself, the more conscious you will be of the process, and the more you will be able to make effective changes to meet your goals.

I once used a style-assessment tool for about 160 people at the headquarters of Johnson & Johnson, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms. One person stood out as highly confrontational. We released the assessments to everyone, by name. This particular person happened to be a highly placed counsel of the company. He called me up and started sharply criticizing me, saying that I ruined his reputation at the company, and that the results comprised confidential information.

So I checked back with my sponsors at the company. They had given me permission to release everyone’s name and results so the participants could compare notes and help one another improve. When I mentioned what happened with this attorney, they chuckled. “We knew he’d be like that,” one of them said. “Now he’s outed. It will be good for him to see this.” The sponsors actually wanted the attorney to see that he was too aggressive with others in the company.

An American woman won custody of her two young children in a divorce. Her husband, a Brazilian, promptly kidnapped the children and took them to Brazil. She didn’t have the funds or skills to navigate the Brazilian legal system. She wanted to call him and work it out. I asked her to assess her negotiation style, and his. She thought she was very accommodating and he was very aggressive.

I advised her not to deal directly with him; he would eat her for lunch. I suggested that she deal with his family, whom she knew well, to get her children back. The standards should be: (a) a young child should be with its mother, (b) laws should be respected, and (c) kidnapping is bad. His family agreed, and prevailed upon him as a group to send the children back to the United States. So knowing the relative styles of individuals can be a key tool in deciding how to conduct a difficult negotiation.

It’s important to understand corporate style (to the extent that there is one) as well as individual style. In 1997, I did a negotiation workshop for second- and third-tier management at the Seoul, South Korea, headquarters of Daewoo. Daewoo was then one of the world’s premier companies, a $60-billion-plus conglomerate that made everything from cars to ships to appliances.

The Daewoo managers I taught, almost to a person, were extraordinarily accommodating and routinely gave away the store. I mentioned to Daewoo’s chairman, Kim Woo Choong, that the fire in the belly that he and others had in founding and growing the company did not seem to have been transferred to those he expected to follow him in leading the company. And, indeed, the managers I taught were saying that the Vietnamese and Brazilians were eating them for breakfast, competitively.

Chairman Kim was alarmed at this. He started a strategic program to increase his management’s negotiation skills, training them to be more assertive and better at meeting goals. But it was too late. Daewoo essentially went bankrupt. Companies are run by people, and if its people aren’t skilled in negotiation, the company is in trouble.

Even with cultural norms, in a negotiation, one needs to address individuals. The norms are a good starting point, as in “Are these attorneys as aggressive as the reputation of their firm or profession?” But that is a question, not an answer. You still have to focus on the individual. For Daewoo, as it so happened, there was very little difference among the individuals—an unusual situation.

I have found, by the way, only small differences in the style of men and women in corporate America. We have statistics on this, despite the popular books that emphasize major gender differences. Corporate women tend to be a little more collaborative and corporate men tend to be a little more avoiding.

I have also found from both studies and experience that people who are highly confrontational reach fewer deals, unless their counterparts are highly accommodating (in which case the one who gives in will often be resentful sooner or later).

Companies can effectively choose a strong negotiating team based on the styles of the people on the team. Aggressive, goal-directed people are good closers. They will make sure the deal gets done. Accommodating people, who are often much better listeners, are good openers. They help connect with the other party. Compromisers are good in an emergency: they can make decisions quickly. Collaborators make good facilitators: they consider the needs of all parties. As you look at the descriptions below, think of yours and others as either low, medium, or high.

What are the common negotiation styles?

Assertive

The more aggressive you are, the more you try to meet your own goals at the expense of others’—and you will get less in a negotiation. That’s because other people sense that you don’t care about them. “Tough” people fall into this category. If you fight every battle, you fit this profile. Back off a bit: the key is to meet your goals while still considering and fulfilling the needs of the other party. Listen to the other party. Acknowledge their value.

