Beyond Reason - Using Emotions as You Negotiate (Roger Fisher)

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate—and in ourselves.

I.THE BIG PICTURE
1.Emotions Are Powerful, Always Present, and Hard to Handle 

WHAT IS AN EMOTION? 

Psychologists Fehr and Russell note that “everyone knows what an emotion is, until asked to give a definition. Then, it seems, no one knows.” As we use the term, an emotion is a felt experience. You feel an emotion; you don’t just think it. When someone says or does something that is personally significant to you, your emotions respond, usually along with associated thoughts, physiological changes, and a desire to do something. If a junior colleague tells you to take notes in a meeting, you might feel angry and think, “Who is he to tell me what to do?” Your physiology changes as your blood pressure rises, and you feel a desire to insult him.
Emotions can be positive or negative. A positive emotion feels personally uplifting. Whether pride, hope, or relief, a positive emotion feels good. In a negotiation, a positive emotion toward the other person is likely to build rapport, a relationship marked by goodwill, understanding, and a feeling of being “in sync.” In contrast, anger, frustration, and other negative emotions feel personally distressing, and they are less likely to build rapport.

EMOTIONS CAN BE OBSTACLES TO NEGOTIATION

None of us is spared the reality of emotions. They can ruin any possibility of a wise agreement. They can turn an amicable relationship into a longlasting feud where everybody gets hurt. And they can sour hopes for a fair settlement. What makes emotions so troubling?

They can divert attention from substantive matters.  

If you or the other person gets upset, each of you will have to deal with the hassle of emotions.
Should you storm out of the room? Apologize? Sit quietly and fume? Your attention shifts from reaching a satisfying agreement to protecting yourself or attacking the other.

They can damage a relationship. 

Unbridled emotions may be desirable when falling in love. But in a negotiation, they reduce your ability to act wisely. Strong emotions can overshadow your thinking, leaving you at risk of damaging your relationship. In anger, you may interrupt the long-winded comments of a colleague who was just about to suggest an agreement workable for both of you. And in resentment, he may retaliate by remaining silent the next time you need his support.

They can be used to exploit you. 

If you flinch at another negotiator’s proposal or hesitate before telling them* your interests, these observable reactions offer clues about your “true” concerns and vulnerabilities. Careful observers of your emotional reaction may learn how much you value proposals, issues, and your relationship with them. They may use that information to exploit you.
If those are possible results of emotions, it is not surprising that a negotiator is often advised to avoid them altogether.

EMOTIONS CAN BE A GREAT ASSET 

Positive emotions can make it easier to meet substantive interests. 

Positive emotions toward the other person reduce fear and suspicion, changing your relationship from adversaries to colleagues. As you work side by side on your problems, you become less guarded. You can try out new ideas without the fear of being taken advantage of.
With positive emotions, you are motivated to do more. Things get done more efficiently as you and others work jointly and with increased emotional commitment. You are more open to listening and more open to learning about the other party’s interests, making a mutually satisfying outcome within your reach. As a result, your agreement is more likely to be stable over time.

Positive emotions can enhance a relationship. 

Positive emotions can provide you with the intrinsic enjoyment that comes from a person-toperson interaction. You can enjoy the experience of negotiating and the personal benefits of camaraderie. You can talk comfortably without the fear of getting sidetracked by a personal attack.
That same camaraderie can act as a safety net. It can allow you to disagree with others, knowing that even if things get tense, each of you will be there tomorrow to deal with things.

Positive emotions need not increase your risk of being exploited.

Although positive emotions may help you produce a mutually satisfying agreement, there is a danger that you may feel so comfortable that you make unwise concessions or act with overconfidence. Our advice is not to inhibit positive emotions but rather to check with your head and your gut before making decisions. Before committing to an agreement, check that it satisfies your interests. Draw on standards of fairness. Know each person’s alternative to a negotiated agreement, and use that information wisely.

Below we contrast the effect of positive and negative emotions on a negotiation. This table illustrates the effect of emotions on seven key elements of the negotiation process.

Elements of Negotiation 
-> Negative Emotions Tend to Foster 
-> Positive Emotions Tend to Foster

1. Relationship 
-> Negative emotion fosters: A tense relationship filled with distrust 
-> Positive emotion fosters: A cooperative working relationship

2. Communication 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Communication that is limited and confrontational 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Open, easy, two-way communication

3. Interests 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Ignoring interests, clinging to an extreme demand, conceding stubbornly if at all 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Listening and learning about each other's concerns and wants

4.1. Options 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Two options: our position and theirs 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Creating a lot of possible options that might accomodate some interests of each

4.2. Options 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Doubts that options for mutual gain are possible 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Optimism that with hard work mutually beneficial options can be created

5.1. Legitimacy 
-> Negative emotion fosters: A battle of wills over why we are right and they are wrong 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Use of criteria that should be persuassive to both why one option is fairer than another

5.2 Legitimacy 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Fear of being 'taken'
-> Positive emotion fosters: A sense of fairness

6. BATNA (Best alternative to a negotiated agreement) 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Walking away from a possible agreement even if our BATNA is worse 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Commitment to the best we can get, as long as it is better than our BATNA

7.1. Commitments 
-> Negative emotion fosters: No agreement or commitments that are unclear or unworkable 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Well-drafted obligations that are clear, operational and realistic

7.2. Commitments 
-> Negative emotion fosters: Regret for making (or not making) the agreement 
-> Positive emotion fosters: Contentment, support, and advocacy for the agreement

~ ~ ~

DEALING WITH EMOTIONS: THREE APPROACHES THAT DON’T WORK

Despite knowing that emotions can harm or help a negotiation, we still have little guidance on how to deal with them. How can we reap their benefits? It is sometimes suggested that negotiators: Stop having emotions; ignore them; or deal directly with them. None of those suggestions helps.

1. Stop Having Emotions? You Can’t.

You cannot stop having emotions any more than you can stop having thoughts. At all times you are feeling some degree of happiness or sadness, enthusiasm or frustration, isolation or engagement, pain or pleasure. You cannot turn emotions on and off like a light switch.

In most circumstances, negotiators would be foolish to turn off emotions even if they could. Stopping emotions would make your job harder, not easier. Emotions convey information to you about the relative importance of your concerns. They focus you on those things about which you care personally, such as respect or job security. You also learn what is important to the other side. If the other person communicates an interest with great enthusiasm, you might assume that that interest is important.
Rather than spend days trying to understand the other side’s interests and priorities, you can save time and energy by learning what you can from their emotions.

2. Ignore Emotions? It Won’t Work.

You ignore emotions at your peril. Emotions are always present and often affect your experience. You may try to ignore them, but they will not ignore you. In a negotiation, you may be only marginally aware of the important ways that emotions influence your body, your thinking, and your behavior.

2.1. Emotions affect your body.

Emotions can have an immediate impact on your physiology, causing you to perspire, to blush, to laugh, or to feel butterflies in your stomach. After you feel an emotion, you might try to control the expression of that emotion. You might hold back from a smile of excitement or from crying in disappointment. But your body still experiences physiological changes. And suppressing the emotion comes at a cost. A suppressed emotion continues to affect your body. Whether an emotion is negative or positive, internal stress can distract your attention.
Trying to suppress that emotion can make it harder to concentrate on substantive issues.

2.2. Emotions affect your thinking.

When you feel disappointment or anger, your head clogs with negative thoughts. You may criticize yourself or blame others. Negative thinking crowds out space in your brain for learning, thinking, and remembering. In fact, some negotiators become so wrapped up in their own negative emotions and thoughts that they fail to hear their counterpart make an important concession.
When you feel positive emotions, in contrast, your thoughts often center on what is right about you, others, or ideas. With little anxiety that you will be exploited, your thinking becomes more open, creative, and flexible. You become inclined not to reject ideas but to invent workable options.

2.3. Emotions affect your behavior.

Virtually every emotion you feel motivates you to take action. If you are exuberant, you may feel a physical impulse to hug the other side. If you are angry, you may feel like hitting them.
Usually you can stop yourself before you perform a regrettable action.
When you feel a strong emotion, however, careful thinking lags behind, and you may feel powerless to your emotion. In such moments, your ability to censor your thoughts or reflect on possible action is severely limited. You may find yourself saying or doing things that you later regret.

3. Deal Directly with Emotions? A Complicated Task.

Negotiators are often advised to become aware of emotions—both their own and those of others—and to deal directly with those emotions. Some people are naturally talented at dealing directly with emotions, and most can improve their ability. If a negotiator habitually gets angry, for example, he or she can learn helpful skills to recognize and manage that anger.
Yet even for a trained psychologist or psychiatrist, it is a daunting proposition to deal directly with every emotion as it happens in oneself and others. And trying to deal directly with emotions is particularly challenging when negotiating, where you also need to spend time thinking about each person’s differing views on substantive issues and the process for working together. It can feel as though you are trying to ride a bicycle while juggling and talking on a cell phone.
Dealing directly with every emotion as it happens would keep you very busy. As you negotiate, you would have to look for evidence of emotions in yourself and in others. Are you sweating? Are their arms crossed?

You would have to infer the many specific emotions taking place in you and in them. Look through the list of emotion words below and think how long it takes simply to read through that list, let alone to correctly identify which emotions you and others are feeling. You would have to make informed guesses about the apparent causes, which may be multiple and unclear. Is the other person upset because of something you said—or because of a fight with a family member this morning? You would have to decide how to behave, then behave that way, and then notice the emotional impact of that behavior on yourself and on the other person. If the resulting emotions are negative and strong, there is a great risk that each person’s emotions will quickly escalate.

Positive Emotions 

1. Excited, Glad, Amused, Enthusiatic, Cheerful, Jovial, Delighted, Ecstatic

2. Proud, Gratified, Happy, Jubilant, Thrilled, Overjoyed, Elated

3. Relieved, Comforted, Content, Relaxed, Patient, Tranquil, Calm

4. Hopeful, In awe, Wonder

Negative Emotions 

5. Guilty, Ashamed, Humiliated, Embarassed, Regretful

6. Envious, Jealous, Disgusted, Resentful, Contemptuous

7. Impatient, Irritated, Angry, Fumed, Outraged

8. Intimidated, Worried, Surprised, Fearful, Panicked, Horrified

9. Sad, Hopeless, Miserable, Devastated

Emotions are usually contagious. Even if your emotions change from frustration to active interest, the other person is likely to be reacting still to your indignant behavior of a few minutes ago. The impact of a negative emotion lingers long after it has passed. The stronger and more troublesome the emotion, the greater the risk that both of you will lose control.
Thus comes the question to which this book is directed: How should a negotiator cope with the interacting, important, and ever-changing emotions of each side? Given that we cannot realistically be expected to observe, understand, and deal directly with these emotions as they occur, must we simply react as best we can?

AN ALTERNATIVE: FOCUS ON CORE CONCERNS

This book offers negotiators—and that means everyone—a powerful framework for dealing with emotions. Whether or not you acknowledge emotions, they will have an impact on your negotiation. As the following chapters suggest, you can avoid reacting to scores of constantly changing emotions and turn your attention to five core concerns that are responsible for many, if not most, emotions in a negotiation. These core concerns lie at the heart of many emotional challenges when you negotiate. Rather than feeling powerless in the face of emotions, you will be able to stimulate positive emotions and overcome negative ones.

CHAPTER 2
Address the Concern, Not the Emotion

Rather than getting caught up in every emotion you and others are feeling, turn your attention to what generates these emotions.
Core concerns are human wants that are important to almost everyone in virtually every negotiation. They are often unspoken but are no less real than our tangible interests. Even experienced negotiators are often unaware of the many ways in which these concerns motivate their decisions.
Core concerns offer you a powerful framework to deal with emotions without getting overwhelmed by them.

FIVE CORE CONCERNS STIMULATE MANY EMOTIONS 

1. Appreciation: The concern is ignored when: Your thoughts, feelings, or actions are devalued.
The concern is met when: Your thoughts, feelings, and actions are acknowledged as having merit.

2. Affiliation: The concern is ignored when: You are treated as an adversary and kept at a distance.
The concern is met when: You are treated as a colleague.

3. Autonomy: The concern is ignored when: Your freedom to make decisions is impinged upon.
The concern is met when: Others respect your freedom to decide important matters.

4. Status: The concern is ignored when: Your relative standing is treated as inferior to that of others.
The concern is met when: Your standing where deserved is given full recognition.

5. Role: The concern is ignored when: Your current role and its activities are not personally fulfilling.
The concern is met when: You so define your role and its activities that you find them fulfilling.

We want each of the core concerns to be met not excessively nor minimally, but to an appropriate extent. Three standards can be used to measure if our concerns are treated appropriately. Do we feel that others are treating our concerns in ways that are:

1. Fair?

Fair treatment is consistent with custom, law, organizational practice, and community expectations. We feel treated as well as others who are in similar or comparable circumstances.

2. Honest?

Honest treatment means that what we are being told is true. We may not be entitled to know everything, but we do not want to be deceived. When the other person honestly addresses our concerns, their intent is not to deceive or trick us. They communicate what they authentically experience or know.

3. Consistent with current circumstances?

It is perhaps unreasonable to expect all of our concerns to be met in every circumstance. Norms change as we deal with everyday matters or a crisis. Appropriate treatment is often consistent with these changing norms.

USE THE CORE CONCERNS AS A LENS AND AS A LEVER

As a Lens to See a Situation More Clearly and to Diagnose It

The core concerns can be used as a lens to help you prepare, conduct, and review the emotional dimension of your negotiation.

1. Preparing for your negotiation.

You can use the core concerns as a checklist of sensitive areas to look for in yourself and in others. In what ways might others be sensitive to what you say or fail to say about their status? Will the senior negotiator on the other team feel that her autonomy is impinged upon if you revise the current proposal without first consulting her? Do you feel your sense of affiliation has been affronted when the rest of the team goes to lunch without inviting you?

2. Conducting your negotiation.

Awareness of the core concerns can help you see what might be motivating a person’s behavior. For example, you might realize that the other team’s leader feels unappreciated for the many weeks he spent building internal support for the agreement. With that awareness, you can tailor your actions to address his concern.

Awareness of your core concerns can defuse much of the volatility of escalating emotions. If the other party says something that pushes your button, you want to prevent yourself from losing control of your own behavior. Rather than reacting to the perceived attack on you, take a deep breath and ask yourself which of your core concerns is being rattled. Is the other negotiator impinging upon your autonomy? Demeaning your status?

THE RISK OF IGNORING CORE CONCERNS

My core concerns are unmet whenver:  

  1. I am unappreciated 
  2. I am treated as an adversary 
  3. My autonomy is impinged 
  4. My status is put down 
  5. My role is trivialized or restricted

The resulting emotions can make me feel:  

  1. Angry: enraged, furious, indignant, irritated, annoyed, hateful, spiteful, impatient 
  2. Anxious: regretful, fearful, nervous, uneasy, alarmed 
  3. Envious and jealous 
  4. Disgusted: repulsed, sickened, resentful, contemptuous 
  5. Guilty and ashamed: remorseful, humiliated, embarassed 
  6. Sad: anguished, hopeless, gloomy, devastated, apathetic

When this happens I am prone: 

  1. To react negatively, contrary to my interests 
  2. To "go it alone"
  3. To think rigidly 
  4. To act deceptively and be seen as untrustworthy

THE POWER OF MEETING CORE CONCERNS

My core concerns are met when:

  1. I am appreciated 
  2. I am treated as a colleague 
  3. My freedom to decide is acknowledged 
  4. My high status is recognized where deserved 
  5. My role is fulfilling: it includes activities that convince me that I can make a difference

The resulting emotions can make me feel:

  1. Enthusiatic: cheerful, playful, amused, ecstatic 
  2. Happy: content, pleased, jovial, comforted, glad 
  3. Hopeful 
  4. Affectionate: fond, caring, compassinate 
  5. Proud: accomplished, courageous 
  6. Calm: relieved, relaxed

When this happens, I am prone: 

  1. To cooperate 
  2. To work together 
  3. To be creative 
  4. To be trustworthy

3. Reviewing your negotiation.

In reviewing a meeting, you can use the core concerns to help you understand what happened emotionally. If the discussion was cut short because your colleague stormed out of the meeting, you might take a moment to run through the core concerns to try to figure out what may have triggered the other person’s anger. You can use this information to address the situation or to prevent its recurrence. If a meeting went surprisingly well, the core concerns can be used to understand what worked. You might develop your own list of best practices.

As a Lever to Help Improve a Situation 

Whether or not you know what a person is currently feeling and why, each core concern can be used as a lever to stimulate positive emotions. This is often easier than identifying which of many negative emotions have been stimulated and then determining what to do. You can say or do things that address one of the areas of core concern, moving a negotiator up or down in status, affiliation, autonomy, appreciation, and role. Positive emotions result.
You can also use the core concerns to shift your own emotions in a positive direction. Perhaps you can reduce the pressure of a big decision by reminding yourself that you have the autonomy to accept or reject an agreement with the other team. Or perhaps you can raise your status by sharing with others a relevant area of knowledge.
A big reason to proactively meet the core concerns is to avoid the strong negative emotions that might be generated if those concerns are left unmet.

The joy people experience when they breathe is no match for the distress they experience when they are drowning.

II. TAKE THE INITIATIVE
Chapter 3. Express Appreciation: Find Merit in What Others Think, Feel, or Do—and Show It

APPRECIATION: A CORE CONCERN AND AN ALL-PURPOSE ACTION

The results of appreciation are simple and direct. If unappreciated, we feel worse. If properly appreciated, we feel better. Our esteem gains in value, just as the stock market appreciates as it gains in value. We become more open to listening and more motivated to cooperate.
Appreciation is not just a noun that labels a concern: It is also an action.
To appreciate is a verb. Appreciation takes on an added value as both a core concern and a strategic action since honestly expressing appreciation is often the best way for one person to meet many of the core concerns of another. Thus, appreciate others can be taken as a shorthand, all-purpose guide for enlisting helpful emotions in those with whom you negotiate.
If you and the other side appreciate one another, you are more likely to reach a wise agreement than if each side feels unappreciated. In fact, you benefit by helping the other side feel appreciated, whether or not they reciprocate. They will tend to feel more at ease and cooperative. And by appreciating them, you are more likely to foster their appreciation of you.

OBSTACLES TO FEELING APPRECIATED

In most negotiations, three major obstacles inhibit mutual feelings of appreciation.

1. First, each of us may fail to understand the other side’s point of view. We argue our own perspective but do not learn theirs. As the other person talks, our mind focuses on ideas we want to communicate. With no real listening, no one feels understood.

2. Second, if we disagree with what the other person is saying, we may criticize the merit in whatever they say or do. We assume that part of the job of a negotiator is to put down the other side. All too often, we listen for the weaknesses in what the other person is saying, not for the merit. Yet everyone sees the world through a unique lens, and we feel devalued when our version of the world is unrecognized or dismissed out of hand. If we spent weeks putting a proposal together and the other side merely criticizes it, we are likely to feel discouraged and angry.

3. Third, each of us may fail to communicate any merit we see in the other side’s thoughts, feelings, or actions. When either of us hears the other person only criticizing our perspective, we assume our message and its merit were not heard. We end up arguing more forcefully or giving up.

THREE ELEMENTS TO EXPRESS APPRECIATION  
Expressing appreciation thus takes more than a simple thank-you. Since we so often fail to appreciate, we need: 
1. To understand each other’s point of view;
2. To find merit in what each of us thinks, feels, or does; and 
3. To communicate our understanding through words and actions.

1. Understand Their Point of View

To appreciate another person, your first task is to understand how things look and feel from their point of view. Your main tools are your ability to listen and to ask good questions.
Many people assume you cannot really understand how they see things unless you have heard it directly from them. While that is often true, you can anticipate quite a bit by imagining how you might feel in their shoes.
But even if you do understand their point of view, they still may want to be heard. Be prepared to listen.
During a negotiation, there are many active listening techniques you can use to improve your understanding of another. Two are worth noting here:

1.1. Listen for the “music” as well as the words.

The process of coming to understand is not limited to hearing specific words that someone utters. It is important for a listener to gather the ambience that surrounds them, to listen for the mood, character, atmosphere, and emotional tone that put the words into a context.
Like listening to a song, it is not enough to get the words right. You want to listen for what is accompanying the words—the underlying melody.
Just as the crash of a drum can turn a sentimental love song into an angstridden war cry, the emotional tone may confirm a negotiator’s words or refute them as when a person shouts, “I am not angry!”