Collaborative

Highly collaborative people tend to be more creative, look for joint gains, and find ways to expand the pie. They look for items of unequal value to trade. They solve problems. Every problem is seen as a potential opportunity. But they need to be incremental with people whose trustworthiness is uncertain.

Compromising

Compromisers get less. They settle. They tend to pursue speed instead of quality. They “split the difference.” Busy people are often compromisers. They take the first reasonable option and move on. But they sacrifice their ability to get more.

This is not to say that one should never compromise. After you have used every negotiation tool in this book, bridged every gap you can, used every intangible available, and are still a little apart, you can split the difference and feel you’ve done the best you can do. But it is a last resort for good negotiators.

Avoiding

High avoiders generally meet no one’s goals. They don’t engage, they avoid conflict, and as a result, they not only don’t get more: they often get nothing. There are extreme situations in which one actively wants to avoid—like not talking back to a crazy guy with a gun. But in everyday life, you mostly want to engage others. It will get you more. Try starting to engage by being incremental. Ask for something more modest. Instead of asking for a discount, for example, ask if the store ever has any sales.

Accommodating

Accommodators tend to be great listeners. But they can go overboard in trying to reach a deal at the expense of their own goals. Focus on standards of fairness, getting commitments, and using third parties. By contrast, if you don’t accommodate much, you probably don’t listen well. You need to collect more of the basic information necessary to be effective in negotiations. If you don’t collect enough information about the other person and the situation, you will have a much harder time meeting your goals. Ask more questions before making statements. Try not to interrupt the other person. It is not hard to fix this.

The more you learn and practice the tools of Getting More, the less extreme you will be in terms of any of these traits. As always the key questions are paramount: What are my goals? Who is the other person? What will it take to persuade them? You can be as nice as pie while being very persuasive. Don’t let your negotiation style get in the way.

ETHICS

Ethics—or, I should say, the perception of a lack of ethics—is an emotional topic. Like so much of negotiation, ethics is usually situational. There are some absolutes, but far fewer than you might think.

Let’s define ethics: it’s a system of behavior in which people are supposed to treat one another fairly. “Fair” includes judgment, but clearly it includes not hurting people on purpose, except as part of a socially agreed process of justice. It also includes acting in a way that people think is fair.

“Ethics” varies depending on culture and perception. While the law is a guide, most ethical issues don’t reach the level of legal intervention. The problem with ethics is that when people think others are unfair, they become emotional. Their ability to process information declines. So they don’t often see that the situation is more complicated and nuanced than they originally thought. In such cases, perfectly good deals often fail. What I am proposing in Getting More is that you ask more questions before simply assuming that something is unethical.

The Israeli economic consul in Kazakhstan was complaining about the lack of ethics in Kazakhstan. As an example, he said the Israeli government canceled a $50 million investment in a factory in the early 1990s because a dozen local inspectors wanted bribes. “We don’t pay bribes,” he said emphatically.

Fifty million dollars was a huge amount for a newly independent, developing country such as Kazakhstan, on the eastern end of the former Soviet Union. “Tell me about the inspectors,” I said. “Were they decision-makers? Were they in the government ministry in charge of approving the plant?” He said the inspectors were not in the government ministry approving the plant. But, he said, they were in a sister ministry with influence over the deciding ministry.

They were asking for “$600” in bribes over a six-month period. This was one ten-thousandth of one percent of the project. The consul said it was the principle.

I then asked him how much each inspector earned monthly. “$12,” he said. So the twelve inspectors each wanted another $8 a month for six months: a hefty two-thirds increase in their salary. Finally, I asked the consul to describe the lifestyle of these inspectors: well-off, middle-class, poor, etc. He said the inspectors and their families barely had enough to eat.

I reminded him that in New York and other cities, government employees are sometimes hired part-time by private enterprise to serve as “expeditors” to help a company navigate the bureaucracy in getting a project approved. It is all disclosed, legal, and especially popular in countries trying to attract foreign investment.

“So,” I said to him, “do you know why the inspectors asked for bribes? Because they didn’t know how to ask for a job.”

The Israeli economic consul was embarrassed. He said that he and his government had made a mistake. It is an easy mistake to make. It’s back to that term “fundamental attribution error.” We all think that everyone else has the same thought processes, set of experiences, and perceptual framework that we do.

So here it didn’t have to be an ethical issue. And everyone would have been helped by the reduction in reflex emotion.

A bribe is typically defined as payment to someone, usually a government employee, to do something they are already being paid to do by the government. (Extortion, its sister behavior, is threatening to harm someone unless they pay you.) You might say a bribe is a bribe, no matter how small. But that isn’t really true, is it? If you take someone out to lunch, or give them a small trinket, that’s not considered a bribe. Sometimes the key is in thinking more creatively—that is, finding better options for all parties.

How about one closer to home. A job interviewer asks if you have other offers and you don’t. Fearful of not getting an offer, many people want to lie. Don’t think of it that way. First, the other person is essentially trying to find out how the market has valued you. If other offers are possible, you might say, “I have other opportunities that I am actively pursuing.” It is true, and it doesn’t force you to lie.

Let’s say the question is more specific. “Did you get a job offer at your internship with Morgan Stanley last summer?” If you did not, then you needed to prepare for that question long before the interview with another firm. What is the other person likely to perceive? That if you didn’t get the job offer, there may be something wrong with you since Morgan Stanley is perceived to have good judgment.

Given those possible perceptions, you need to think in terms of framing. Was the reason you didn’t get an offer at Morgan Stanley that you weren’t good enough? Was there some other reason? For example, perhaps the fit wasn’t right. Then you should talk about how the new firm’s fit is better. In other words, talk about it in a way that is true and ethical. Or suggest that the present firm should use its own judgment, not that of another firm.

What we are trying to do is improve your negotiating situation. We are trying incrementally to move people in a direction where the cost is less, the risk is less, and the ethical insult is minimal. We are not going to change thousands of years of human nature or cultural norms overnight. In the real world—where you and I live—any improvement is a plus.

DOES MOMMY LOVE YOU? A REPRISE

Today, more than a dozen years later, Lisa Stephens and Aubree still talk about the extraordinary experience they had in the kitchen that day, profiled at the beginning of this chapter. “We see the small scar on Aubree’s forehead and remember the twelve stitches and how we handled it together,” said Lisa, now a senior manager for a major accounting firm in Washington, D.C. “Not a day goes by that we don’t use the negotiation tools to improve our lives.” Lest you still think the anecdotes in this chapter are exceptions: I had an executive in one of my programs at Wharton, Craig Silverman, a financial advisor on Long Island. Craig went to a local medical laboratory one day for a routine blood test. In the next room was a young girl, about five years old, screaming at the top of her lungs “as if she was being tortured,” Craig said. She was supposed to get a blood test, too, but she wouldn’t let the nurse stick her arm with the needle. Her mother, soon joined by Craig’s nurse, was holding the girl down, while a second nurse was trying to stick the needle into the girl’s arm. It was a nightmare of a scene.

Craig, remembering the story of Lisa and Aubree, decided to be of assistance. He went to the girl’s room and asked her mother’s permission to talk with her, which he received. “Look at me,” he empathetically said to the girl. The others wondered what was up. The girl looked at him. “Do you think your mommy loves you?” Craig asked, kindly. “Yes,” the girl said. “Do you think your mommy would do anything to hurt you?” Craig asked. “No,” the girl said.

Craig went through the entire litany, with some variations, of what I described at the beginning of this chapter, including “Don’t you want to get better?” and then, when the girl had calmed down a bit, “The doctor and Mommy can’t make you better unless they do this test.” Within two minutes, he said, the young girl calmed down and was ready for the needle.

“Her mother and the nurses looked at me like I was some sort of magician,” Craig said. “Where did you learn that?” they asked. I’m happy to say he referred them to this book.