1.2. Listen for “meta-messages.”

As you listen, you will notice that sometimes one message is buried inside another. Such inexplicit metamessages occur all the time. At a dinner party, for example, a host may look at his watch and say, “I have been so enjoying myself that I did not realize how late it has become.” Most guests quickly catch the meta-message that the party is now over.
Meta-messages often suggest whether a person feels supportive, ambivalent, or resistant to ideas being discussed. An easy way to detect meta-messages is to listen for which word is emphasized. Though the following four sentences are comprised of the same words, each sentence suggests a different meaning. Possible translations are in brackets.

I like this proposal. [But others are resistant.]
I like this proposal. [I enthusiastically support this idea.]
I like this proposal. [I like this proposal better than others.]
I like this proposal. [As a proposal; I am not making a commitment.]

Do not ignore ambivalence or resistance. A person’s body language may express something quite different from what words communicate. By being aware of a mixed or meta-message, you can better appreciate another’s point of view.

2. Find Merit in What the Other Person Thinks, Feels, or Does

Find Merit in What Another Person... -> And Express Using Illustrative Statement

Thinks 
Logic and Reasoning -> "I find your arguments persuasive."
Points of view -> "Even though I disagree with your conclusion, I see value in your point of view."

Feels 
Emotions -> "I admire the pride you put into your work."
Core concerns -> "I think it makes sense that you don't want to be excluded from tomorrow's meeting."

Does 
Actions -> "I value what you do around here."
Effort -> "I appreciate your putting together this first draft."

When views conflict, find merit in their reasoning. 
Even if you disagree with the other person’s stance on an issue, you can acknowledge their reasons for seeing the world as they do. They might be motivated by strong feelings, a passionate belief, or a persuasive argument.

Finding merit in another’s reasoning requires that you actually do see merit in it. Sincerity is crucial. It is your honest valuing of another’s perspective that makes them feel appreciated. You want to express that you understand the basis for why they feel, think, or act the way they do. While you may struggle to find value in what they say or do, look hard and imagine what their emotional experience is like, considering what concerns may be motivating their emotions.

When you strongly disagree with others, try acting like a mediator. 
The hardest time to find merit in another’s point of view is when you are arguing about an issue that may be personally important. Listening for merit in another’s point of view can transform the way you listen.
To do this, try acting like an impartial mediator. A mediator works to understand each disputant’s perspective and to look for the value in it. In this role, you refrain from judging whose side is right or wrong. Instead, you try to see the merit in each side’s perspective.
To take on the perspective of a mediator, start by discovering why the other person’s view on an issue may be personally important and persuasive to them. What beliefs and reasoning underlie their view? You may not agree with their stance on the issue, but you can still find merit in the reasoning and beliefs that brought them to that conclusion. Once you find merit, you will be able to say: I understand [your point of view], and I appreciate [your reasoning or beliefs].

Consider the example of a pro-choice leader searching for merit in a pro-life leader’s point of view. She probably won’t find value in the leader’s stance that abortion should be illegal. But she might be able to see merit in some of the reasons and beliefs underlying that stance. She might say: I understand that you believe that life begins at conception. [She demonstrates understanding.]
And with this as a core belief, I can see the value in your wanting to protect what you see as an innocent child. [She shows that she sees merit in the other person’s reasoning.] Appreciation is not something to be bargained over. In fact, it loses much of its value if my expressing appreciation of your point of view is made conditional on your expressing appreciation of mine. If the pro-life leader were to go through the same process—finding and expressing some merit in the pro-choice leader’s reasoning—then each side would feel appreciated. And neither person changes her basic beliefs about abortion. In fact, each leader may become clearer and firmer in her own views. Thus, by seeing merit in the other side’s reasoning, the leaders can simultaneously disagree and work together. They might, for example, decide to initiate a joint project aimed at reducing unwanted pregnancies.
There may be persuasive reasons for your being unwilling to see some merit in the views of another. We have found two. The first is that to do so appears to be contrary to your religious beliefs. The second is that to express such merit could easily be misunderstood by your friends, family, or constituents. They might think that your seeing merit demonstrates that you agree with views with which you, in fact, disagree.

3. Communicate Your Understanding

The third element of expressing appreciation is to demonstrate your understanding of the merit you have found. Once you understand their perspective and find merit, let them know. Your remarks should be apt; fitting; to the point; appropriate to the circumstances; and, above all, honest.
There is no need for flowery language. What is important is that the person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are recognized and acknowledged.
Plain and simple.
It sounds like you feel worried that if you sell your shares of stock, your relationships with other members of the board would be damaged. [You demonstrate your understanding.]
I can appreciate your concern, especially given that you want to keep working in this industry. [You show that you see merit in the other person’s reasoning.]

To ensure that the other person does not become defensive, express your message in an affirming tone. This is easier if you already have found merit in their perspective. Rather than saying in a sarcastic voice, “Yes, I understand the reason why you think you deserve a pay raise,” you can affirm their perspective: I think you have good reason to feel you deserve a pay raise. You have invested significant time in this company. You’ve worked hard.
You have successfully managed projects involving two of our biggest clients.

Both the sarcastic statement and the affirmative one indicate that you understand what the other person is saying. Yet only the second statement demonstrates that you see merit in the other person’s point of view. And validating their perspective does not mean that you are giving in.

Reflect back what you hear. 

It is rarely enough simply to understand another or even to say, “Yes. I understand.” Others are likely to feel unheard unless you demonstrate to them that you do in fact understand what it is that they believe is important. This is a lesson learned by two leaders with whom Dan worked. As he recalls: I was in Lake Ohrid, Macedonia, facilitating a week-long negotiation workshop for social and political leaders. Participants included ethnic Albanians and Macedonians. At the time of the workshop, violence had erupted between these groups. The war in Kosovo had triggered an influx of thousands of Albanians into Macedonia. Some Macedonians feared a loss of political and cultural influence.
During a coffee break, I sat at a table with two participants,
“Ivan,” a Macedonian, and “Bamir,” an ethnic Albanian. They immediately started to argue.
“Do you realize that thousands and thousands of Albanian refugees have come here from Kosovo?” said Ivan. “How are we supposed to take care of that many people?”
“What’s the choice?” Bamir responded. “You don’t know what it feels like to be in a hopeless situation like ours.”
“Look,” said Ivan, “if we don’t help those refugees, the world will think we’re ruthless. But our country’s too small. What are we supposed to do?”
“You don’t understand the situation,” says Bamir. “You don’t know what it feels like to be rejected by your own country!”
Back and forth the two men argued. Their voices got louder.
They talked over one another. I had initially listened to learn their perspectives, but now things were getting out of hand.
I cut in and said, “Hold on a minute. This is getting nowhere.”
They stopped for a moment and looked at me. I said, “You both seem frustrated. Let’s try to figure things out.”
“He just doesn’t get my situation!” interrupted Bamir.
“He’s the one who doesn’t understand!” snapped Ivan.
I paused for a moment. We all calmed down. “Ivan,” I said,
“What did you learn from listening to Bamir?”
He began, “Bamir thinks that Macedonians reject ethnic Albanians. And we don’t.”
“That’s not what I said at all!”
I asked Bamir, “What did you hear Ivan saying?”
“It’s obvious that he only wants to take care of his people.”
Ivan jumped in and said, “That’s not what I said at all!”

The two men stared blankly at one another. They had listened, but they had not heard one another. Neither knew what the other one was saying nor responded to it. They were having two separate conversations, each responding to his own assumptions and emotions.
There was silence. Then Ivan laughed. He realized what had happened, and the realization startled him. He said, “Nobody gets anywhere if we close our ears.”
And he is right. All too often, people fail to listen because they want their turn to speak and express themselves. Listening is not passive, but active. It takes concentration. During the rest of the workshop, I watched as Bamir and Ivan tried to listen—to really listen—to one another. On more than one occasion, their emotions still overrode their ability to listen. But they were now trying to find merit in each other’s perspective—and to let one another know.
If you find that you have stopped listening to the other person, ask yourself, “Am I done or are they done?” In other words, have you prematurely stopped listening to the other person—perhaps because you are tired of listening to them or are uncomfortable with the emotions they are expressing? Reflective listening motivates you to listen carefully. You paraphrase either the factual information or the feelings the other person is expressing.
Dan demonstrated reflective listening when he said to the men, “You both seem frustrated.” This allowed Ivan and Bamir to feel heard.
Suggest how upset you might be if it happened to you. We are often unable to assess accurately the emotions that are affecting another person. If we try, we may misread the other person’s emotions and offend him or her.
This happened to a tenant who wanted to negotiate the rent for her apartment. The landlord was a lawyer who lived in the apartment below her.
The tenant decided to begin the negotiation by trying to build rapport. She said, “I heard you just switched to a new law firm. That must be tough.”
The landlord’s face turned pale, and he snapped, “No. That’s not the case. Now tell me why you want to meet with me.” As he said these words, a different set of ideas cluttered his head. He worried, “Is she implying that I’m not strong enough to handle a job change? How weak does she think I am?” Despite the tenant’s good intentions, the landlord felt criticized and offended.
A nonintrusive approach would be to assume only how we would feel if the situation happened to us. This is best done after asking the other how they are feeling. The tenant could say, “I heard about your job switch.
What’s it been like? If I had to switch jobs, I know I’d find it tough.” Such a vicarious suggestion tends to open the way for better communication. In this less presumptuous approach, she remains open to learning, and the landlord no longer feels that an emotional experience is being imposed upon him.

TO APPRECIATE DOES NOT MEAN TO GIVE IN

Many people fear that appreciating someone’s point of view is equivalent to agreeing with them. Wrong. Whether or not you agree with someone, you can find merit in their reasoning and let them know. You give up none of your authority to decide; you can still say yes or no to proposals and increase the likelihood that the two of you will be able to work effectively together.

It is possible for you to understand a person’s ideas or opinions that you think are foolish or patently wrong. It is also possible to understand, for example, arguments that you believe are weighty, important, and deserving of attention even if you happen to disagree with them or feel that they are outweighed by other factors. Communicating that you understand is quite different from saying, “I agree with you” or “I will do what you suggest.”
For example, a lawyer can interview a client and demonstrate understanding of the client’s emotional difficulties. This does not mean, however, that the lawyer agrees with every action or opinion of the client.
But he or she can appreciate the underlying beliefs and reasoning. To prevent misunderstanding, the lawyer might preface the conversation by saying, “I want to understand, to really understand, more about your experience so that I can best represent you. I may not agree with everything you say or have done, but I want you to be confident that I do see merit in your point of view.”
In business, too, it can be helpful to appreciate another person while, at the same time, not giving in to them. Consider the case of “Mark,” a talented manager at an automobile manufacturing company, who was struck with Parkinson’s disease. As the disease progressed, he lost his ability to speak clearly and to keep his balance. He had fallen several times at work, but fortunately had not hurt himself.
Mark was friendly with the leadership of the organization, especially “Sam,” the regional president, whose family had joined Mark’s family for the past four years’ summer vacations. Mark suspected that the leadership wanted him to take early retirement due to his impaired ability to communicate with employees. Mark wanted to semiretire. He loved his job, but wanted to spend winters with his wife at a home near the beach. He certainly did not want senior management to dictate unilaterally the terms of his departure. Rather than making demands of the senior management and risk turning the situation into an adversarial battle, Mark used the power of appreciation. He set up a private meeting with the CEO and said: Sam, thanks for taking the time to meet. I’ve been thinking about how to manage my work life now that this disease is starting to make communication more of a challenge. We’ve been good friends for a long time, and I’m sure this is hard for you to see the disease affect me as it has. I know you want to look out for my best interest and to make sure that I don’t put too much stress on myself. I also assume that, as regional president, you need to look out for the company’s best interests. You want people to satisfy their daily responsibilities efficiently. So I’d imagine that this situation is hard for you. I wanted to sit down with you and, without committing to anything, just think through some options we have. Through these statements, Mark demonstrates an understanding of Sam’s point of view without conceding anything. Rather, he recognizes that Sam cares about him and that Sam also has professional responsibilities to uphold. These statements promote a positive tone to their conversation and increase the likelihood that an outcome will satisfy the interests of Mark, Sam, and the company.

PREPARE TO APPRECIATE OTHERS

Decide Who You Want to Appreciate 
Your first step is to decide who you want to appreciate. Regardless of a person’s age, wealth, or authority, every person values appreciation. It is a core concern that is shared by people from the top to the bottom. We often assume that the person above us in rank or command does not need appreciation. Appreciation is supposed to be one way—from the top down, right? No. Subordinates need appreciation, and so do superiors. You can appreciate your boss, your subordinates, your peers, and even those with whom you are negotiating. In fact, in situations where you feel disempowered, your appreciation of others can level the playing field.
When another person feels truly heard, you have valued not only the person’s message but also the person as an individual.

Try the Role Reversal Exercise

Prepare to appreciate another person’s point of view by trying the Role Reversal Exercise. Work with a colleague who can help you enter the role of the person whom you would like to appreciate. You “become” that person. Your colleague can ask you questions to help you understand what the person on the other side of the table might be experiencing.

At times, you would want to answer three questions from the other person's point of view:

1. “In what ways might the other person feel that you do not understand him?”

2. “In what ways might the other person’s point of view have merit?”

3. “Have you communicated your understanding to the other person?”

Prepare a List of “Good Questions” to Learn Another Person’s Perspective

“Help me understand. Where are you coming from on this?”

“Help me understand how you see things.”

“Of all the things we’ve talked about today, what do you see as most important?”

“What are some of the other things that you care a lot about in this negotiation?”

Too often, negotiators grill one another with questions that try to prove the other side wrong. Each negotiator treats the other negotiator as though he or she were on the witness stand. Such questions call for a short yes or no answer:

“Did you even think about the impact of your behavior on my client?”

“Are you planning to go behind my back again?”

To pursue a wiser goal of coming to understand the other person’s perspective, you will want to use open questions. Not arguments, but honest inquiries. Such questions invite others to talk about what they consider important. Open questions typically begin with the words how or what. For example:

“You tell me that the house my client is thinking of buying is worth at least the $500,000 asking price. What comparable sales or other information do you have that led you to reach that opinion on value?”

“What do you see as some of the advantages of this option? What are some of the risks?”

“How do you feel things are going?”

“What are some of your concerns about this proposal?”

HELP OTHERS APPRECIATE YOU

What should you do if a person fails to appreciate you? A negotiation may feel lopsided and unequal if you are trying to find merit in their point of view, but they fail to value yours. In resentment, you might think that you should bargain over appreciation: “I won’t express appreciation of him unless he appreciates me.” But, as mentioned earlier, this won’t work well because appreciation should be sincere. You are likely to view with suspicion any appreciation given only by request.
Don’t get discouraged. There are plenty of things you can do to help others understand what you are saying, find merit in it, and communicate their understanding. Here are some:

1. Help Others Understand Your Point of View 
If you think that others do not understand your message, take action.

1.1. Propose a specific amount of time for them to listen to you. 
You can let someone with whom you are working know that you have a particular point on which you would like to be heard.

1.2. Tailor your message to be heard. 
On the front of many ambulances in the United States, the word ambulance is written backward. This allows drivers who look in their rearview mirror to see the word correctly. The person who conceived of this idea wisely considered, “How can we tailor our message so that other drivers get it right?”
In a negotiation, you want to shape your message so that others get it right. You may tell your junior associates that you will give them a 5 percent commission on every item they sell. You think that is generous.
What many of them may hear is that you are keeping 95 percent of everything. They interpret the act as greedy. Your message and its intent have not been clearly communicated.
When your emotions or theirs become strong, it can be difficult to communicate your message so that others will hear it. When you are angry, for example, you may have a desire to blame the other side for your negative feelings. “I’m angry because you didn’t consult me before signing the agreement.” Don’t blame. It makes others defensive. Their ability to listen declines as they develop counterarguments in their mind about why they are right and you are wrong. The ability to work together is reduced.
Rather, you can communicate your anger as part of a forward-looking message. Let the other person know that you are expressing your anger in order to change future interactions. “I’m angry—and I’m letting you know —because I want to be consulted in the future before you sign an agreement that affects both of us.” Your chance of being appreciated in the long run is likely to be greater if you want to be heard not just to score points, but because you have a message designed to affect the future.

2. Help Others Find Merit in What You Think, Feel, or Do

There are actions you can take to help others find merit in your point of view and your emotional experience.

2.1. Ask the other person to find merit in your point of view. 
Rather than argue the merit in your point of view, ask the other person questions. Get him or her to reflect on the merit in your point of view. You might say, “I’m not sure that I have been as clear as I can be about my own perspective.
Why do you think I find my own stance on these issues to be important and persuasive?”

2.2. Draw on a metaphor that resonates with them. 
You may feel angry if another person devalues your emotional experience. They might pretend not to notice that you are upset, or they might try to outdo your emotions with their own gripes. How can you encourage them to find value in your emotional experience? A powerful approach to defuse tensions is to introduce a metaphor into a conversation. A metaphor allows you and others to talk about your shared emotional experience without doing so directly and explicitly. Rather than saying, “I feel anxious about our situation, frustrated by you, annoyed with my colleagues, and pretty hopeless right now,” you can talk about your experience using a metaphor. “It feels as though we are dancing to different music.”
Either alone or with others, you can create a metaphor that depicts your shared emotional experience. Here is a sampling of such metaphors:

% “We seem to be walking a tightrope here. Let’s make sure we have a safety net.”

% “I feel as if we’re caught in a tide that is pulling us into dangerous waters. Let’s change course.”

% “I feel like we’re walking into a windstorm. How can we keep from moving in that direction?”

% “I feel like we’re digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole. How can we get out of this?”

% “I feel we’re trying to swim upstream. How can we make this easier for both of us?”

% “A chill seems to have come over this room. Can you help me warm things up a bit?”

Metaphors provide a common language for you and others to work through your differences. Through the use of metaphor, you can both acknowledge emotional obstacles and turn those obstacles into problems you can deal with. If you and others are “dancing to different music,” you might ask, “How can we synchronize our moves better? Should we take a short break, then come back and see if we’re more in step with one another?” If you and others have “hit a roadblock,” you might ask, “How can we get around this roadblock? Should we back up our conversation and review your interests and ours?”
Metaphors are commonly used by politicians, news reporters, and negotiators to provide people with a visual, visceral sense of purpose. In the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, the concept of a road map to peace was initiated jointly by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia. The concept of a road map resonated with many people around the world who saw the disputants as being “lost” in conflict. The road map provided a set of suggested activities each side could take. Rather than just saying, “We’re announcing a new plan for everyone to consider,” the tangible nature of a road map gave the public and politicians a concrete item to grasp and to discuss.

3. Help Others Hear Your Message

There are a couple of ways to motivate others to listen to you.
3.1. Have only a few big points. 

In crafting a message to be heard, simplify it. You want to be able to answer a few important questions:

% Who is the person for whom the message is intended?

% What are they supposed to do? Will they understand that?

% What are the pros and cons of that choice as they will see them?

% Are they likely to welcome the message or ignore it?

Answer these questions succinctly and you will have built a strong, clear case for yourself.

3.2. Ask them what they hear you saying. 
You will not know if others are understanding your message unless they let you know. A simple way to find out what they hear you saying is to ask them. You might say, “I’m not sure I’m communicating my message clearly. What do you hear me saying?” If they reflect back your message inaccurately, you can clarify. And whether or not they are accurate, this question motivates them to listen more carefully in the future.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-APPRECIATION

There is a danger in relying on others to appreciate you. You do not have control over their actions. If they fail to give you appreciation, you may feel frustrated. They may even use appreciation as a manipulative tool, flattering you to influence your compliance with a request. Or they may refuse to understand your point of view. Any such actions will push your button if you rely on others for appreciation.
You do, however, have control over your ability to appreciate others— and over your ability to appreciate yourself. You can use your own internal resources to appreciate yourself, to boost your self-confidence, and to clarify your understanding of your point of view and theirs.
You will want to explore the objective merits of your views and actions, independent of a bias in your favor. Where your views deserve praise, do not hesitate to let yourself know. If you have a difficult time finding areas of value in your own actions or reasoning, imagine how an important mentor in your life would appreciate you. Perhaps you have a parent, teacher, or colleague who has supported you and boosted your esteem in difficult times. What might that person say to you as you are negotiating? Tell yourself that. How might they communicate their valuing of your efforts and views? Listen to that voice.
Where, on reflection, you should qualify your self-praise, do so. Be honest with yourself. It costs you nothing. In fact, you can take pride in your willingness to make a candid appraisal of yourself. This is true whether the result is enthusiastic endorsement of your thinking or honest recognition that, at this point, your ideas are best considered tentative and deserving of rigorous rethinking. The more honestly you appreciate the ideas of another negotiator—both their possible flaws and their merits—and with equal rigor examine your own ideas for their merits and possible weaknesses, the better equipped you and others will be to reach a workable agreement.
It may well be that you have little or no interest in building a long-term relationship with the other negotiator. Of course, one consequence of expressing appreciation of another is that you might change your mind about that. In any event, a better understanding of both the other negotiator and yourself will make it easier for each of you to work together in a way that will result in an agreement.

Chapter 4: Build Affiliation 
Turn an Adversary into a Colleague

When training a group of negotiators, we often start with the Arm Exercise. In a group with whom we were working one day, there were thirty participants, all with a background in international trade negotiations. We paired them up, one on one, and instructed them to sit down across from their partner, more or less facing each other, with their right elbows on the table. We told them to grab their partner’s right hand with their own right hand and not to let go. Each person would get one point every time the back of the other’s right hand touched the table. The goal of each was to get as many points for himself or herself as possible during the exercise.
Participants were told that they were to be totally indifferent to how many points their partner got…and to keep their eyes closed.
“Get ready... GO!”
For two minutes, the pairs struggled as each member tried by physical strength to force the back of the other’s right hand down to the table. With a lot of effort and against the physical opposition of each partner, almost no one got more than a point or two.
There was a single exception. One participant remembered, almost immediately, that his goal was to get as many points as he could for himself —and that he was wholly indifferent to how many points his partner got.
Instead of pushing on his partner’s hand, he pulled it down to the table, gave his surprised partner a quick and easy point, took a quick point for himself, and then gave his partner another point. Without talking to each other, the two partners, with their elbows on the table, then swung their clasped hands harmoniously back and forth as rapidly as they could, collecting a large number of points for each of them.
We stopped the exercise and had participants report to the group how many points each had obtained. No participant in the group had received more than three points, except for the pair who had cooperated, each of whom had obtained more than twenty.
In our post-exercise review it became apparent that, despite our using the word partner and despite our clear instruction that they were to be indifferent to how many points their partner obtained, virtually all participants made the assumption that they and the one with whom they were doing the exercise were adversaries. That adversarial assumption dominated their thinking and prevented them from getting as many points as they could have.
The assumption that the one with whom you are negotiating is an adversary dominates a great many negotiations. And that assumption typically prevents everyone from doing as well as they might.

THE POWER OF AFFILIATION

When negotiating, we are dealing with actual or possible differences with someone else. We want to deal with those differences in a way that leaves us feeling satisfied and that wastes as little time and as few resources as possible. This process is best accomplished when we work together. Using our combined brainpower and understanding, we are well situated to create a mutually satisfying outcome.
A big part of working together involves affiliation. The word affiliation comes from the Latin verb, affiliate, meaning “to adopt or receive into a family.” As a core concern, affiliation describes our sense of connectedness with another person or group. It is the emotional space between us and them. If we feel affiliated with a person or group, we experience little emotional distance. We feel “close.”
When we feel affiliated with one another, working together is easier. We view another not as a stranger, but rather as part of the “family.” As a result, each of us tends to care for the other, protect the other’s interests, and look out for their good. There is less resistance to fresh ideas and more openness to the prospect of changing our mind. Loyalty to one another often keeps us honest, obligates us to search for an agreement of mutual benefit, and makes it likely that we will honor an agreement.
Affiliation involves an honest connection. It only happens when someone has a true concern for our well-being, not only for our money. Con artists and telemarketers may try to build affiliation to get our money. But the moment we sense that they do not care about us, we are likely to hang up the phone.

TOO OFTEN, WE OVERLOOK OPPORTUNITIES TO BUILD AFFILIATION

Despite the power of affiliation, we often neglect to build it. Sometimes, we fail to recognize structural connections we share with others—the roles that place us in a common group. We and our negotiating counterpart may both be coin collectors, which might bond us together; but if we never discover our common role, we obtain no emotional benefit. We may also disregard our own power to establish new roles that link us together as colleagues, fellow negotiators, or joint problem solvers.
Whatever the structure of a relationship, we often fail to strengthen our personal connections—the emotional ties that bring us closer to a specific person. Brothers and sisters who live in different communities may drift apart and rarely communicate. Yet, strangers who happen to sit next to one another on a long airline flight may, within hours, be exchanging personal stories that they have not shared with good friends. In a negotiation, the power of a personal connection can bridge the gap between “our side” and theirs.

IMPROVING YOUR STRUCTURAL CONNECTION If you and another person share a structural connection, you both are members of a common group. You may be siblings, workers at the same organization, or fans of the same music. Belonging to the same group often confers an automatic degree of affiliation.
There are practical ways to strengthen your structural connections with another negotiator. You can find links that already exist or build new links as colleagues.

1. Find Links with Others As you find a structural connection with another, your disagreement no longer becomes the sole tie that keeps you working together. Other connections help bind you together, motivate joint work, and act as a safety net in the event that discussion gets tense.
Before you negotiate, investigate possible links between you and the other. You might discover structural connections by asking questions of colleagues who know the other, by requesting the other’s curriculum vitae, or by searching for information about the other on the internet.
As you meet with the other person, you might initiate a sincere discussion about some of the links that connect you, such as:

% your age (“On days like this, retirement looks tempting.”)

% your rank (“Does your boss keep you working all weekend like ours?”)

% your family (“Do you have kids? How do you balance work and home life?”)

% your background (“What a coincidence that both your parents and mine were born in Berlin!”)

% your religious conviction (“Do you have any good recipes for [Passover, Easter, etc.]?”)

% a common interest such as hiking, music, or chess (“I really like skiing, too. It might be fun to get our families together to go skiing over the winter holiday.”)

You may also be linked through your role as business partners, colleagues, fellow employees, classmates, friends, acquaintances, or fellow alumni of a university. A short discussion on your structural connections can bond you. (“You went to that university? I did, too. What dorm were you in?”)

2. Build New Links as Colleagues

2.1. From the outset, treat the other as a colleague. 
Do not let the assumed structure of a negotiation—or conventional wisdom about how negotiators are supposed to behave—deter you from being constructive. Some simple steps to build links include the following:

2.1.1. Arrange to meet in an informal social setting. 
Before important negotiations between the South African government and the African National Congress (ANC),
Roelf Meyer, the government negotiator, arranged to “drop in” for lunch at a friend’s remote country house, knowing that Cyril Ramaphosa, his ANC counterpart, would be there for a fly-fishing weekend.

2.1.2. Introduce yourself informally, suggesting that they use your first name. 
“Hello. I’m Sam Johnson. Please call me Sam. May I call you by your first name?”

2.1.3. Sit side by side, if that is reasonably possible. 
“Since we are going to be working together, let’s sit together here at this table.”

2.1.4. Refer to the importance of their interests. 
“As I see it, any solution we come up with will have to take care of interests important to you as well as interests important to us. I understand fairly clearly the interests on our side. But I doubt if I understand your interests as well as I should. If you would like to do so, I would welcome your taking a few minutes to lay out what you consider to be important interests on your side. I could then quickly review interests of ours that we think important. This might help us both be clear on the major interests that will have to be taken into account in any agreement we reach.”

2.1.5. Emphasize the shared nature of the task you both face. 
“We certainly face a real challenge in coming up with something both our bosses can be happy with! Let’s jot down your concerns and mine and go forward from there.”

2.1.6. Avoid dominating the conversation. 
“Before going any further, I think I should stop and ask for your ideas and your advice on how we can best proceed.”

2.2. Make yourself indebted to the other. 
Benjamin Franklin suggested that doing a favor can help build a link between you and another. Rather than doing a favor for other people, however, he suggested that you let them do a favor for you. Borrow a book or otherwise ask them for a small favor that is easy to grant. You become indebted to the other person, and that person feels both generous and connected.

2.3. Plan joint activities. 
Engaging with your counterpart in a constructive task can build a structural link between you as colleagues or friends. Ask yourself, “What activity might I organize to build a link between us?” For example, political tensions between two countries can be reduced if someone organizes joint economic-development activities or studentexchange programs.
In most negotiations, you could invite relevant parties to join you for a brainstorming session to nominate ideas to deal with the differences you face. You might shift the meeting to a less formal location, change the seating arrangement so that everyone sits around a circular table, or lighten the mood with an icebreaker such as having each participant share a story from childhood. Or you might invite members of the other team and yours to eat together, to go out for drinks, or to attend a sporting event.

2.4. Exclude with care. 
Structural links that you build can easily be destroyed if the other person feels left out. Feeling excluded from team activities—whether a meeting, a conversation over coffee, or a questionnaire to colleagues about office space—can have a more powerful emotional consequence than many people realize. One day, during a coaching session with Dan, a high-level government official described the bitter resentment her colleague felt when he received no invitation to an important interdepartmental meeting. He had expected to be included in the meeting and felt alienated from the organization and the organizers. In retaliation, he apparently found a legitimate way to withhold several million dollars’ worth of funds from the department that had organized the meeting.
Not until six months later were the funds finally made available.
Exclusion from a meeting may seem trivial—but not for the person being excluded. As you plan your next meeting, whether lunch with colleagues at the local cafeteria or a meeting of key negotiating parties, remember to ask yourself if there is anyone who might be sensitive to being excluded. Take a moment to decide whether you want to invite them to participate. What are the benefits of inclusion? Possible costs of exclusion? One minute of thought can save you hours of grief. Even if you decide not to invite them, think about whether you could at least touch base with them to explain the reason, so they are not surprised and put in the position of hearing it from someone else.

REDUCING PERSONAL DISTANCE

Connecting at a Personal Level

The degree of affiliation that one feels toward another tends to change, sometimes gradually and sometimes quickly. Without taking the time to become consciously aware of our personal distance from one another, we might not recognize that we are moving closer together or further apart.
For example, two siblings may fail to agree about whether to move their mother into a nursing home. Their dispute distances them. Without taking a step back and asking themselves how to improve their personal connection, they may overlook their potential to support one another as they watch their mother’s health decline.
The optimal emotional distance between negotiators can be compared to the physical distance between porcupines trying to keep warm on a cold night. They huddle together, but do not want to be so close that they are being pricked by each other’s quills. How emotionally close we feel to each other is often indicated by how physically close we behave, with hugs and kisses demonstrating emotional closeness and a chilly nod of the head or a brisk handshake revealing greater emotional distance. Understanding the physical signals of emotional distance can help you gauge the degree of affiliation between you and another; it can also warn you when you are in danger of overstepping the other’s personal boundaries and getting too close for comfort.
Here are four tactics to help you connect with others at a personal level:

1. Meet in person rather than via phone, computer, or e-mail. 

Personal distance is better reduced by face-to-face conversation than through e-mail, letters, or the telephone. Once you get to know someone in person, it is easier to avoid stereotyping that person or misattributing ideas to them.
Whether a negotiation involves Israelis and Palestinians, labor and management, or a landlord and tenant, face-to-face negotiation helps to humanize each of the parties and provides a greater depth of context. When people meet you in your office, you may want to avoid having your desk become a barrier. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson regularly got up from behind his desk and moved to a chair near that of his guest. Roger has his desk facing bookshelves on the wall so that he can easily swivel his chair and greet a visitor who is promptly invited to sit nearby. Without a desk between you, it can be easier to build a personal connection.
After you have gotten to know someone face-to-face, affiliation can be further built without every subsequent meeting having to be in person. You have acquired a sense of each other as a person, which makes it easier to understand the other’s tone of voice over the phone or the meaning of their words in a letter.
However, if a difference arises, it is often more efficient to work through your problems face-to-face rather than through a volley of e-mails.
By dealing with problems in person, you reduce the danger of miscommunication. Each of you is able to convey your feelings through body language, tone of voice, and the content of your message. During a face-to-face meeting a person’s voice can raise or lower to help indicate the extent of their feelings; there is no “volume control” on an e-mail.

2. Discuss things you care about. 

A second way to build a personal connection is to talk about things that you find personally important. We all know safe subjects, like traffic or the weather, where we won’t offend others or reveal too much of ourselves. Conversations with the least risk, however, tend to be those that also offer the least benefit in terms of reducing personal distance.
Talking about personal concerns is likely to feel more revealing—with more sense of intrusiveness and vulnerability—and yet at the same time offer the greatest opportunity to forge a sense of closeness. Affiliationenhancing topics are likely to include family issues, financial concerns, emotional reactions to a topic at hand, self-doubts about one’s career, and ethical dilemmas.
On any such subject, a good way to open the conversation is to ask for advice. “I’ve been having a terrible time getting my colleagues to show up on time for a meeting. Do you have any suggestions? How do you deal with that?” Sharing your mistakes, weaknesses, and bad habits can also bring you and others emotionally closer.
Setting boundaries of confidentiality can make affiliation-enhancing discussions less risky. Before getting advice from another negotiator about how to deal with a problem at home or work, you might say, “I’d like to get your advice on a personal issue. Would you mind not sharing this conversation with others?” Or, after a personal discussion, you might say,
“I’d appreciate it if you would keep this conversation between us.”

Following table outlines some topics that can be used to build closer affiliation.
It also suggests some “safer” topics that can be used to create greater emotional space if a conversation begins to feel awkward or if you sense that you are in danger of crossing uncomfortable boundaries for yourself or another.

Affiliation-Enhancing Subjects That Reduce Emotional Distance ->

% Family 
% Personal concerns, plans 
% Children, siblings, or parents 
% Personal opinions about politics 
% Subjects away from the job (stories, personal philosophy, etc) 
% Soliciting advice (e.g., disciplining children, issues with spouse) 
% Sharing ambivalence and uncertainty

Safe Conversation Subjects That Maintain Emotional Distance ->

% Weather 
% Some good restaurants 
% Traffic 
% Favourite TV programs 
% Narrow "job" subjects 
% Automobiles 
% Saying nothing

If feelings are too open and raw to discuss, acknowledge that fact.
Religious leaders, for example, can communicate to warring groups that wounds are so deep that things are difficult to talk about now, which is natural and to be expected. Similarly, after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, some psychologists encouraged people silenced by the shock of the situation to voice their emotional experience, even if only to say, “I’m at a loss for words.” Such an acknowledgment strengthens affiliation, because people reveal their vulnerability. Rather than saying nothing, they open up and express their emotional experience, even if that experience is not so well defined as to be categorized with specific emotion words.

3. Consider giving space to bring you closer. 
A third tactic to build a personal connection is to allow others—and yourself—plenty of space. You need not damage the sense of affiliation in order to provide greater freedom.
You can request space while remaining friendly. A Scottish couple once greeted their weekend houseguests with a cordial “Welcome” followed by “We are reading. What would you like to do?”
To build affiliation you need not share your deepest secrets. The purpose of affiliating with another negotiator is to humanize each of you, not necessarily to make new friends or heal your every family problem. You want to create enough of a personal connection that you increasingly trust one another and can deal with problems jointly and effectively.
If efforts to build affiliation appear to bring you or others “too close for comfort,” consider backing off. You may have gone too far. We all have times when we want greater personal distance between us and others. We want time to ourselves, time to relax, time to think, time to be alone. If a conversation becomes too heavy, intimate, close, or personal for comfort, one can always change the conversation to a “safe subject,” or take a break and do something else.
To build affiliation with someone whom you do not totally trust, you can limit the type of information you share. Imagine you have a close colleague who has a number of wonderful qualities, but who gossips about office politics. In this situation, it makes sense to refrain from telling him about office issues that you don’t want other colleagues to hear. Still, you may decide to build affiliation by confiding in him about your own marital issues, information you are confident he will keep private.

4. Keep in contact. 
A final way to strengthen a personal connection is to check in occasionally with the other person, regardless of whether they are on “your side” or work for another organization. Affiliation is not static. It changes over time. Just as most personal relationships need to be nurtured, affiliation often requires regular maintenance. You can’t just ignore your spouse and expect you both to continue to feel as strongly affiliated as you have in the past. To maintain a sense of affiliation, personal attention is critical. You might invite a member of your team to lunch, ask about their welfare, or inquire about their children.

Making It Easier to Build a Personal Connection

We may see the value in building a personal connection, yet fear doing so.
Without a basis for trust, we may worry that the other side will mislead us.
And even if we trust individuals on the other side, our colleagues and constituents may criticize us.
Three ways to make it easier to build a personal connection between sides are to hold private meetings, to reshape the public’s image of a conflict, and to organize subcommittees to focus on specific issues.
Roger used some of these tactics in a contentious labor-management negotiation. He worked with the vice president for labor relations of a large American corporation who was trying to improve his working relationship with the head of the union. Both the union and the company saw their relationship as totally adversarial. Negotiations extended for weeks and weeks over wages, benefits, job security, and a host of other issues. Each side was angry, frustrated, and agitated. They dug their feet in the ground with firm demands and refused to budge to the demands of the other side. In fact, adversarial relations were so entrenched that this corporation had a specially designed Negotiation Room where labor and management met. A long wooden table stretched down the length of the room, lined with about twenty-five chairs on each side. Another fifty chairs were placed behind for support staff. Each side’s negotiators sat across from the other, lined up like troops ready for battle.
Roger recalls thinking how to improve the affiliation between the two groups:

My first inclination was to change the location of the meeting.
Down the hall from the Negotiation Room was a conference room with a big round table at which everyone could sit side by side. I took the name cards of participants from each side and placed them alternately in front of chairs at this round table. Union representatives walked into the conference room, saw their name cards next to management name cards, and became concerned. They approached me and said, “What’s going on? Is this a trick? We want to sit next to our own team. If we don’t go back to the other room, we’ll walk out.” Trust was so tenuous between these groups that everyone ended up back at the long table and accomplished nothing.
Yet given the tensions, both the union and management were interested in further consultation. I realized that personal, face-toface interaction can help reduce the personal distance between adversaries. I invited the vice president and the head of the union to meet in my office at the Harvard Law School on an informal, unofficial basis to consider jointly what they might do toward bridging the structural divide between management and union.
As soon as the two men sat down, they started right away chatting with each other in the warmest and most genial manner that anyone might hope to see.
I reached into my desk drawer for my camera, hoping to record their smiles and looking forward to using such a photo to remind the two men at some future time of their personal rapport and cordiality.
On seeing the camera, both men immediately and strongly objected to my taking a photograph. Their shared concern was how such a photograph might look to their constituents. Both the top management of the corporation and members of the union viewed these two men as tough adversaries, ready to fight vigorously over any issue. Each feared that a photograph of them meeting privately together in a genial fashion could cause irreparable damage in the eyes of their constituents. Seeing such a photograph, top officials of the corporation might conclude that their labor-relations man was “in bed” with the union and could no longer be trusted to represent the corporation zealously in battle with “the enemy.” The union president worried that such a photograph might seriously damage him in the eyes of union members, who might fear that their leader was secretly undercutting their position by building personal friendships with management.
The remainder of the meeting was productive but less eventful. I facilitated a joint brainstorming session on how the groups might settle some of their most divisive issues. The leaders brainstormed ways to help satisfy the underlying interests of each group. That year, no strike took place. 

Hold private, unofficial meetings. 

In reflecting on Roger’s intervention, it is clear that he recognized the importance of building personal connections between negotiators. He tried to build a context that was conducive to collaboration. His first attempt—moving the negotiators to a circular table—was unsuccessful. But he persisted. In the neutral terrain of Roger’s office, the leaders met in an informal capacity. This context made it easy for the leaders to talk congenially and to discuss how to proceed.

Reshape the public’s image of the conflict. 

Strong personal connections may not be enough to secure a collaborative relationship between negotiators. Although the union and management representatives had surprisingly good rapport in the privacy of Roger’s office, they each maintained the public image of enemies. Each leader felt that he could not risk disclosing to constituents how close and comfortable he felt toward the

other side without being viewed by his own constituents as a traitor to his cause. Yet Roger and both leaders realized that good relations between the two groups would enhance each group’s ability to deal with current problems and future ones.
In some circumstances, leaders would be wise to demonstrate to the public that they are working together collaboratively on the problems that divide them. They might have a picture taken of them sitting side by side and working together on a joint problem.* Or they might coauthor a newspaper article or cocreate and distribute an e-mail message describing their intent to solve issues jointly.

Organize subcommittees to focus on specific issues.

Reshaping their public image was unattractive to the union and management leaders, who each feared that disclosing their personal connection would risk alienating constituents. In such circumstances, action might be taken to reduce the structural divide between groups. Subcommittees could be established on benefits, wages, job security, and other divisive issues. Each subcommittee could include a handful of representatives from both labor and management who would jointly brainstorm creative ways to deal with the focal issue of their group. The actual meetings would be private, and no substantive commitments would be made. Without feeling pressured to make binding commitments, participants would be structurally linked as joint brainstormers working on a shared problem. Over time, the work of these committees could help reduce the structural divide and make recommendations that would ease collaborative decision making.
Additionally, the leaders might rename the process by which they negotiate. Collective bargaining is a common name for the approach labor and management take to deal with differences between them. The assumption of positional bargaining is embedded in the word bargaining, which implies that the negotiation is an adversarial process of give and take.
“We won’t increase benefits unless you reduce demands for vacation hours.” A simple change in the name to interest-based negotiation, or perhaps to joint problem solving, might emphasize the fact that the affiliation between negotiators does not need to be adversarial.

PROTECTING YOURSELF FROM BEING MANIPULATED BY AFFILIATION

To this point in the chapter, we have advocated that you build strong affiliations. Yet the stronger your affiliation with someone, the more likely your gut feelings will tell you to say yes to their requests. That may put you in a vulnerable position.
Wise decisions involve both your head and your gut. Each can serve as a good source for fresh ideas. Each can also serve as an excellent screening device to help you winnow out bad ideas and select the best. Before committing, consult both your head and your gut feelings.

Check a Proposal with Your Head

Strong affiliation can lead us to make bad decisions. A colleague may use peer pressure to influence us to do something. Teenagers use this tactic to pressure friends into drinking or smoking cigarettes. “Everyone else is smoking. Here. Try one.” Similarly, someone with whom you are negotiating may use their affiliation with you to pressure you into committing to an agreement.

As your longtime friend and colleague, I haven’t asked for much. But now I ask you to say yes.

You feel the emotional pressure. And the proposed deal may be fine. In fact, it may be pretty good for you. But before you rely on your personal ties and emotional affiliation, stop. Check out that deal with your head. In fact, you may want to have in mind (or on hand) a sentence or two of preparation for just such pressure:

I am not holding out a promise that I will be persuaded. But since you ask me, I will look at it again with an open mind and get back to you in the morning.

Committing to a poor decision is bad for you and often for the other party as well. If you were misled into buying a car that does not fit your family’s needs, you are likely to feel buyer’s regret. The car is not as good as you had hoped. You may feel angry at yourself for being “suckered” into buying that car. From the dealer’s perspective, the situation is hardly more promising. The dealer may lose future business as you describe your buyer’s regret to others and worsen the dealer’s reputation.
Before committing to a decision, check it out with your rational thinking—with your head. If you are looking into buying a new car, first locate and check out some basic information about the models you like: What does Consumer Reports say about their safety, gas mileage, durability, and warranties? What sales prices are quoted on the Internet for different models? What is your BATNA—your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement? If you don’t reach agreement with this dealer, where are you going to go, and what kind of car are you going to get at what price? And what are the costs of waiting for a few weeks to buy?

Check Also with Your Gut Feelings

There is no need to be overly suspicious of everyone with whom you interact. In fact, becoming highly suspicious of others will almost certainly reduce your ability to gain the negotiating power that comes through affiliation. Nevertheless, you do want to guard yourself. Before making an important decision, rely not only on your reasoning mind but also on your feelings.
Wherever a possible decision came from—a friend, an ad, or a TV commercial—your gut feelings can offer you a lot of helpful information as you decide. This is likely to be true whether you are thinking of buying a new car, taking a new job, firing somebody, or taking on a new associate.
And you often can learn a lot by getting in touch with just how your body feels when thinking about such important decisions. Consulting others can be a big help, but you can also learn a lot by asking yourself how you feel.
Relax, take your time, and start considering such questions as:

% How am I feeling about becoming committed to this decision? (Scared? Happy? Confident? [long pause] Feel your feelings.)

% If I said no, how would I be feeling tomorrow morning? (Relieved? Disappointed? Frustrated? [long pause] Close your eyes; check your gut.)

% If I now said yes, how would I be feeling tomorrow morning? (Does such a decision feel right? Why?)

The distinction between what you think in your head and what you feel in your gut is useful, but it is not always as clear cut as our language suggests. For example, if you conclude that for you to do something would not feel right, are you looking only to your own personal emotional reaction to that conduct, or are you reacting to what you anticipate might be the critical views of a friend or colleague? The more closely you are affiliated with someone, the greater the risk that your feelings about an action you might take (for example, clothes you might wear) would not be your own internal emotional reaction, intuition, or gut feelings but rather your guess of how a person with whom you are closely affiliated might feel. When you are checking with your gut or your intuition to learn how something would feel to you, you may need to be careful not to substitute someone else’s presumed feelings for your own. By using your head and your gut, you protect yourself from being manipulated by affiliation, and you improve the quality of your decision.

Chapter 5: Respect Autonomy 
Expand Yours (and Don’t Impinge upon Theirs)

It is not only negotiation, even in trivial logistical matters, emotions can quickly get stirred. Usually this is not because someone made a wrong decision, but because a decision was made without consulting the other person. As a negotiator you should be ready for trouble if the decision you made that affects the other can be responded to with: “I did not agree to that!”
“I was not consulted!”
“I was not even informed!”
We easily get offended when others limit our scope of autonomy beyond what we think is appropriate. They may pressure us to acquiesce to their demand: “That’s our final offer—take it or leave it.” They may try to limit our thinking: “Don’t even think about walking out on this deal.” Or they may discourage us from feeling certain emotions: “You shouldn’t feel sad about losing the deal. Just get over it.”

5.1. OBSTACLES TO USING AUTONOMY WISELY 
If we fail to manage autonomy well, it can stimulate negative emotions in us and in others. Ultimately, those emotions can harm the outcome of our negotiation. Two obstacles stand in the way.

5.1.1. We Unduly Limit Our Own Autonomy

In everyday life, most of us have the autonomy to decorate our office as we would like, to decide what we want to eat for lunch, or to choose our own bedtime. In a negotiation, however, we often are blind to the many ways we can exercise our autonomy. We may limit our own autonomy because we feel powerless to affect change or to influence others. If we are not the final decision maker, for example, what kind of impact can we have on the negotiation? As you will see, there is power in not having authority.

5.1.2. We Impinge upon Their Autonomy

When our autonomy bumps up against the autonomy of another, we may feel as though we are walking through a minefield without a map. A misstep on autonomy can derail an entire negotiation. If the other side’s autonomy feels impinged upon, they are more likely to reduce their trust in us, to reject our ideas whether useful or not, and to invest little effort to implement “our” agreement.
To stimulate positive emotions, then, you will need: 
- to expand your own autonomy 
- to avoid impinging on the other person’s autonomy.

5.2. EXPAND YOUR AUTONOMY

The power of autonomy primarily rests in our ability to affect decisions.
Many of us wrongly assume that without the ability to authorize a decision, we are powerless. And if others lack such authority, we view them as powerless and not worth dealing with. Why negotiate with the junior associate who showed up at the meeting if he is not authorized to make commitments? If we are representing a client, why go into a meeting with the other side if we have no authority to make decisions? We may worry that others will see us or our ideas as “weak.”
Do not unduly limit your autonomy. There are powerful ways you can affect a decision even if you do not have decision-making authority. You can make a recommendation to someone, invent options before deciding, and conduct joint brainstorming.

5.2.1. Make a Recommendation

No one but you limits your ability to make a recommendation to someone.
If you are disappointed at the way your company is dealing with a problem, develop some useful ideas. Do not constrain your ability to think creatively about problems and about ways to address them. Consider: 
- What is the problem that I want to address? 
- Who do I want to influence? 
- What recommendation can I make? 
- How can I get my recommendation to the decision maker?

5.2.2. Invent Options Before Deciding

The ability to affect a negotiation need not depend upon having the authority to make a binding decision. By brainstorming, you can invent possible decisions that might later be made. This is best done if you can talk freely without having to worry that something you say might amount to a commitment. You and others can step “outside the box” of conventional thinking. The fact that you have no authority to make a binding decision gives you enhanced autonomy to generate new ideas and fresh possibilities.
Freed from the risk that something you say might limit your authority, you need not worry about locking yourself or a client into a poor decision.

5.2.3. Conduct Joint Brainstorming

A third way to expand autonomy is to conduct joint brainstorming. In this process, you and the other party explore options without deciding, refine those options, and then decide among them. Whether you are negotiating a business transaction or a government policy, if you want to give joint brainstorming a try, follow the five steps on Table 7.
Even in emotionally heated conflicts such as divorce, joint brainstorming can help. For a couple with children, a divorce is likely to involve a mix of difficult questions and strong emotions. Perhaps the clearest example is when a husband and wife who have children are negotiating custody issues in an amicable divorce. The autonomy of each spouse is very likely to bump up against the autonomy of the other. A checklist of open issues includes decisions about visitation times, household rules, medical and dental needs, religious upbringing, and which school to attend.

Table 7: Five Steps For Joint Brainstorming

1. Decide who should participate.

- Select six to a dozen people with knowledge on the subject and differing points of view.

- Include some who have access to a decision maker.

- Invite each participant "in their personal capacity" - not as a representative.

- If participants hold strong views on the topic, consider getting a facilitator.

2. Explore interests.

- Participants on each 'side' jointly draft their best estimate of the other side's interests.

- Each side shares their list and invites feedback and "corrections" from the other.

3. Invent options without commitment

- Make clear: "Nothin said at this stage is a commitment"

- Each participant generates ideas that might satisfy important interests of everyone.

- Welcome wild ideas, as they may stimulate better ones.

- List all ideas on a flip chart for everyone to see.

4. Refine options

- Everyone nominates ideas that might best meet the interests of all.

- The group selects a shorter list of options that deserve further consideration.

- The group sharpens thos ideas into operational possibilities.

- They simplify each idea until the word 'yes' is a sufficient and realistic response.

5. Decide what to do with the ideas.

- Nominate deciders to whom these options might be recommended.

- Enlist volunteers to convey ideas to deciders.

- If some participants are themselves deciders, ask their advice: "Is there something we could do that would make it easier for you to say yes?"

The underlying question—which of the divorcing parents has the autonomy to make decisions about their child—is likely to stir up strong emotions. The chance of ending up with a tolerable divorce for the parents and the child is likely to depend on the parents’ spending enough time together, or perhaps with a mediator or facilitator, to conduct joint brainstorming.
Of course, the wife or husband can skip this complex brainstorming and simply go to court and request the terms of a divorce. A busy judge may use his or her autonomy to grant the request within a few minutes—often to the financial and emotional detriment of everyone, except perhaps the lawyers and the taxing authorities. The ex-spouses, their children, and their lawyers can now argue for years over issues that might have been settled more wisely and less expensively through joint brainstorming.
In other situations, members of some organization or group have little intrinsic authority or have left what they had at the door. During joint brainstorming, they may want to devise ways to communicate their recommendations to a particular decision maker. Participants may decide to write a memo, jointly or alone, or they may decide to share suggestions orally with decision makers.

5.2.4. Caveat: A Great Deal of Autonomy Can Be Overwhelming

Sometimes the problem is not that we lack autonomy, but rather that we feel overwhelmed by having too many choices and too many decisions to make.

With autonomy, as with each of the other core concerns, we want to feel an appropriate degree of satisfaction. More autonomy is not always better.
We can be overloaded with decisions to make.

DON’T IMPINGE UPON THEIR AUTONOMY

Too often, when we do have decision-making authority, we fail to include in the decision-making process those people who will be impacted by our decision. By excluding others, we risk impinging upon their autonomy— and having to deal with their consequent anger and resentment.
Negotiators are often wholly unaware of the emotional impact of their unilateral decisions. We would be taken aback if the other side simply announced, “Our next meeting will be in my office on Thursday at 10:00 A.M.” They are focused on the merits of the decision and ignore the process by which that decision is made. The other side’s office might in fact be the best place to hold a meeting. They may feel more confident and open in their own office; and for us it means we can leave whenever we want. What is upsetting is not the content of the decision but rather how it was reached.
Were we included or excluded from the process? The answer to that question is likely to affect not only how we feel about the decision but also how we feel about working with the other person.

Always Consult Before Deciding

Our advice is to keep watching for ways that your behavior may impinge on the autonomy of others. The simplest remedy is to Always Consult Before Deciding—or ACBD for short.

Consulting another before you make a decision has three important benefits. The other feels included in the decision-making process. You might learn something through the consultation. And you still maintain veto power. Consulting another does not give them the power to choose the outcome of the decision, but rather to provide input.
Consulting does have a drawback. There is a balance to be struck between too much unilateral deciding and too much time spent consulting. Some former students have adopted a revised motto that can safely be applied in all but the most urgent crises: Consider Consulting Before Deciding.

Invite Input from “Invisible” Stakeholders 

Rarely are all stakeholders present at the negotiation table. Millions of constituents are affected by an economic agreement negotiated by two political leaders. Thousands of union members and administrators are influenced by the decisions of a dozen labor and management negotiators.
A family of eight vacations at a location decided by the mother and father.
Trouble may brew if we fail to respect the autonomy of these invisible stakeholders. Without their “buy in,” constituents may speak poorly of an organization, exert little effort to implement their small part of an agreement, or even try to sabotage it. American consumers may not buy merchandise from a company that has negotiated extremely cheap labor from a third world country. Union members may work halfheartedly if they fail to receive the salary increase they expected. Children may resent vacationing if they were not consulted about the place.
Although a decision may not have an immediate impact on someone’s position, it can affect that person’s life in important ways. An employee may sourly note, “I just took out a second mortgage on my house. If this company is falling apart, my job falls apart with it. Why didn’t the corporate heads let me know in advance! And what am I going to say today to my subordinates worrying about the future of their jobs?” The anxiety and resentment of enough employees can produce an unmotivated workforce and, perhaps, a failed company.
Thus, it is a useful practice to respect the autonomy of these invisible stakeholders. It would be too overwhelming to negotiate with thousands of constituents or employees. It can even be overwhelming to negotiate a vacation with a houseful of children. You may be able to consult with them, however, and, in any event, you can usually inform them of decisions that are being considered.

Consulting with stakeholders.

Ask stakeholders for their input on decisions that will be made. You might create a system where stakeholders can e-mail their suggestions to a central location, place recommendations in a suggestions box, or call in their ideas to a designated person. Or you might organize a consultation committee of stakeholders. For example, suppose the CEO of a nationwide pharmacy chain is negotiating new store policies with branch executives. Before deciding anything, the CEO might set up a consultation committee that includes a couple of cashiers, pharmacists, marketers, and managers of local stores. The CEO instructs the committee members to solicit from their colleagues input on key issues being negotiated, and then to report their findings to the consultation committee. Several of these committees could be formed across the country.
A summary of the recommendations could be forwarded to the CEO.
With any system, it is unlikely that everyone will offer input. Yet you can create an atmosphere that promotes inclusion in decision making.
People can feel that they have a voice in a matter, even if they do not have the final choice.

Informing stakeholders.

You can respect the autonomy of stakeholders by informing them of decisions whenever possible. If appropriate, inform them of decisions you are in the process of making. If this is not feasible, inform them of decisions promptly after they are made.
For example, the pharmacy chain may need to modify their policies to comply with revised government regulations. Though the CEO of the corporation wisely consults with lawyers and top executives, there may not be enough time to form a consultation committee or to take into account suggestions from every employee. In this case, the CEO may want to change the policy and then, without delay, inform employees of the change and why it was necessary.
By consulting others, we can tailor our decision to satisfy their interests.
And the mere act of keeping others informed of decisions can save governments, families, and companies from the perils of ignoring stakeholders’ autonomy.

An example: The impact on employees of a merger. 

Too often top management ignores what is going to happen to the autonomy of their employees.
The chairmen of two companies met, were persuaded of the overall economic benefit that could result from a merger, and decided to go ahead.
They jointly decided who would be chairman of the new enterprise, who would be the chief executive officer, how much each would be paid, how much money would change hands as one company bought the stock of the other, and what the name of the combined company would be. The merger was then announced to the press.
Most mergers fail, as did this one.
Although the chairmen had correctly estimated the potential economic benefit of combining the two companies, they had failed to take into account the emotionally charged issues generated by such a merger. Of course, they had the autonomy to explore those issues, to brainstorm options, and to take preemptive action. Yet they failed to use their autonomy wisely.
If the chairmen had consulted widely, they could have learned a lot.
Autonomy was important at all levels of both organizations. The grades and pay scales of the two companies did not match. The two companies had markedly different internal cultures in terms of formality, dress codes, keeping office doors open or shut, and the use of first names. All these features raised issues of great importance to employees. About those issues and others, employees on both sides could have been consulted. Many could have been involved in the process of dealing with such differences.
As it was, their autonomy and their emotions were ignored. The resentment of a great many employees over that merger led to its demise.

To Establish Decision-Making Guidelines, Use the I-C-N Bucket System 

We are often at odds about the “right” amount of autonomy each of us should have in affecting and making a decision. The autonomy of a boss, a spouse, a partner, or a counterpart in negotiation can be protected by sorting decisions to be made into three “buckets.” The three buckets are to Inform, to Consult, or to Negotiate, or I-C-N for short.
Some years back, a partner in a small, Cambridge-based negotiation consulting firm was asked to take on the role of managing partner. The firm had a dozen partners and another dozen employees. Given the high number of partners, the question was soon raised about the managing partner’s decision-making autonomy. What guidelines should the firm establish about the managing partner’s authority to make decisions? For a couple of weeks, the managing partner kept a record of the many decisions with which he was faced, and then he had a meeting of the partners. The managing partner ran through the kinds of decisions he and the firm had to make and the partners each held up one, two, or three fingers to indicate into which bucket a decision of that kind should go.
What startled the partners was that there was almost no disagreement as to which issues fell into which bucket.

Bucket 1: Inform. 

These were thought of as small decisions that the managing partner could make on his own and then simply inform the rest of the organization. These were decisions like buying new furniture and hiring office staff.

Bucket 2: Consult, then decide. 

Into the second bucket went significant issues that the managing partner had authority to decide but only after consulting other partners. Just who he consulted was up to him, but he was expected to consult partners who were likely to have views on the subject.
It might, for example, be a decision of the firm to take on a potentially unsavory client like a tobacco company. After deciding, he would promptly inform partners of the decision.

Bucket 3: Negotiate joint agreement. 

Into the third bucket went those big decisions where the managing partner had to negotiate and obtain agreement of a majority of the firm. All partners wanted to participate in “big decisions” such as making new partners or moving the firm’s office to a new building.
The three buckets can come in handy for labor-management negotiators and others who work together over time and face similar decisions again and again. The process also helps those who work together to keep from stepping on each other’s toes without being paralyzed by the need for constant consensus.
Even in an organization of only two people, such as a personal relationship, the bucket system can help with decisions ranging from handling money to making social plans. As Dan recalls: I planned to surprise my wife by taking her to a French restaurant to celebrate our upcoming wedding anniversary. Saturday arrived, and I revealed my plans to Mia, who had a surprise for me. She had already planned a girls’ night out with a few of her friends but had not informed me. We were both disappointed as plans for a romantic evening quickly crumbled.

We discussed ways to avoid this kind of grief in the future and decided to use the bucket system to answer a few key questions:

- On what days of the week can we make plans on our own? [bucket 1]

- On what days should we consult with the other before making plans? [bucket 2]

- On what days should we decide plans together? [bucket 3]

We decided to do as we each would like on weekdays, to consult before deciding on weeknight plans, and to negotiate weekend plans.
The bucket system also can be useful in dealing with money issues. For one member of a couple to make a unilateral decision to spend what the other considers a lot of money is almost certain to stir up emotions— usually negative. Dividing such financial issues into buckets can help.
(“Let’s neither of us buy anything that will cost more than $100 unless we both agree on it.”) Brainstorming together in advance of buying big items can eliminate many of the most troublesome money issues. Yet, the simplest and most basic rule about protecting autonomy is probably CCBD — Consider Consulting Before Deciding.

Chapter 6: Acknowledge Status 
Recognize High Standing Wherever Deserved 

A middle-aged man was admitted to the hospital. He complained of chest pains. The doctor determined that he was at only mild risk for a heart attack. He was placed on a basic care floor with heart monitor attached to him. A nurse kept an eye on the monitor throughout the night.
In the morning, a young doctor walked into the room, glanced over the patient’s medical history, and talked with him for a few minutes. The nurse said to the doctor, “I noticed some unusual heart rhythms around midnight.
You might consider sending him to the intensive care unit.”
“The patient reports he feels better this morning,” the doctor responded.
“And I have no reason to send him down there over a few unusual rhythms.”
“But doctor, it would take time for…”
“How many patients with heart problems have you treated?” snapped the doctor. “I’ve examined the patient. I’ve made my diagnosis. And I’ve decided on the treatment plan. Now get the forms completed.”
The nurse quieted. She felt foolish for offering information that appeared to be of little use, and she felt angry at the doctor for demeaning her suggestion. As the doctor walked away, she recalled the patient’s more severe chest pain that radiated up his arm in the middle of the night, but decided that there was no use in telling the doctor. He already had made up his mind.
Ultimately, the doctor stuck to his judgment. The nurse said no more.
Hours later, the patient experienced a massive cardiac arrest. It took ten minutes for the appropriate resuscitation team to arrive in the ward. The patient survived but became dependent on life support.
How did this brief interaction result in such a poor outcome? The core concern of status has a lot to do with it. Status refers to our standing in comparison to the standing of others. If our status is demeaned, we may feel embarrassed, ashamed, or frustrated, and we may act unwisely. In the hospital example, the nurse withheld additional information, and the doctor failed to inquire further about the nurse’s observations. The result: The patient nearly died of a heart attack.

STATUS CAN ENHANCE OUR ESTEEM AND INFLUENCE

It is no wonder that people want status. As the hospital story illustrates, there are valuable consequences to having it. Status elevates both our selfesteem and the esteem with which others view us. Everyone wants to feel like “someone”—a force to be reckoned with, a voice worth heeding, a person to know. Whether it is because of our training, accomplishments, family background, job, or position in the organization, we are likely to enjoy having a lofty status that is recognized by others and by ourselves.
High status also adds weight to our words and deeds. We can use our high status to influence others. An employee is more likely to be amenable to working over the weekend if that request comes not from a midlevel manager but at the personal request of the chief executive officer. As expressed by the motto of a former brokerage firm: “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.”

THERE IS NO NEED TO COMPETE OVER STATUS

Negotiators often compete for higher status as though there were one single dimension of status. If one person is high in status, then the other is assumed to be lower. We may see ourselves as superior to a colleague in terms of importance, rank, or approval. Yet that colleague may disagree, thinking that he or she outranks us.
Negotiators may even use tricks to obtain higher status. They may invite you to meet in their office, have you wait ten minutes for them while they finish up with another “important” client, and then welcome you into their office where you sit on a low chair looking up at them.
Competing for status tends to induce negative emotions. People who feel put down become resentful and less cooperative. Treating others as inferior tends to make them less able to think creatively or work collaboratively.
This chapter provides you with an alternative to competing over status.
The first section reminds you to pay attention to people’s social status in order to gauge the extent of courtesy that they expect of you. The second section suggests that whether or not others have higher social status, each of you has some area of higher particular status based upon expertise or experience. You can refer to that particular status to raise someone else’s self-esteem and to influence your own. The third section offers suggestions on how you can raise your status—and how it can be lowered by you or others.

SOCIAL STATUS: TREAT EVERY NEGOTIATOR WITH RESPECT 

The level to which we are regarded as someone important or famous is our social status. This is a single, all-purpose measure of standing for everyone within a geographic area, such as within a neighborhood, an organization, a city, a country, or the world. The lofty social status of a rock singer may stretch across the globe, whereas the high social status of a sheriff may stop at the county line.
At a global level, society “tells” us who is important and who is not. At the top of the social order are VIPs—very important people—of all kinds: royalty, presidents, movie stars, prime ministers, and people of great wealth, achievement, or fame. At the bottom of the social order are the disenfranchised: the poor, the unemployed, and the homeless. The rest of us fall somewhere in between.
At an organizational level, co-workers tend to treat one another differently depending upon where each is situated on the corporate ladder.
Employees may treat their chief executive officer like a movie star, while those low on the rung may struggle for basic recognition.
Even in one-on-one negotiations, people are often sensitive to their social status. Negotiators tend to evaluate where they stand socially in comparison to their counterparts, sometimes jockeying for higher social standing. They might mention the university from which they graduated, an important event they attended last week, or the major promotion they received. They may try to outdo one another in terms of their relative social importance or treat the issue as unimportant.

Become Aware of Social Status 

Throughout a negotiation, people may share specific information about how they view their social status in order to indicate how they expect to be treated. Those who are high in social status—such as the president of an organization or an ambassador—may expect to be treated with particular deference. This is not always true, but it is helpful to be alert for signs of such expectations. With a little bit of preparation and some careful listening, you can learn a lot about where people think they stand in terms of their social status.
Listen closely to the way they describe themselves. Does a negotiator refer to her course at Yale? Does she talk about the important people she had dinner with last week? Does she hint at her senior position in a highpowered firm? Language often provides the clearest clue as to how people rank themselves and others. Pay attention to what level of formality makes people feel appreciated and comfortable. Some want to be addressed by their first name and some by title, such as Doctor, Lieutenant, or Professor.
In virtually all cultures, the words we use can express our views of a person’s social status. For example, a speaker can demonstrate greater respect by referring to “you” in French as vous rather than more informally as tu. In some cultures it can be offensive for a low-level negotiator to address a high-level official by his or her first name. (If in doubt, it is usually safer to start with a formal address and let the other invite you to be more casual.) You may set an informal tone by introducing yourself by your first name and asking how another prefers to be addressed. Professors often request that their graduate students address them using their professorial title and last name. One student reported the elation he felt on the day that his mentor said to him, “Please, don’t call me Professor Smith. Call me John.” This shift in formality signaled a shift in the type of relationship between them. In the eyes of the professor, the student’s status had been raised through hard work and good relations.
If you have a higher social status than another, there is a chance that he or she will have an interest in vicariously acquiring some social status by working with you. Any such desire for personal association would tend to encourage a deepening emotional commitment to have the negotiation succeed so that a more lasting relationship could be forged. Working with a skilled negotiator or a famous person can give somebody a boost in social status.
Your social status often depends upon the values within your team, organization, or group. In some Internet companies, for example, seniority is not as socially valued as youthfulness. An executive with fifty years of corporate business experience may not be as highly valued in such a rapidly evolving field as an enthusiastic twenty-three-year-old right out of college, bursting with creativity and knowledge of the latest computer innovations.

Be Courteous to Everyone 

In general, when we think about other people’s status, we first focus on social status. If the other is a VIP, we may automatically treat them with courtesy. And, to maximize the benefits of positive emotions, we recommend treating every negotiator with courtesy—whatever his or her social status. Every negotiator holds high status as a human being worthy of dignity and respect.
A little courtesy can go a long way. While consulting for a Fortune 500 company, Dan learned that an administrative assistant to the chief executive officer of the organization was being treated poorly by two or three of the employees. They ignored her, treated her with little respect, and did not invite her to some work-related parties at their homes. A few years into her job, the administrative assistant married the CEO. All of a sudden, everyone was coming to her house for parties. Now that she had full access to the key decision maker in the organization, everyone wanted to be her “best friend.”
Not surprisingly, she gave partiality to those employees who had respected her all along.
Courtesy is more than just saying please or thank you. It involves honest respect for the person with whom you are interacting. The administrative assistant to the CEO told Dan that though many people now treated her with courtesy, she easily could sense who sincerely respected her and who was simply trying to use her.

PARTICULAR STATUS: ACKNOWLEDGE EACH PERSON’S HIGH STANDING WHEREVER DESERVED 

Your relative standing is based not only on the perceptions of society but also on how you are rated—by yourself or others—within some narrowly defined substantive field. Whether or not you have a high social status, you may have high standing in terms of your particular expertise, experience, or education. We call your standing in each field particular status. You may have skills in auto mechanics, home repair, or business networking. You may have the ability to play a musical instrument beautifully, write persuasively, or analyze ethical issues wisely. You may be knowledgeable in a variety of fields pertinent to the subject of a negotiation.
Fortunately, there are hundreds of different fields in which your status can be measured. Everyone has a comparatively high status in some particular field—and a comparatively low status in others. An unemployed carpenter may know a great deal about a well-constructed home. A skilled doctor may know little about maintaining administrative records. There are an infinite number of particular fields in which a person can hold a high status. And there is at least one particular area in which your status outranks that of many others. By the same token, another negotiator is almost certain to have at least one particular status that exceeds yours.

Look for Each Person’s Areas of Particular Status 

The better you understand how others see their own status, the more equipped you will be to enlist their positive emotions. You will know how they view themselves and what they deem to be important parts of their identity.

A brief list of areas in which they may have a high particular status could include: 
- education 
- computer skills 
- business experience 
- technical skills 
- “big picture thinking”
- cooking ability 
- connections 
- moral standing 
- social skills 
- life experience 
- emotional insight 
- professional skills of different kinds 
- strength 
- athletic ability

Visible areas of high social status—fame, fortune, and fashion—often overshadow the less glamorous, but often more important, fields where status is critical in a negotiation. There are an unlimited number of fields in which others may hold high status. Two questions can help reveal fields of particular status.

Is either of you an expert on substantive issues? 
Substantive issues are the content of your negotiation. Your negotiation may be about a new car, a plot of land, or a raise in salary. Even before meeting the other party, familiarize yourself with the subject matter of your negotiation. Find out information on the Internet. Ask friends. Call up stores that sell similar items and get their advice on what to watch out for in your upcoming negotiation.
The other party’s substantive expertise can benefit each of you. For example, imagine that you are negotiating the purchase of your neighbor’s used computer. By asking him questions about the computer, you can learn a lot. He informs you that he worked as a computer programmer for ten years. This makes it clear that he has particular status as a computer specialist. You inquire about the computer’s memory capacity, speed, and how the computer compares with newer models. Your curiosity rewards his concern for status, enlisting positive emotions in him. He is in the satisfying role of being the one with superior knowledge helping the two of you develop a common understanding of the substance of the negotiation.
Trusting the seller to educate you completely could leave you open to being exploited. It is always wise for you to conduct a substantial amount of preparation. You will certainly want to learn some things before making a binding commitment. You may decide to consult an impartial expert such as a computer technician at your workplace. Nevertheless, after learning from the seller, you now know more about the subject and about him than you did before you met. And you have built some personal rapport as you talked together about a subject he knows well.

Is either of you an expert on the process of negotiation? 

An important issue in any negotiation is how to structure the discussion. An effective process, for example, often involves exploring each other’s interests and brainstorming options before making binding commitments. The more knowledge you have about how to structure the negotiation, the higher your particular status as a negotiation expert. If either of you has particular expertise in terms of how to structure the negotiation effectively, discuss those ideas. Ask the other party for advice.

We are not giving general advice to trust others. Trusting others is a matter of case-by-case risk. As you decide how much you want to trust others, however, remember that there are costs in being overly suspicious, just as there are costs in being overly trusting.

Recognize Their High Status, Then Yours

The fact that there are multiple fields of particular status makes your job easier. Rather than having to compete with the other negotiator over who is the alpha negotiator, each of you can have superior status in some particular field of expertise or experience. With a little creativity, you will find areas in which your status trumps theirs and areas where their status trumps yours.

Consider an example. The economics department at an Ivy League university was interested in promoting their department’s research through op-ed articles, presentations, and interviews. The department hired “George,” an editor, to assist their most distinguished economics professor in writing op-ed pieces for newspapers. This professor had a reputation as being both brilliant and arrogant. George immediately faced the challenge: How do I acknowledge the professor’s status without putting myself down? George did not want to work daily with someone who would belittle him.
After some creative thinking, he had an idea. At his first meeting with the professor, he said: It’s a pleasure to be working with you. I feel that we each have something of value to enhance our collaboration. You have expertise in economics. As I see it, you are basically the leader in the field.
My expertise is in having a good sense of what the “average reader” of an op-ed will understand.

In this way, George established the professor’s expertise in economics, as well as his own expertise in assessing the extent to which an average reader could comprehend the op-ed. He turned his inexperience with economics into an advantage and did so in a way that did not demean the status of the professor. The two were able to work effectively together without the fear of competing for status as to who was smarter, more knowledgeable about economics, or a better writer.

Take Pleasure in Your Areas of Status 

No matter how old or experienced we get, there are times when we all have to turn to others to shore up a flagging sense of self-esteem. Some years ago, Roger’s assistant came into his office with a handful of letters, every one of them criticizing something that he had written or done. He turned to his assistant and asked, “Doesn’t anyone like what I do?”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “Most of the letters are just fan mail, which I acknowledge and file. But these letters are problems that you have to deal with.”
Roger told her to reverse the practice. “Bring me the fan mail. And you suggest what I should do about these problems.”
It is much more emotionally rewarding to read praise than criticism.
Roger, in fact, can spend hours responding to critics, but his revised practice reduced the risk of being overwhelmed by the negative.
Appreciate your areas of high status. Be confident about what you have to contribute to the negotiation—from your professional expertise to your personal qualities. Give yourself a boost when you need it by recalling close friends or family who appreciate you. Keep a picture of someone supportive on your wall or in your wallet. When your status is demeaned, imagine how someone who cares about you might praise you for your analytical ability, your patience, or your sense of humor. Remember, you can gain status in every interaction if you learn from the experience.
After a tough negotiation, take pleasure in your achievement as you review what you have learned from the experience. Take pride in what status you have accumulated in the substantive fields in which you have gained knowledge and in such social status as you may have acquired.
Savor what you have done and recharge by indulging in activities where your status is affirmed, whether playing a sport with a colleague or cooking with friends.

KNOW THE LIMITS OF STATUS

If a person has a higher status than you, it is important to give weight to their opinion where deserved. At the same time, you want to guard against being unduly influenced if they overstep the bounds of their high status.

Give Weight to Opinions Where Deserved 

Appreciate a person’s particular status where relevant to the negotiation and worthy of special weight. Consider what happens if you have a toothache.
You tell a good friend, who tells you it’s probably nothing. But your neighbor, a reputable and competent dentist, examines your tooth and warns you that it needs extracting immediately. You would be wise to treat the dentist’s opinion with special weight, because it is based on an area in which he holds particular status.
Those high and low in the formal hierarchy of an organization each have areas of particular status deserving of weight. This was certainly true in the case of a teachers’ union and school administration negotiating a policy for evaluating teachers. Should evaluations happen every year? Every other year? Should it be based upon the results of standardized testing of students, or upon observations by the principal? Dan worked with the two parties before their formal negotiation began.
At first, leaders on each side saw the other as an impediment to getting their own interests met. But they came to realize that each side held important areas of status. The teachers had specialized knowledge about the pros and cons of gathering evaluation information from parents, students, fellow teachers, or standardized tests. And administrators had specialized knowledge of state policies and district requirements. Rather than compete over who was better positioned to develop an evaluation policy, each expressed appreciation of the other’s special knowledge. Together, they drafted a proposal that drew upon each side’s particular status. Appreciation of the other’s status enlisted positive emotions and reinforced their motivation to work together.
Sometimes, however, the other may say or do something that inappropriately lowers your status. In such a situation, it may be important that your areas of high status be understood by others so that you do not feel put down or disempowered. To do this, you can clarify your role.
Consider the situation of a young female lawyer as she met with one of the senior partners of another firm. She arrived a few minutes early at the meeting room and found a senior partner for one of the other parties sitting at a head table and looking over his notes. Without looking up he said,
“Miss, would you get me a cup of coffee from over there? I like it black with no cream or sugar.”
The young lawyer flushed. Her head flooded with questions. “Should I simply inform him that I’m not a secretary? Should I educate him that nowadays many lawyers are women? Should I just get him a cup of coffee and have him learn later of his mistake?” She did not want to embarrass him if he was indeed mistaken; nor did she want to appear to be weak or a pushover. She responded:

I’m sorry I failed to introduce myself. [She demonstrates graciousness by assuming the senior partner unintentionally mistook her for the secretary.] I’m Sarah Jones, the lawyer for Smyth, Wilcox, and Adams. [She clarifies her role.] Since we’re both here early, maybe we could talk about the issue we’ll be working on this morning. [She establishes her professional behavior within that role.] In any event, I’ll first get coffee for us. Help yourself to the doughnuts over there. And if you get one for yourself, please get one for me. [She indicates that they share a status as colleagues working together on issues.] 

The young lawyer took responsibility for the apparently mistaken identity, introduced herself, and graciously assured him that she would get coffee for both of them. Rather than try to score points, she demonstrated her professionalism and colleagueship by suggesting that they use the fact that both were there early to share ideas about the upcoming discussion.
And she indicated their shared status by requesting that he might get them doughnuts while she gets them coffee.
The big point is that whether an emotional issue relates to social status or particular status, it is rarely if ever a good idea to try to raise oneself up by putting another down. Clarify for others your role and play it professionally. Rather than competing over status, respect the status of others and communicate yours.

Beware of Status Spillover 

There is a constant risk that the opinions of a person who has high status, either socially or in some substantive area, will be given undeserved weight on a subject to which their status is irrelevant. We call this status spillover, and it is something to watch out for. Deference is due only where it is deserved. Those with high social status, based on their fame as movie stars, for example, have sometimes used that status to market their opinions on everything from gun control to salad dressing.
Of course, it is possible for actors and socialites to become an expert in some unrelated substantive area—but be careful. Don’t let their status in one area persuade you of the validity of their opinions in an area unrelated to the basis of their fame. An actor on television promoting a particular medicine and wearing a white coat and stethoscope around his neck may look like a doctor, but don’t be fooled. He’s no doctor. No matter how skilled the actor, the views he expresses should not be taken as those of a doctor who has had years of substantive medical training and experience that earned him a high level of particular status.
Although negotiators with high social status may expect special courtesy, their social status does not mean that their opinions on matters under negotiation automatically deserve special weight. A woman of high social status might greatly admire a diamond necklace at Cartier’s or a hundred acres of prime ocean-front real estate. She may suggest that with her high social status she should be able to buy the necklace or the real estate at what she considers to be a fair price. No. A wise seller would not lower the fair market price because of the opinion of one who simply holds high social status. Her lofty status may deserve special courtesy. But high social status adds no special weight to her opinion on an issue of value.
Status spillover is a real risk in a negotiation. Consider the challenge of “Melissa,” a young woman searching for a house to buy. She sees one she likes, and her real estate agent pressures her to buy it today. “It’ll be gone by tomorrow if you don’t act quickly,” he says. She worries that she might not find a good mortgage rate by the end of the day and fears committing to the house without financial clarity.
Her agent reassures her that rates are the lowest ever. But Melissa wonders, “Is he being honest, or is he interested in the 5 percent commission he will make on the sale?” The real estate agent may know a lot about houses, but he is not a mortgage broker. The young woman would be wise to watch out for status spillover.
To protect yourself from status spillover, start by recognizing the areas of status that others do have. They will be more likely to listen to you if you acknowledge their particular status. Keep it honest. False flattery will not go far and may backfire. Melissa may let her real estate agent know that she appreciates his competence in finding a house that matches her desires.
Consider seeking a second opinion. It is not an insult to have a policy of seeking a second opinion on important matters, whether the original recommendation comes from your boss, your lawyer, your doctor, or your spouse. Melissa might say, “I have a standard practice of getting a second opinion. Perhaps you know the names of two or three mortgage brokers or banks that you might suggest that I consult about a mortgage?”
Another way to protect yourself from status spillover is to ask the person about the pros and cons of your other choices. Medical doctors, for example, usually recognize that a decision is up to the patient, but many fail to outline the costs and benefits of other choices.
Imagine that a relative of yours asks a doctor about how to deal with some possible cancer cells in his throat. The doctor responds, “I recommend surgery to remove the cancer. But it’s not my choice. It’s yours. What do you want to do?”
Do not let your respect for the high status of the doctor prevent you from exploring your options. Rather than take the doctor’s recommendation at face value, your relative might ask the doctor about other possibilities.
What are they? To postpone surgery for six months? To have a less invasive procedure? To try a new medication? Whether it is health or real estate, negotiation is about getting your interests satisfied.
Finally, recognize that you always hold higher status than others in one respect: You are the world’s best expert on your feelings, your interests, your needs, and your particular situation. This inherent particular status can often protect you from status spillover—if you recognize its value. A car dealer may pressure you to buy a car, saying, “I’ve worked with lots of families. Most come back and tell me how much they love this particular car. I think you should buy it today before prices go up.”
You might respond, “Thank you. I’ll certainly consider it. Now I would appreciate your helping me explore other options that are available given my interests. We want a car that is safe, that is big enough for camping equipment, and that gets good mileage. What are some other possibilities?”
By acknowledging another negotiator’s particular status, you can shift their perception of themselves from that of an adversary pressing for a sale to that of a high-status expert working with you to help you formulate a decision that will best meet interests on which you are the expert.

REMEMBER: STATUS CAN ALWAYS BE RAISED—OR LOWERED 

Many people assume that one’s status is fixed. This assumption is perhaps based on the concept of royal status that depended on the blood of kings and queens: One is born into an upper class. In most cases, a person’s status is not determined by birth. Reputations are made, not born. It is within your power as an individual to raise your status by effort and achievement.
By educating yourself, you can improve your status in the substantive areas of a negotiation. Before you negotiate with your manager about realigning what you see as her unfair work expectations, you might sit down with a human resources representative to learn your organization’s work policies. You can use the Internet to study up on business transactions, legal processes, car facts, and any subject that can help enhance your particular status in the negotiation. The power to improve your status in a substantive field rests largely with you. If your social status is hampered by bad habits of yours or a lack of interpersonal skills, you can take a class or hire a coach to help you manage your emotions more effectively, be more assertive, or listen more carefully to others.
Raising one’s status—and lowering it—is not just a question of fate.

Chapter 7: Choose a Fulfilling Role (and Select the Activities Within It)

A FULFILLING ROLE HAS THREE KEY QUALITIES 

We play roles all the time. Yet rarely are those roles as fulfilling as they could be. Whether at work or at home, a role may feel pointless, meaningless, or insincere. To build a more fulfilling role, we need to understand its three key qualities.

% It has a clear purpose.

Engaging in a fulfilling role is not a futile exercise. There is a clear purpose, whether to improve society or to relax by taking a walk. A clear purpose provides an overarching framework to your behavior.

% It is personally meaningful.

Only you can know with certainty what is personally meaningful to you. Often, a role may be meaningful in relation to what you do.
Engaging in the role of parent may fulfill your desire to raise a child. Or, if you enjoy problem solving, a job as an engineer might be fulfilling. A meaningful role incorporates your skills, interests, values, and beliefs into the task at hand.
Meaning is found not only in what you do but also in how you perceive a situation. Your role can be fulfilling in relation to how you “make meaning” of a situation. A dress manufacturer may hate his work obligations but nevertheless find his role meaningful because it allows him to support his family.

% It is not a pretense.

When we talk of playing a role, it may sound as though each of us is an actor pretending to be someone. But the core concern that each of us has with role is not a matter of who you should pretend to be, but rather with the role that defines who you really are. In this life — the life you are living, not a life you are pretending to live — you want to have a fulfilling role.

MAKE YOUR CONVENTIONAL ROLES MORE FULFILLING  

Conventional roles are commonly accepted roles that people play within an organization or community. You might play the role of “vice president” of a company or “parent” within your family. Table 8 lists common conventional roles.

Table 8: Academic, Actor, Analyst, Artist, Chef, Child, Client, Customer, Doctor, Executive, Fashion Designer, Finance officer, Grandparent, Lawyer, Manager, Nurse, Patient, Politician, Real estate agent, Recruiter, Scientist, Secreatary, Seller, Sibling, Student, Teacher, Technician, Travel Agent, Truck driver, Writer, etc

Become Aware of Your Conventional Roles 

You can avoid unnecessary conflict by becoming aware of the roles guiding your behavior. In some cases, two of your own roles may bump up against one another. For example, the demands of a parent with a newborn child may compete with the demands of remaining the “star employee” at work.

In other cases, you may disagree with someone else about who should play what role. You may be negotiating on behalf of a client, a trade union, or some other entity with particular interests. Yet you also have your own interests. Becoming aware of your roles is the first step in managing a role conflict.
Consider the situation of “Eileen,” an executive at a business in which the operations pollute a water supply. She starts to think, “What kind of person am I? Am I a bad person if I work for a polluter?” She feels guilty for working for an industry that goes against her own environmental beliefs and ashamed that she is not living up to her own moral standards.
If Eileen fails to think about the conflict between her roles as business executive and environmentalist, she risks getting angry at her subordinates, colleagues, or boss for “no apparent reason.” She will be, in essence, acting out internal tension without a clear purpose in mind.
On the other hand, with awareness, Eileen can decide carefully what to do. She may decide to talk to colleagues and her boss about ways to reduce the damaging by-products of their industrial operations. She may decide to leave the company. Or she may decide that because the company lives up to industry standards, there is no conflict with her own beliefs. Whatever her decision, she actively clarifies the conflicting roles that cause her stress. As a result, she can take action to make her roles more fulfilling.

Shape Your Role to Include Fulfilling Activities 
You can shape virtually any role to make it more fulfilling for you. In order to do so, turn your attention away from a role’s job label and toward the set of activities associated with it.

Every role has a job label and a set of activities. 

A job label is a shorthand way of describing what, in general, you “do.” Just as people have a first and last name to identify themselves, roles often have a name to identify them, such as personal injury lawyer or child psychologist.
A role is more than just a job label. Every role has a corresponding set of activities that is expected of us. A company might advertise a new executive position by specifying the job label and associated set of activities:

WANTED: CHIEF OPERATING EXECUTIVE. [That’s the job label.]
Responsibilities include guiding the mission of the organization, overseeing executives who direct each department’s activities, and reporting to the Board of Directors. [These are the associated set of activities.]

There is no list of associated activities that could comprehensively describe every activity of this Chief Operating Executive. And when we negotiate as part of our jobs—whether as an executive, plumber, or teacher —the corresponding activities are not always spelled out. There is usually no specific policy about how employees should negotiate with their colleagues, boss, or counterparts at another company. This provides you with an opportunity.

Expand your role to include meaningful activities. No matter your job label, you have a choice about how to define many of the activities in your role. You can decide the extent to which you want to talk or to listen, to argue or to work together, and to treat others with disrespect or with courtesy. You are free to explore interests with the other side, to brainstorm options that meet your interests and theirs, and to ask the other person’s advice or to offer advice. You can make recommendations about how to structure an agenda. In large part, the bounds of your role are set by you.

Redefine the activities in your role. If you find that your role is not fulfilling, you may want to consider how your role is being affected by the other core concerns. A role may be unfulfilling because you feel disaffiliated from others, unappreciated for your point of view, limited in your autonomy, or demeaned in status.
Rather than passively accepting an unfulfilling role, you can shape your own role to satisfy your other core concerns. Table 9 outlines four steps you might follow.

Table 9: Four Steps to Shape Your Conventional Role

1. Name your current role

2. List current activities within your role

3. Nominate activities to make your role more fulfilling - Add some new activities? - Modify current activities?

4. Consider deleting unfulfilling activities - No one has to do these? - Someone else should handle them?

This same process can be used in a variety of situations to help you and others build more fulfilling roles. If you find yourself disagreeing often with a colleague, boss, or subordinate, consider initiating a discussion to clarify roles and associated activities.
When you encounter friction with another negotiator, you might run through this process from the other person’s perspective to learn ways you can help them make their role more fulfilling. List what you think are their expected activities. What are they not doing that they could, perhaps, be doing? What are some additional activities they might do to make their role more fulfilling? Talk with them about your ideas. Treat your ideas as suggestions, not as a criticism or demand.

Appreciate the Conventional Roles That Others Want to Play 
A fulfilling role can occupy an important place in our lives. Our identity becomes closely associated to the role and all that it brings—the status, the power, the affiliation. Losing that role can feel like someone is cutting off a part of us. We may go to great lengths to resist being hurt.

YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CHOOSE YOUR TEMPORARY ROLES 

Jake LaMotta, a famous boxer, liked to play the role of victim in the ring.
His opponents would throw punch after punch, and Jake would withdraw passively like a possum. As the opponents increased their confidence with each successive strike, they relaxed their guard. That’s when Jake would unleash his attack.
Playing the role of victim was a basic strategy for Jake. His opponents almost automatically took on the opposite role of perpetrator, but not of their own volition. They reacted to the role Jake was playing. The more he played the role of helpless victim, the more confirmed they were of their strength, and Jake exploited that tendency.
As we negotiate, we sometimes fall for the same trap. We play a role in response to a role set by another person. If the other acts adversarial, so do we. If they make demands, we make demands. If they call us weak, we show our strength.
By letting others choose our role, our core concern for a fulfilling role may go unmet. We feel trivialized. And like Jake LaMotta’s opponents, we put ourselves at risk of being misled.

Become Aware of Temporary Roles You Automatically Play 

Temporary roles change based upon how you are acting in the moment. In a negotiation, you have the freedom to play such temporary roles as listener, arguer, or problem solver. By giving a name to these patterns of behavior, you can become more alert to them, talk about them, and decide which ones to play.
You may find yourself habitually playing one temporary role. With colleagues, you may be the listener that everyone seeks when they have personal problems. When negotiating with colleagues who are your senior in age or social status, you may act as an accommodator. With a romantic partner, you may often play the role of problem solver.
People often pay too little attention to temporary roles. Yet these are the easiest roles you can choose to play. No one needs to assign them. You can choose to play them on your own. In the course of a one-minute conversation, a manager may play the temporary role of problem solver, listener, advisor, and advocate. Meanwhile, the conventional role of manager remains the same. Table 10 provides you with some sense of the types of temporary roles you might play as you negotiate.

Table 10: Common Temporary Roles: Talker, Listener, Devil's advocate, Collaborator, Competitor, Accomodator, Compromiser, "Joker", Learner, Brainstormer, Advocate, Victim, Aggressor, Problem solver, Colleague, Informal mediator, Facilitator, Host, Guest, Evaluator, Option generator, Advisor 

Adopt a Temporary Role That Fosters Collaboration 

As you negotiate, select a temporary role that feels true to yourself and that fosters collaboration. Would it be beneficial to play the role of friend? Protector? Mentor? Joker? Consider the situation of “Jim” and “Nancy,” a married couple. Nancy comes home after a long day of work. At a staff meeting, her boss blamed her for mishandling an important corporate client. When Jim comes home, she begins describing her day to him. Within one minute, he disrupts her to offer ideas on how to improve her situation.
Nancy wants to scream at him, “Why won’t you just listen to me!” She restrains, but interrupts him and continues talking about how frustrated she feels. He now becomes offended and says, “What’s your problem? I’m just trying to help.” She feels stuck. She knows Jim’s intentions aren’t bad, but she feels unsupported. She walks out of the room.

In this situation, Nancy and Jim have a different expectation about the temporary role Jim should play. Nancy wants him to play the role of listener, whereas he automatically falls into the role of problem solver.
While no role is inherently “wrong,” some are generally more fulfilling than others.
As Nancy becomes aware of their conflicting expectations, she might suggest that Jim play a more helpful role. In a supportive tone, she might say, “I appreciate your wanting to make sure that I’m okay at work. Right now, I think I really need you as a listener. Would you be willing to do that for a few minutes, and then I’d love to get your advice on how to deal with this situation?”
Or Jim might note that Nancy is getting upset and realize that his role as problem solver does not suit Nancy’s needs right now. He adopts the role of listener. It matches his desire to support her. To change roles, he demonstrates to Nancy and himself that he is now a listener: “Tell me more about your day. It sounds frustrating.” She talks. He listens. Within a minute, the emotional tone of their conversation lightens. They now can support one another rather than needlessly fight.
As with Jim and Nancy, you might find it helpful to consider temporary roles that you habitually play at work and at home. Are they helpful? It takes years of education to legitimately assume the role of surgeon or lawyer, but you can adopt helpful temporary roles starting right now.
Appreciate the Temporary Roles That Others Play At any given moment, we may fail to appreciate how another person views his or her temporary role. This lack of appreciation can generate frustration and confusion.

Always appreciate how the other person sees his or her role. This is especially important if you share multiple roles with someone. Otherwise, you may surprise the other by saying or doing something that fails to meet his or her expectations.

Suggest a Temporary Role for Them

Formal roles can handicap our ability to speak openly. By suggesting that we interact on an “informal basis,” we can expand our freedom to share ideas and change the level of trust between us. This is a lesson learned in an important set of negotiations forged by Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations.
In 1967, Lord Caradon was working to persuade the fifteen member countries of the Security Council to support UN Resolution 242. This resolution offered a framework to settle many of the big issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He calculated that if the vote were to be taken immediately, many of the Security Council members would approve the resolution. But in order for the resolution to have the best practical chance of being implemented, he needed a yes from one of the main nonsupporters: the Soviet Union.
Soon before the vote on Resolution 242, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Kuznetsov met in a private room with Lord Caradon. He requested that Caradon postpone the vote on the British resolution for two days.
Caradon hesitated, fearing that the Soviet Union might use that time to its advantage to revive a competing resolution.
But then Kuznetsov surprised Lord Caradon. He made it clear that the request was not coming from his government, but from himself personally: “I am not sure that you fully understood what I was saying to you. I am personally asking you for two days.”
This unusual request changed the decision facing Lord Caradon. He knew Kuznetsov, respected him, and trusted that he would do nothing that would hurt their relationship. He also realized that Kuznetsov might personally like more time to try to persuade the Soviet government to change their opinion. Caradon simply said, “Thank you. The two days are yours.” He walked back to the Council chamber and announced a two-day postponement on the vote.
Two days later, the Resolution came up for a vote. The first hand raised in support of Resolution 242 was that of Deputy Foreign Minister Kuznetzov of the Soviet Union. Applause broke out in the crowded gallery of the UN chamber as the resolution was unanimously adopted.
Kuznetsov’s personal request to Lord Caradon established a more fulfilling role for each of them. Kuznetsov recognized that in the circumstances then existing, it could be difficult for a British Ambassador, on behalf of the British government, to speak candidly to an official representative of the Soviet government—a government that was opposed to Resolution 242. By shifting their roles from “advocates” of their own country to informal, trusted “colleagues,” it became easier to talk freely and to work side by side.
The shift to informal roles also allowed the two men to benefit from their personal trust for one another. By taking on the role of friend and colleague, Kuznetsov implied that he would use the additional time not to damage Lord Caradon or the prospects of Resolution 242, but rather to attempt to persuade his own government. Lord Caradon’s acceptance of the personal request indicated his faith in Kuznetsov’s intentions. The actions these two diplomats took in their informal capacity facilitated the successful vote on the UN resolution.

A CAVEAT: ROLES ARE NOT JUST “THEIR PROBLEM”

The big message of this chapter is that you have great freedom to shape a fulfilling role for yourself and others. Yet most of us do not use that freedom to the extent we could. Sometimes, we simply fail to take the initiative to expand our role. At other times, anger may jumble our thinking and cause us to play a role that serves little purpose for us or others.

Roger remembers such a time when a co-pilot’s own anger jumbled his ability to act effectively in his role. Roger was a second lieutenant meteorologist in the U.S. Army Air Corps flying as a weather reconnaissance observer from Goose Bay, Labrador, to Meeks Field,
Iceland. One winter day, their four engine B-17 plane, with plenty of gas aboard, was flying at about 10,000 feet. The weather was remarkably clear without a cloud in the sky, and the pilot was bored: To provide the crew with a little excitement, he quietly cut off the number one engine (the far left) and feathered the propeller. While the B-17 could easily fly on three engines, we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The nearest airfield, in Greenland, was closed with low clouds, and Iceland was hours away.
The fear among the crew on seeing one dead engine was so satisfying to our hotshot pilot that, just for a lark, he cut off and feathered the other three engines. There was total silence in the plane as it started to glide toward the icy North Atlantic.
Having scared the wits out of the crew, the pilot turned on some switches and pressed buttons to unfeather the propellers and start the engines. Nothing happened. Only then did the pilot and co-pilot remember that to unfeather the propellers and start an engine, the plane had to have electric power. And it now had none. The whole plane was dead. Even at an airport on the ground, external power is required to start a plane’s engines.
On our long glide toward the ice-cold ocean, we heard the copilot tell the pilot, “Boy oh boy. Have you got a problem!” 

Here, we see that the co-pilot likely felt conflicting roles (and a lot of frustration). As co-pilot, he had a responsibility to ensure the safety of the plane and passengers. As victim of a practical joke, he knew the pilot had created the problem and assumed it was the pilot’s job to fix it. As human being, he had an interest in survival. In anger, he reacted automatically and played the role of victim. If it were not for a young sergeant on board who expanded his own role, Roger might not have lived to tell the story:

We had on board a flight engineer, a sergeant who was to do some work on the plane when we got to Iceland. Fortunately, he remembered that we had a “putt-putt generator” on board that we could use to start the engines if we ever had to land on an emergency airstrip in Northern Greenland where there was no airbase or ground power.
Nothing made it the sergeant’s job to do anything on the plane when it was flying. But he remembered the generator. Ran back.
Found it. Wrapped a rope around the flywheel and pulled it several times. Fiddled with the carburetor. Wrapped the rope again and pulled it hard, this time starting the putt-putt generator. He connected the wires to the plane’s system, and we had power. We had fallen only about a mile toward the ocean when the pilot got one engine going, and then all four.
We arrived in Iceland alive, relieved, and shaking our heads in disbelief at the pilot’s conduct.

Unlike the co-pilot, who clearly thought it was the pilot’s job to solve the problem, the flight engineer took the initiative and got electric power to the pilot, who could then restart the engines. Nowhere was it written in the flight engineer’s conventional role that he was supposed to work on the plane while it was in the air. But he did.

III. SOME ADDITIONAL ADVICE
Chapter 8: On Strong Negative Emotions 
They Happen. Be Ready.

When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. - THOMAS JEFFERSON

When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, swear. - MARK TWAIN

To deal with emotions, our general advice is to take constructive action.
Rather than worry about labeling emotions, diagnosing their causes, and figuring out what to do, you can often overwhelm whatever negative emotions a person might have with positive ones. This is done if you express appreciation, build affiliation, respect autonomy, acknowledge status, and choose fulfilling roles.
Sometimes, however, strong negative emotions—anger, fear, or frustration—may drive the behavior of others. They may stop listening to you, stop talking, or storm out of the room. Equally true, strong emotions may affect your behavior. You may find yourself angry and mulling over something that the other person said or did. If these emotions are unaddressed, there is a strong likelihood that they will escalate and prevent a wise agreement.
For better or worse, strong emotions are not hard to find. You do have to pay attention to them before they overwhelm your ability to negotiate.

STRONG NEGATIVE EMOTIONS CAN SIDETRACK A NEGOTIATION

Strong negative emotions pose two main problems for negotiators. First, they can cause you to experience tunnel vision, in which the focus of your attention narrows and all you are aware of are your strong emotions. As a result, your ability to think clearly and creatively gets sidetracked.
Imagine two teams negotiating. Out of all of the negotiators, only one is a woman. Every time she speaks, the other team’s lead negotiator speaks over her or looks the other way, as though she is not important enough for him to listen to. She gets angrier and angrier and becomes preoccupied with a single behavior—the other leader’s lack of acknowledgment. Tunnel vision hinders her ability both to think clearly about the substantive issues and to contribute ideas—losses both for her and for the other negotiators.
Second, strong emotions make you vulnerable to the point that your emotions take control of your behavior. As your emotions escalate, you risk acting in ways that you will regret. You are likely to fail to think about the consequences of your behavior, especially the long-term consequences. In a fit of rage, for example, you may insult your spouse (and end up sleeping on the couch) or storm out of a meeting (and end up disappointing both your boss and your hopes for a promotion).
To make matters worse, emotions feed off one another. Your anger can stimulate the other person’s anger, just as their anger can easily be “caught” by you. Strong negative emotions are like a snowball rolling down a hill.
They get bigger as they roll along. The sooner you deal with strong negative emotions—yours and theirs—the easier it will be to stop them from running you over.

CHECK THE CURRENT EMOTIONAL TEMPERATURE 

Whatever the source of strong emotions, you need first to become aware of them to avoid their escalation. One way to become aware is to check your “emotional temperature” often enough during a negotiation to catch your emotions before they overwhelm your ability to act wisely.

Take Your Own Emotional Temperature

Unlike taking your body temperature, there is no need to decide definitively whether your emotional temperature is 98.6 degrees or 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit. You do not even need to know which specific emotions you are experiencing—or even why. All you need to know is the general extent to which your emotions are starting to affect you. To take your emotional temperature, simply ask yourself, are my emotions:

Out of control? Past the boiling point. (I am already saying things better left unsaid.)

Risky? Simmering. Too hot to be safe for long.

Manageable? Under control. I am both aware of them and able to keep them in check.

To answer the question, quickly assess how manageable your emotions feel at the moment. Do you feel in control, or are you biting your tongue to stop yourself from berating the other negotiator? If you are finding it hard to concentrate on anything other than your emotions, your emotional temperature is at least “risky.”

Assess Their Emotional Temperature

The people you are dealing with may also experience strong emotions, some of which are negative. If you do not notice that they are simmering with anger, their emotions may boil over and lead to unpleasant—even disastrous—results.
Herein lies a problem. When negotiating, people engage in thousands of different behaviors—whether avoiding eye contact, talking loudly, or banging a fist against the table. How do you determine their emotional temperature from such a wide variety of behaviors? Like a good detective, look for behavior that is out of the ordinary.
Although you cannot be certain what emotions another may be feeling, unusual behavior can alert you to a rising emotional temperature. Has their voice gotten louder, changed pitch, or gotten quiet—too quiet? Has their face become immobile, flushed, or red? Did they show up for a meeting unexpectedly late and without a good excuse? With a little bit of observation, you can get some sense of another’s ordinary way of acting. Are they consistently friendly? Quiet? Loud? Before you negotiate substantive issues with someone for the first time, consider having an informal meeting over a meal or coffee. Such an occasion offers an opportunity not only to build a sense of rapport and affiliation, but also to get a sense of their “ordinary” ways of acting. You will have more information from which to tell when they may be getting upset.
To get a sense of another’s emotional temperature, you can also step into their shoes for a moment and consider whether they have core concerns that may currently be unsatisfied. From their perspective, how do things feel? Because you arrived late at a meeting, might they feel that their autonomy was impinged? Upon discovering that you met with their competitor, might they feel disaffiliated from you and perhaps even betrayed? Ask yourself if those concerns might be significant enough to stimulate negative emotions.

HAVE AN EMERGENCY PLAN READY BEFORE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS ARISE

The worst time to craft a strategy to deal with strong negative emotions is while experiencing them. Imagine what would happen if hospital staff waited until each new patient arrived in the emergency room before considering from scratch what they should do. There would be chaos.
Instead, emergency rooms have developed standard operating procedures followed by everyone from nurses to surgeons and used with every patient who comes through the door. Negotiators need their own standard operating procedure to avoid facing strong negative emotions unprepared. Such a procedure can help you avoid letting emotions take charge.
The goal of your emergency plan is not to get rid of strong emotions.
Whether positive or negative, strong emotions give you information about core concerns, underlying interests, and hidden barriers to agreement.
Strong emotions can also energize negotiators to work toward reaching agreement. The passion of an enthusiastic negotiator can be contagious and encourage long-term joint work, just as the impatience of a mediator who has worked for hours and hours with two disputants may pressure them to come to agreement. Either way, strong emotions serve a useful function.
You do not want to ignore emotions and lose their energy and information.
Rather, you want to be able to make a conscious choice—a smart choice —about what to do with strong emotions and how to deal with the event that caused them. A wise course of action will take into account your emotions and your reasoning. Before you can reasonably reflect on your emotions, however, you first need to calm them.

Soothe Yourself: Cool Down Your Emotional Temperature

By soothing your escalating emotions, you enhance your ability to reflect on what your emotions might be telling you and what you should do about them. Although soothing can take many different forms, the basic idea is to engage in a behavior that brings your emotional temperature back to a manageable, calmer state. You want to be in control of your emotions, not have them in control of you.
What can you do to address your risky or out-of-control emotions? In the heat of anger or in a fit of frustration, it is hard to figure out how to soothe your strong emotions. Therefore, we suggest that you choose a selfsoothing behavior now—while you are able to reflect clearly. Try it out the next time you find your emotions escalating in a risky direction. Here are some suggestions of things you can do in the moment:

- Slowly count backward from ten.

- Breathe deeply three times, in through your nose and out through your mouth.

- Pause. Allow yourself to sit comfortably in silence for a moment. Ask yourself what is at stake for you.

- Take a “justified” break to go to the bathroom or make a phone call. During the break, relax. Think about how to move the negotiation forward.

- Visualize a relaxing place like a sandy beach, a sunlit forest, or a symphony performance.

- Change the subject, at least briefly.

- Adopt a relaxed position: Sit back, cross your ankles, let your hands rest on your lap or the table.

- Let upsetting or offensive comments fly by and hit the wall behind you.

- Call to mind a good walk-away alternative that you have prepared.

One of the best methods of soothing is to ask yourself, “How important is this issue to me?” Some negotiators, just like some married couples, are at risk of making every issue a big issue. We can get worked up about issues that are of little importance. As Aristotle pointed out, “One can become angry; that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose—that is not easy.”
Negotiators increase or decrease the emotional magnitude of an issue depending upon how they size up that issue. Each of us has the capacity to treat an issue as a small mistake or as “the issue of all issues.” During the Cold War, the crew of a Soviet trawler pulled up a New Bedford fisherman’s lobster pot off the shores of Massachusetts, ate the lobsters, and was seen doing so by an American plane. The U.S. government faced a choice of how to frame the issue. Should it treat the matter as an intrusion by the Soviet Union into the territorial waters of the United States, or—as it wisely chose—a dispute over one lobster pot between a New Bedford fisherman and the captain of a trawler? Sometimes, you may not be able to soothe yourself until the meeting or session has ended. After a negotiation, during a long break, or following a disturbing telephone exchange, you might try out one of the following:

- Listen to calming music.

- Distract yourself: Watch TV for a few minutes, make a phone call to a friend, read the paper.

- Take a walk. But don’t obsess over who’s to blame for the anger-inducing situation. Try to appreciate the other’s perspective. Think about ways to deal with the situation.

- Forgive: Let go of the grudge.

Soothe Others: Calm Their Strong Emotions

Some negotiators express strong negative emotions in an attempt to gain advantage. They hope that we will respond to their strong emotions by offering a substantive concession. We may be tempted to placate their emotions, either to avoid a confrontation or to reduce the risk that they will do something irrational, such as walking out of a negotiation altogether. We sometimes try to “buy” our children out of their anger by getting them an ice cream cone. As they get older, the strategy becomes more costly and even less wise. “If you’ll just stop your whining, I’ll buy you a bicycle.”
“You want a car? Okay, but you’d better be happy now and stop asking for things.” No chance. By this time we have taught our children to use their anger or another negative emotion as a way to get what they want.
Whether dealing with a child or with another negotiator, rewarding negative emotions sets a bad precedent. To be sure, giving in can often make angry people happy—for the time being. But they have also learned that a way to satisfy their substantive interests is to express a strong negative emotion. The stronger the better.
When anger, frustration, or embarrassment in another person is genuine, soothing their emotions can cool things off and allow you to keep a negotiation moving in a positive direction. There are several ways you can soothe the strong emotions of others:

Appreciate their concerns. 

Perhaps the most powerful way to soothe someone’s strong emotions is to appreciate their concerns. People often want you to realize that they are angry or upset—and to see the merit in their concerns. Until you appreciate their experience, the intensity of those emotions is unlikely to diminish.

There are three elements in appreciating someone. You want to understand the other’s point of view; find merit in what they are thinking, feeling, or doing; and communicate the merit you see:

It sounds like you are frustrated that we haven’t yet come to an agreement. [You express your understanding.] Given how much time you’ve invested in this new draft, I can understand why you feel like that. [You communicate merit you see in the other’s point of view.]

Take a break. 
Rather than waiting for an angry person to blow up or walk out, you might call for a break, ostensibly for yourself, and appreciate their emotions and yours:

I’ve been feeling pretty upset at how things are going, and I suspect you have, too. Let’s take a fifteen-minute break to think about ways we might work more cooperatively and save ourselves a lot of time and hassle?

If a break is done effectively, it can truly soothe a negative emotion.
During a break, parties should be encouraged to think not about who is at fault for the current tension but about ways of moving forward.
A short break can revitalize you and others if neither of you is too tense or upset. But strong emotions can easily be rekindled. If tension is palpable and an angry scene seems imminent, a five-or ten-minute break may offer a sense of relief but is unlikely to provide adequate time for our bodies to readjust physiologically. More time may be required.

Change the players or the place. 

If someone’s emotional temperature has already reached the boiling point, you might want to soothe them by changing the players or the place. You might say, “Let’s have our two assistants work for a half hour and brainstorm ideas for going forward.
Then let’s get back to this.” Or you might suggest a neutral location for the next meeting. In international negotiations, locations are often selected to distance the parties from the immediate emotional pulls of the media, constituents, and colleagues. In everyday negotiations, a change of scenery can shift the emotional atmosphere. A business meeting adjourned to a coffee shop, a patio, or a restaurant can have a calming effect on the participants.

DIAGNOSE POSSIBLE TRIGGERS OF STRONG EMOTIONS

Once we calm ourselves, we need to decide what to do about the emotions that we experienced. Strong emotions are likely to reignite if we do not understand what brought them about in the first place. But figuring out the cause of an emotion can be difficult. Strong negative emotions let us know that some concern is unaddressed, but they do not direct us to a specific concern. Emotions tend to linger until we understand the message that they are conveying. It is only when we understand such information—and how it relates to the current situation—that we can take corrective action.

Consider Core Concerns as Possible Triggers

There are many possible causes for our strong emotion. We may feel frustrated by the lack of good options on the table, by hunger or lack of sleep, or by the insurmountable gap in how much money we have to spend on merchandise as compared to how much the seller is willing to accept.
Beyond such causes, a core concern often stimulates a strong emotion.
If you observe that you or another is becoming upset, run through the five core concerns. Ask yourself, “Might the strong emotion be triggered by one of the core concerns? Which? What did people say or do to deprecate a core concern?”

Ask Questions to Check Out Your Assumptions

Even if you feel confident that you know what caused another person’s strong emotions, question your assumption. You might slide your notes aside for a moment, look up at the person, and ask: “Is there something I said or did that upset you?”
It is all too easy to assume that we know why a person feels the way they do—when in fact we are very mistaken. One of the clearest examples of a mistaken assumption is a story told to Roger by a Harvard College classmate at a reunion:

After midnight one night, my wife woke me with a sharp pain in her right side. It was tender to the touch. She had a slight fever, and I thought it might be appendicitis. I called a surgeon I knew, woke him up, told him the situation, and asked him to meet us at the hospital.
When he realized who I was, he told me not to worry. “Give your wife a couple of aspirin,” he suggested, “and put her back to bed.”
The doctor was certain that it was not appendicitis. I told the surgeon that I was worried and asked why he was so sure that it was not appendicitis. He said that he was fully awake and understood the situation. He said that he was a doctor, I wasn’t, and that we should all go back to bed.
When I pressed the surgeon, it turned out that his strong confidence was based on an assumption. He recalled that he had taken out my wife’s appendix five or six years ago, and said, “No woman has a second appendix.”
I told the doctor that was true, but that some men had a second wife. Would he please meet us at the hospital? 

BEFORE YOU REACT EMOTIONALLY, FORMULATE YOUR PURPOSE

Strong emotions inform us that a concern is probably not being met, and they rattle us to try to satisfy that concern now. We often feel compelled to deal immediately with strong emotions—ours and those of others. We want to alleviate the gnawing feeling inside us, or we want to extinguish any negative emotions directed toward us.

Immediate action puts us at risk of acting counter to purposes that are more important. If strong emotions are getting out of control, it is likely that each of us is reacting to the other and not acting with a clear purpose in mind. Without much time for thinking, emotional temperatures rise, as do the stakes in a negotiation. What was initially a straightforward transaction over money can become a conflict over status or autonomy.
How do you decide the right strategy for expressing your emotions? Know your purpose. Once you have a clear purpose in mind, it becomes much easier to choose a beneficial strategy to deal with your emotions.
For example, if your purpose is to educate the other party about the impact on you of their insensitive behavior, you may want to have that conversation over coffee when your client is not paying for your services. If your purpose is to get strong negative emotions off your chest, you may want to talk about the situation first with your spouse or with a trusted colleague.
In a negotiation, there are four common purposes for expressing strong negative emotions:

- To get emotions off your chest

- To educate others about the impact of their behavior on you

- To influence the other

- To improve the relationship

Purpose 1: To Get Emotions off Your Chest

It can be difficult to contain a strong negative emotion. Just as a person who is madly in love wants to tell the world, a negotiator who is extremely angry wants to release the internal tension generated by the emotion. A tempting way to release anger is to vent. Venting occurs when we openly and without censor express the extent of our anger to someone, typically to the person who caused it.
Consider the situation of “John” and “Louise,” who recently divorced after seven years of marriage. They have two children. Louise takes care of them during weekdays, and John is in charge of them during weekends. For several weeks in a row, John was late in returning the children to Louise’s house. After the first week that John was late, Louise said nothing. “Better to keep good relations for the sake of our kids,” she thought. After the second week John was late, she still kept quiet, but was biting her tongue to do so. After the third week, Louise decided that the best thing to do would be to vent her anger at John. But was that a wise decision?

Venting can make a bad situation worse. 

Venting often causes more harm than good. And venting to the person who angered us can be disastrous. Think about its effect on the interaction between Louise and John. As Louise gets angrier and angrier, she comes to believe that John slighted or “wronged” her. She thinks to herself, “How dare he keep the children more hours than he is allowed?” Her frustration festers until, during his third late arrival, she marches out of her house, storms up to his car, and yells: “Can’t you tell time? You’re late. You’re always late. This is my time with the kids, not yours! It’s just like you!” He defends himself and bites back at her: “If you hadn’t been late in dropping them off in the first place, then maybe they’d be home on time. But you can’t take away my time with my kids. It’s just like you to try to control me like that.”
The intensity of the back-and-forth venting escalates. For every attack one person makes, the other constructs a justification. Each person becomes increasingly persuaded that he or she is “right.” And as each gets angrier, he or she sees the situation increasingly in black-and-white terms. “I am right; my ex-spouse is wrong.” As a result, each person feels increasingly entitled to feel upset. This process easily can lead to an explosion of emotions.

Focus on understanding, not blaming. 

As your emotions heat up, recognize that you might feel the desire to blame someone for causing your emotions. You mutter to a colleague, “This is all your fault that we didn’t get the proposal in on time!” Or you blame yourself: “How could I have been so stupid not to make sure the proposal was sent.”
Either way, blaming does not help. It typically leads to a downward cycle of self-justifications, criticism, and negative emotions.
As an alternative, refocus your attention on trying to understand the “message” underlying your emotions. This may be hard to do if your emotions are heated (in which case you should first self-soothe). But if you feel capable, dig for core concerns that might have stimulated your emotions. Understanding what has upset you or others can make you feel somewhat better. At the very least, you know what is bothering you, and you can take corrective action.
Let’s see what happens if Louise uses this advice. Before John arrives, she spends a few minutes understanding her strong negative feelings. She recognizes that her autonomy feels impinged on by his repeated late arrival without first consulting her. This new understanding empowers her, and she feels a release of tension. Once John arrives, she is able to clearly express her concerns. Instead of saying, “You irresponsible parent! You didn’t get the kids to my house by the agreed upon deadline,” she says, “I feel upset. I understood that we had agreed upon the time to drop off the kids. Was I mistaken? I came home early from a meeting to make sure I was here.”
After listening to him, she decides to learn more, asking, “How do you see the situation? Do you have ideas on how we might reduce the risk of upsetting each other like this?”
Still, there are moments when your emotions feel so intense that all the rational advice in the world seems useless. You just want to vent. At such times, we urge you to do so with caution.

If you vent, be careful not to further justify your anger.

When you talk with someone about your strong negative emotions, recognize that you risk creating new justifications for your anger. The person with whom you are speaking may not think that your reasons for getting upset are appropriate; but you are likely to be persuaded by your reasons. The more often you justify your anger—with a colleague at work, with a friend, or with the person who upset you—the more persuaded you become. Rather than your anger being vented, it escalates.

Stay on topic. 

To avoid a litany of self-justifications, avoid introducing into the conversation a list of grievances from the past. “Well, this is just like the time that you…” Although John and Louise were arguing about the punctuality of dropping off their children, each strayed from the topic.
Louise attacked John by saying, “You’re always late.” John bit back by telling Louise, “It’s just like you to try to control me like that.” These insults and attacks transformed a contained conflict into an uncontained mess.
Our advice: Stay focused on the current situation. Establish a rule that it is off limits to raise past grievances or to insult one another. The only issues to be raised are those that directly pertain to the current situation. Establish a second rule that if the first rule is broken, each party takes a short break to think about how to move forward productively.

Vent to a third party, not to the person who triggered your emotions.

Even venting to an uninvolved person, such as a close friend, can be risky.
If the friend is unconditionally biased in your favor, he or she may reinforce your negative perceptions of the person who angered you. For example,
John heads to the local bar after dropping off his children. He realizes the importance of staying on good terms with his ex-wife for the sake of their children, but is frustrated by his interaction with her. He meets a close friend at the bar and immediately starts venting: “That damned Louise! She’s out of control. It’s like she’s trying to hold the kids hostage from me.
Totally out of line!”
John’s friend concurs, saying, “Yeah, that sounds ridiculous! She has no right to claim your kids like that!”
Consequently, John feels increasingly justified for his self-serving beliefs, making the cycle of anger between John and Louise likely to escalate even more.
To prevent venting from turning into a festival of self-justification, we recommend that you not vent directly to the person who upset you. Instead, communicate your emotions to a disinterested friend or colleague who can moderate your perspective and give balance to your self-justification. For example, after dropping off the kids, John might call up a close friend who John trusts to moderate his perspective. John says, “I just got into another fight with my ex. I need to blow off a little bit of steam. Do you have a few minutes for me to tell you what happened? I’d appreciate your feedback since I don’t think I’m seeing clearly right now.”

Vent for the other side.

If you are venting to yourself or to a close colleague, you want to be careful not to talk yourself into making the situation worse. One helpful activity is to vent as though you are the other side. What would they say? How would they describe the conflict? By venting as though you are the other side, you gain a better understanding of their perspective and consequently soothe some of your strong feelings.

Write a letter to the person who triggered your anger—but don’t send it.

Sometimes it is impractical or unappealing to enlist the assistance of a third party to help you deal with your strong emotions. On your own, you can do things to deal with your emotions. After the negotiation or during a break, it can be helpful to write a letter or e-mail to the person you feel has injured you. In writing such a letter, describe the impact of their behavior on you. Include a section on ways to keep the negotiation moving forward.
Don’t send your letter, however. Don’t give it to the other person—at least not before taking a day or so to reflect with a clear head on whether such a letter will further your purposes in the negotiation. You might share the letter and the experience with a trusted colleague and get their thoughts on the matter.

Purpose 2: To Educate Another About the Impact of Their Behavior on You

A second purpose for expressing strong emotions is to let the other person know the emotional impact on you of their actions. The other negotiator may have said or done something that had a powerful impact on your emotions. He or she can come to a greater sense of appreciation of your emotional experience if you clearly communicate the impact on you of their behavior.
For example, a young medical student was assigned a middle-aged physician as her supervisor. During hospital meetings, he routinely interrogated her on her knowledge of anatomy. When she gave incorrect answers, his fixed response was a sarcastic “Study more!” She felt singled out and humiliated by his comments. But instead of assuming his intentions were malevolent and venting at him, she set up a private meeting with him and calmly educated him about the impact of his comments on her: “I appreciate your taking the time to meet with me. What I want to say is not easy for me to express,” she said. “I feel embarrassed when I answer your questions incorrectly. I study hard and am starting to feel hopelessly unable to succeed in medicine. I have been considering dropping out of school.”
His eyes widened with surprise at her comments. He confided in her that each year he chose one student who demonstrated superior academic skills. He pushed that student to excel. She was his chosen student for the year.
For this student, it paid off to describe to her supervisor the impact on her of his behavior. But what should she do if he responded with hostility, looking her in the eyes and saying, “Quit school if you must. If this isn’t the right place for you, then move on.”
She could respond by communicating the impact of that statement on her: “I feel lost at this school. It’s so big. And when you suggest that I move on, it doesn’t give me the guidance that I need right now.” The supervisor still may refuse to help her, but at least he now has a clearer understanding of the young medical student’s experience and emotional needs.

Purpose 3: To Influence the Other Person

A third purpose for expressing strong emotions is to influence the behavior of a person with whom you are negotiating. By expressing the intensity of your emotion, you demonstrate the importance of your interests.
Here we would like to distinguish between two situations. In one, negotiators honestly reveal a genuine strong emotion (that they might otherwise not disclose). They reveal their sincere feelings so that another negotiator may be moved by those feelings.
A quite different situation is one in which a negotiator feigns being emotionally upset in order to exert influence deceptively on another person.
Rather than disclosing strong emotions that truly affect them, a negotiator here has become an actor and is falsely and deceptively pretending to be dominated by a strong negative emotion. This is being done, however, for the same purpose and with the same intent as the first case—to influence the behavior of another negotiator.
As we consider consciously using emotions in order to influence another negotiator, the distinction between revealing a genuine emotion of unknown strength that currently exists and pretending to have a powerful and perhaps uncontrollable emotion may not be as clear cut as the previous two paragraphs suggest. Expressing a strong emotion is sometimes a strategic act intended to influence the behavior of another person. A parent’s anger—clearly expressed—can get a teenager to do chores that no amount of reasoned persuasion ever could. Your strong expression of anger may persuade others to act in ways that further your interests. To influence another negotiator to make a concession, might you storm out of a meeting? Rip up your notes? Raise your voice? And whatever you do, others may try to express strong emotions deceptively in order to influence you, perhaps to influence you to raise your offer on their house.
Expressing strong emotions can also be a way to influence another’s image of you. A senior lawyer may perceive a new associate as weak, passive, and incapable of handling the tougher, prestigious clients. A young associate realizing the senior lawyer’s perception of him may make a point of passionately asserting his views during meetings.
The truth about the state of one’s emotions is rarely crystal clear.
Fuzziness about that truth encourages negotiators to bluff, to mislead, and to act deceptively. As we mentioned earlier in this book, trusting others is a matter of risk analysis. Every embezzler is someone who was trusted— mistakenly. Be careful. Do not overload trust. At the same time, negotiators fare better to the extent that they are trustworthy and trusted. When it comes to being deceptive and misleading, be aware of the costs and risks. It is often possible and usually more enjoyable to behave in ways of which you, your children, and others can be proud.

Purpose 4: To Improve the Relationship

A fourth purpose for expressing strong emotions is to preserve or build your relationship with the other. Many negotiators deal with one another again and again. As with marriage, a failure to deal with undercurrents of tension can lead to a decreased ability to work together effectively. Each negotiator sees the other through an increasingly negative lens. Emotional residue builds until neither wants to deal with the other.
There are two key tactics to improve the relationship. First, explain your intentions for acting as you have. Too often, negotiators assume the worst possible explanation of another’s behavior. Clarifying your intentions can deal with that issue. For example, the other side might suspect that you wrote a first draft of an agreement to bias it in your direction. If untrue, you can simply say, “My intention for writing up the first draft of the proposal was to help us work efficiently together, since time is short. Please feel free to suggest modifications to this, since I am assuming that nothing suggested by either of us at this point is a commitment.”
Second, if you have said or done something that caused the other to develop strong negative feelings, an apology can diffuse their anger. Saying “I’m sorry” is a low-cost way to alter the course of a relationship. A welltimed, sincere apology can repair a tremendous amount of damage in a relationship. Some of the key elements of an effective apology include: recognition of the emotional impact of the action on others, an expression of regret, and a commitment not to repeat the negative action. Saying, “I’m sorry that you feel hurt,” is not nearly as powerful as saying, “I’m sorry for my poor behavior and for the hurt it has caused you.”

Chapter 9: On Being Prepared 
Prepare on Process, Substance, and Emotion

PREPARE IN ADVANCE OF EACH NEGOTIATION 

There are three areas of a negotiation on which to prepare: on process, on substance, and on emotion. Being well prepared on the substantive issues that might come up in a negotiation and on the process for dealing with them will do a great deal to reduce emotional anxiety. Emotional preparation involves thinking carefully about steps to build good rapport and taking steps immediately prior to the negotiation to calm your anxiety.

On Process, Develop a Suggested Sequence of Events

A basic part of preparation is on the structure of the negotiation process itself. Much of the anxiety that any negotiator feels comes from the fear of being called on to make an important decision and not knowing what to say.
Therefore, it is a good idea to prepare a negotiation process that will make you feel at ease.
Preparing a good process for your meeting entails thinking, alone and then with the other side, about three subjects: purpose, product, and process.

% Purpose: What is the goal of this meeting?

% Product: What piece of paper would best serve that purpose?

% Process: What sequence of events will produce a product that meets our purpose? For example:

1. Clarify interests of each side.
2. Generate a range of possible options to meet those interests.
3. Select an option to recommend.

On Substance, Gain Perspective on Seven Elements of Negotiation The Harvard Negotiation Project has identified seven elements that form the basic anatomy of a negotiation.

Table 11: Using Seven Elements To Prepare

1. Relationship.

How do we see the existing relationship between the negotiators? Are they adversaries or colleagues? How would we like that relationship to be? What steps might we take to build a better relationship? Sit side by side? Use the language of colleagues? How might we build rapport and stimulate a favorable response?

2. Communication.

Are we listening? For what should we be listening? What points do we want to communicate?

3. Interests.

What, in order of importance, are some of our interests? What do we think are their primary interests? Which of our interests could be made compatible? What interests may necessarily be in conflict?

4. Options.

What possible points of agreement might be acceptable to both sides?

5. Criteria of fairness.

What precedents or other standards of legitimacy might be persuasive to both sides?

6. BATNA (Best alternative to a negotiated agreement)

If we fail to reach an agreement with them, what are we really going to do? If they should walk away without reaching an agreement with us, what good walk-away alternative do they have?

7. Commitments.

What are some good commitments from the other side that we might realistically try for? What commitments are we prepared to make if necessary in order to reach agreement? Try drafting some potential commitments for each side.

As you prepare, canvassing the seven elements will raise both issues of process— improve communication, build a good relationship, clarify interests early, generate options before making any commitments—as well as issues of substance: What are the interests of the parties? What are persuasive criteria of legitimacy, such as precedent, laws, or market value? What are some realistic commitments that each side might make? What is each side’s Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA)? We have found that the risk of a disconcerting—and sometimes disastrous—surprise can be substantially reduced if, before a negotiation begins, each negotiator has gone through the seven elements from their own point of view and from the point of view of the other side.
To see how persuasive your substantive arguments sound to the other side, try a variation of the role reversal exercise.

Enlist a colleague to play the role of someone on the “other side” of your negotiation. You explain your side of the negotiation. Your colleague listens and takes notes. Then, you both switch roles. Your colleague plays you, the negotiator. You play the person on the other side. Your colleague repeats what you had said to him or her moments before. You, in turn, take on the role of being the person from the other side so that you hear your own words coming back at you. Note how it feels to be in another person’s shoes at that moment and what their likely response might be. Then, compare observations with your colleague to gain insight into how the other side may perceive your argument. It is often highly illuminating and gives you a chance to rework your argument with the benefit of hindsight—before a negotiation even begins.

Once, when Gerhard Gesell, a federal district court judge, was a practicing lawyer, he told his younger associates that the firm had just been hired by the plaintiff in a big antitrust case. He asked them to take a week in the library, study the precedents, and outline the arguments that the firm could make on behalf of the plaintiff.
The following week the young lawyers came in, happy and optimistic.
They told Gesell that it was a great case, that the plaintiff had strong arguments, and that they would surely win.
After he had heard a summary of the strong arguments on behalf of the plaintiff, Gesell told the younger lawyers the truth: The firm had actually been hired by the defendant. The young lawyers screamed in disbelief, protesting that the defendant had a terrible case. Gesell told them not to worry. They would soon talk themselves into believing that the defendant had a wonderful case, but he wanted them first to understand the strength of the plaintiff’s case.
With that understanding, the young lawyers went to work on the defendant’s side of the case. The defendant eventually won: The lawyers’ arguments for the defendant had been fortified by their full understanding of the merits of the plaintiff’s case.
A final substantive preparation activity is for you and those on your side to try to draft a public announcement that negotiators for the other side could make to their constituents if they were to accept your suggestions.
This activity often demonstrates how unrealistic our own demands may be.
It also reminds us of the importance of the other side’s core concern for affiliation with their own constituents.

On Emotions, Consider Core Concerns and Physiology 

An important part of preparation involves facing your own emotions and getting ready to deal with the emotions of those with whom you will be working. Emotional preparation requires you:

- to have a clear understanding of each party’s concerns and how to satisfy them, and

- to feel calm and confident enough that you will be able to maintain a clear focus during the negotiation.

Use the core concerns as both a lens and a lever. As you prepare for your upcoming negotiation, take a few minutes to consider each of the core concerns. You can use the core concerns both as a lens to understand what issues might be sensitive in the interaction and as a lever to improve the situation.

As a lens to understand.

Consider which concerns might be sensitive for others in the upcoming negotiation. Run down the five core concerns. Jot down those that are likely to come into play. Will the fact that you work for a more prestigious company make them feel demeaned in status? Will the other’s tendency to assert his or her autonomy make you feel disempowered?

As a lever to improve the situation. 

Think about ways that you can stimulate positive emotions using the core concerns. Might you begin the meeting by recognizing the particular status of the other negotiator as an expert in the substantive field being negotiated? Might you suggest to others a process for negotiating that ensures each party will have the autonomy to voice their interests without interruption? The more clearly you can recall what happened to your core concerns and those of others in prior negotiations, the easier it will be for you to become emotionally prepared for an upcoming negotiation. The emotions that arise in your negotiation will be less likely to surprise you.
For most of us, however, recalling our feelings during a past negotiation is extremely difficult and highly unreliable. When we think how difficult it is for us to remember what we had for dinner last Wednesday, we realize how difficult it is to recall past experiences and how vulnerable memory is to error.
To reduce the errors of memory, jot down notes during your interaction about times when someone says or does something to appreciate or devalue the core concerns of another. After the session ends, get the perspectives of colleagues. Whose core concerns did they think were respected or trampled upon? Why? While the negotiation is still fresh in your mind, record these observations, as well as some ideas about what might be done differently in future negotiations. You can create a long-term record that can be used over time to tease out key behavior patterns of negotiators.
Before your next negotiation, pull out your notes. Read them and let yourself recall how you and others felt and what you learned. Think about how to put those lessons to use to improve the upcoming interaction.

Visualize success. 

Before professional skiers start down a steep slope, they often try to visualize themselves skiing beautifully down the hill, skillfully avoiding trees, rocks, and other skiers. The same approach can work for you as you visualize yourself negotiating. Picture yourself at ease, setting a positive tone, seeking to build rapport, picking up on another’s cues, and moving toward a productive working relationship.
Imagine yourself at the beginning of your upcoming negotiation—right as you greet the other negotiator. How are you likely to react if the other negotiator treats you as an adversary, holding you at a distance? Are you prepared to reframe your affiliation as colleagues working together on important issues? How do you want to introduce yourself to set the right emotional tone for the meeting while acknowledging status concerns? Try out different lines to see what feels right.
“Jan! Good to see you again. How have you been?”

“Dr. Jones? I’m Professor Smith. Please call me Melissa. May I call you Tom?”

“Happy to meet you. I have heard good things about you. I am looking forward to getting your ideas about how we should go about settling this problem.”

You also may want to do some preparatory work on how to enlist helpful feelings in the other party. Prepare and rehearse a few good lines that ask for their advice, demonstrate appreciation for their contribution to the negotiation, and acknowledge the other roles they play. Whatever approach you take, make sure your questions and comments reflect an honest interest without being too intrusive.

Keep your physiology in check. 

The core concerns will be of little help to you if your anxiety, fears, or frustrations overwhelm your ability to think clearly. Thus, take some time immediately before a negotiation to soothe pre-meeting jitters and other strong emotions.

Use relaxation techniques to calm your nerves. 

A few minutes of deep breathing can help you relax and focus your efforts. Another exercise that can help soothe your emotions before a negotiation is progressive muscle relaxation. This activity can last about fifteen minutes. Start by sitting in a comfortable position, perhaps in your car before the meeting. Breathe deeply. Focus on your feet. Curl your toes and feel the tension. Hold it for a second and then relax. Working your way up, tighten each of your muscles as you would clench your fist and then relax, letting the tension disappear.
Concentrate on tightening and relaxing every muscle from the back of your calves to your shoulders.
When you have finished, put your chin down and roll your head slowly to the right until your ear is above your shoulder and hold for a second or two. Roll your head back and around so that the left ear is above your shoulder and hold the position for a moment. Lift your head, square your shoulders, and you should feel more relaxed and ready to go.

Prepare an emotional first aid kit. 

Strong negative emotions can overwhelm your ability to think clearly. To keep your physiological arousal in check, remind yourself of the symptoms that indicate your emotional temperature is rising. Bring to mind a single behavior or two that you plan to use to keep your cool. If you feel increasingly upset, is your plan to count to ten or suggest a short break?

Check your mood. 

It is important to stay aware of your mood—whether you are generally feeling positive or negative. What feelings might you bring into the room? Despite your proactive emotional preparation, a bad mood can raise your level of physiological arousal and make you more likely to lose control of your own behavior.
The trigger of a bad mood is often hard to identify. It may be caused by someone’s mistreatment of you, by the fact that it is a Monday morning, or by neurochemicals that “decided” to affect you today.
Whatever the cause, becoming aware of your mood allows you to moderate its impact on your behavior in the negotiation. If you are in a negative mood, you might let others know so that they do not misattribute your mood to something they said or did. You might say to a colleague,
“These Monday morning meetings always put me in a bad mood. My apologies in advance if I’m a little on edge.” At the least, you can monitor your own behavior to make sure that you do not say or do things that will sidetrack the negotiation.
If you realize you are in a negative mood, decide to improve it. You often have the power to break out of your current mood rather than be a prisoner to it. Simple things like making sure to get adequate sleep and a good meal can be extremely helpful. Before walking into the negotiation, you might take a few minutes to recall pleasant memories, walk outside, or talk with a friend who can elevate your mood. During the negotiation, you can model a calm, confident mood—by sitting up in your chair, talking with confidence, and co-managing the negotiation process. After a while, you may feel more confident.

Review After Each Negotiation 

Spending time in the school of hard knocks can be an excellent learning experience for every negotiator. If you pay attention, you can learn as much from failures as you can from your successes. Like other forms of on-the job training, negotiation is greatly helped by a conscious effort to put what you are learning into practice.
Unless negotiators develop a habit of reviewing their negotiations and consciously articulating lessons that are there for the taking, most of that hard-earned knowledge fades away. The wisdom that is buried in your brain becomes unavailable unless you bring it out as a guideline for action. By reviewing a negotiation promptly after the fact, you can convert an implicit understanding of what happened into an explicit guideline for the future.
You can consider how to apply that guideline in your interactions with your spouse, boss, colleagues, negotiating counterparts, and others. Although the context of your negotiations may vary, your ability to achieve your goals will consistently improve.
Set aside thirty to sixty minutes following a negotiation session for review. A partner in a Washington law firm took this advice to heart and was able to convince her partners and associates to try it out. After every negotiation, her firm’s lawyers would come back to the office and meet for an hour to review. Instead of having the usual bull session about the negotiation that had just ended, they put that time to good use in an organized examination of what had taken place. The lawyers found that purposeful review was far more valuable—and even more enjoyable—than just blowing off steam.
You can review with your fellow negotiators, a colleague, or by yourself. If there were several negotiators on your side, it is a good idea to invite them all to participate. The value of their involvement stems from the fact that different participants observe and recall the same events in distinctly dissimilar ways. In a multi-participant negotiation, there are so many things happening so quickly that it is often like the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Touching different parts of the elephant, each blind man had a completely different picture of what the animal looked like.
Getting the varied perspectives of several people is likely to make each a little more humble about “knowing” what happened, and each will have a better sense of the interaction.
If you have difficulty in persuading your colleagues to join you in reviewing a negotiation, do not pass up the chance to make the most of immediate hindsight. Reviewing a negotiation, even by yourself, is an invaluable opportunity to learn as you go along. On your drive home from work, for example, you might take a few minutes to review your day’s negotiation.

Determine WW and DD—What Worked Well and What to Do Differently 

Some people avoid reviewing the negotiation because they are afraid that they will be judged and criticized. It should be made clear that the purpose of a review is to help people learn from their experiences in the negotiation.
A simple and powerful way to review a negotiation is to consider WW and DD: what Worked Well and what to Do Differently next time.
To start your review, good questions to ask are: “What did the negotiators on the other side do well? Why?” You may be able to learn something from the other negotiators by reviewing what they said or did to improve the negotiation process. Did they ask questions that got everyone talking about their interests? Did they propose an informal lunchtime meeting before your next negotiation to build affiliation? Conversely, during the negotiation what did the other party do that was probably a mistake on their part or something that could have been done more effectively? If you were going to share honest advice, what could you suggest they might want to do differently next time? Why? Having reviewed what worked well for the other side and what they might want to do differently, you can go through the negotiation asking the same questions about your own performance. During the negotiation, what specific things did your team do that appeared to work well? And finally, what mistakes might you have made? Why? Can you now turn these into a few guidelines for the future? What will you want to repeat and what will you want to do differently? After creating guidelines, imagine how they might be applied in different cases, whether with family members, colleagues, or representatives of other organizations with whom you deal.

Focus on Emotions, Process, and Substance

As you review what worked well and what might have been done differently, focus on three important subjects: emotions, process, and substance. What worked well with how you and the other party managed each of these issues? What might be done differently?

Check your memory for the emotions that each of you appeared to experience. Think about what seemed to annoy you, excite you, interest you, or anger you. What kinds of things might you do next time to soothe escalating negative emotion? The easiest emotions to recall may be the ones that arose from expressions of appreciation—or lack thereof. Run through your core concerns to consider what feelings may have been generated in you and in others:

1. Appreciation

- Did you feel understood, heard, and valued for your point of view?

- Did the other side feel appreciated?

2. Affiliation

- Were you treated as a colleague? (or as an adversary?)

- Do you think they felt treated as a colleague?

3. Autonomy

- Do you feel that your autonomy was impinged upon?

- Do you think they felt their autonomy was being respected?

4. Status

- Do you feel they respected your status in areas where it was deserved?

- Did you respect theirs?

5. Role

- Did you feel satisfied with the activities you performed within your role?

- Did you adopt temporary roles that felt fulfilling and useful?

- Did you broaden their role by asking for their advice or recommendations?

With regard to process, you may want to recall whether an agenda was set, how it was set, and by whom. To what extent was the agenda followed? Did it streamline or impede the progress of the negotiation? Throughout the negotiation, how did people decide what to talk about and how forthcoming they would be? What worked well, and what might be done differently in the future? Consider how the agenda might be improved and turned into a possible standard agenda. This revised agenda could be the basis of an agenda for the next negotiation.
To review substantive success, simply consider what worked well and what to do differently regarding each of the seven elements of negotiation. For example, what questions did you ask that worked well in helping you discover the interests of the other side? What might you do differently next time? In the future, how might you encourage more creative brainstorming of options?

Keep a Journal of Lessons Learned 

Create a journal to record what you learn from your negotiations. Write down your thoughts in a bound notebook or put them on your computer.
Record what you have learned from your own successes and mistakes as well as from the skills and missteps of those with whom you have negotiated. Over time, you will have your own personal negotiation guide.
As you articulate the lessons you learn, your brain will tend to store that information and have it ready for use. The more often you recall and use those ideas, the more you will find them at your disposal.
In a class we teach on the role of emotions in negotiation, students are required to keep a weekly journal about their experiences in dealing with the core concerns. We spend two weeks exploring each of the core concerns, starting with autonomy. During the first week, students are asked to observe and document the ways that their concern with autonomy had an emotional impact on them during their daily interactions with others.
Throughout the second week, the role of students becomes more active: They are asked to respect their autonomy and that of others in their day-today interactions. They write about what worked well and what they might do differently in the future to appreciate that core concern more effectively.
As the weeks progress, students learn to observe and appreciate core concerns, and they develop skills in learning from their negotiation experiences. At the end of the semester, we ask students to review their journal entries and to write a final paper on what they think they have learned. Reflecting upon their thoughts, feelings, and actions helps their learning stick in their heads.