Dr. Joshua N. Weiss discusses the major misconceptions surrounding negotiations—and offers five steps to build your confidence and resilience as a negotiator.
You’ll Learn
- The big negotiation mistake most people make
- The mental reframe that helps you negotiate better
- The five-step strategy to reviving stalled negotiations
About Josh
Dr. Joshua N. Weiss is a renowned negotiation and conflict resolution and leadership expert. As a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project and co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, Dr. Weiss brings unparalleled expertise to his field. He also directs the MS in Leadership and Negotiation program at Bay Path University and runs a private consulting firm, offering tailored negotiation and conflict resolution, and leadership solutions for businesses, organizations, international entities, governments, and individuals.
- Book: Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations
- Book: The Book of Real-World Negotiations: Successful Strategies From Business, Government, and Daily Life
- Study: “Trajectories Toward Peace: Mediator Sequencing Strategies in Intractable Communal Conflicts”
- Website: JoshuaNWeiss.com
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by William Ury and Robert Fisher
- Book: Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts by Daniel Shapiro
- Book: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- Book: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Book: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
- Book: Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell
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Joshua N. Weiss Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Josh, welcome!
Joshua Weiss
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting and I can’t resist, I’d like for you to start us off with a thrilling high-stakes negotiation tale.
Joshua Weiss
Well, there have been a lot of them. And I think, in general, probably my favorite one is that I was working with a team of people to kind of help them prepare for a merger, a potential merger. And they had asked me, because they were trying to sort of build their capacity for their own negotiations, so they asked me to sit in the room and give them advice at different periods during the process, helping them to reset, to think about where to go from there and things along those lines.
And so, we did our preparation, came into the meeting, and the other side, there were three guys, and we had three people on our side. And the first gentlemen sat down, slammed his briefcase on the table, and decided to sort of say, “Look, here’s the offer. It’s a take it or leave it kind of thing.” And after sort of pushing that onto the table, he just looked at us all and said, “Well?”
And I had talked to my team about sort of the idea of trying to get into problem-solving mode and to thinking together with the other side about how you could do this as best and to try to find things of value that might exist that we are not aware of. And that was not the negotiating approach that the other side was taking.
And the lead negotiator was getting more and more sort of agitated. Like, he just sort of felt like we’re going to put this on the table to take it or leave it kind of thing.
And he’s like, “You’ve got 10 seconds to decide whether you want to do this or not.” And so, they were like, “Well, if that’s the scenario, you know, we’re going to leave it.” And it was interesting because his two colleagues were on either side and they were kind of looking at him like they didn’t really know what he was doing. And they definitely were not aligned with the approach he was taking.
So, after 10 seconds, he’s like, “Well, fine.” So, he starts throwing his papers back in his briefcase and he stands up and storms out, basically opens the door and slams it behind him. And what we realized was that, in his theater or performance, he actually walked into a walk-in closet instead of actually leaving the room.
And the funny thing was he stayed in there for what seemed like a long time. It was probably like 30, 45 seconds because I think he was too embarrassed to come out. And so, the lead on our team looked at me and he turns around, and he’s like, “Is this an opportunity?” And I said, “Yes, it is.”
So, he swings around back to the other two guys, he’s like, “Listen, I think we can do this differently. I don’t know what you guys had in mind, but here’s our sort of initial thinking.” And the other two guys are, like, listening, taking it all in. And the guy sort of slinks out of the closet after that and is really sidelined because they had started a conversation.
And, ultimately, they ended up finding a way forward and finding a deal, but it required that kind of theatrics to go awry for something to happen. So, there’s things like that. And the rule in negotiation, in general, is expect the unexpected.
Pete Mockaitis
Wow. That story is so wild. It’s, like, if that happened to be in real life, I would wonder, “Am I having a dream right now? Is this real life? Or am I currently dreaming?”
Joshua Weiss
It was pretty darn funny. And sometimes it just takes those little “unexpecteds” to change a process, and to seize on it, so.
Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s perfect. I mean, wow, what a metaphor. When the take it or leave it guy is stuck in a closet, chat with his colleagues instead.
Joshua Weiss
Right. There you go. That’s the lesson.
Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, this is like Michael Scott buffoonery, you know, “What does the internet tell me about negotiating? Ooh, yeah, that’s the secret move. I’m going to do that.”
Joshua Weiss
That’s right.
Pete Mockaitis
And it’s not so handy. Well, thank you for that. That’s fun. I’d love to hear. So, you’ve been in the game for quite a while. What do you think is the most surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans and negotiating over the course of your many engagements?
Joshua Weiss
To be very honest, most people have no idea how to do it. The reality is that very few people get knowledge and skills about negotiation. And so, they might learn it from Michael Scott. They might learn it from the news. They might learn it, which is all of the wrong places to try to learn this. And the other thing I would say, too, is that there’s a lot of people who are like, “I don’t negotiate.” I’m like, “Actually, you negotiate all day, every day.”
Anytime you’re trying to get somebody to do something you would like them to do, if you’re trying to create some kind of an agreement, whatever it looks like, you’re negotiating. And that can be at work with your bosses and your colleagues and the people that work for you, or it can be with your spouses, or, as we were talking about before we came on, your kids, but also in the world around you. So, we do this all the time and it’s really quite striking to me that so many people don’t know how to negotiate, and what they know about negotiation usually leads them astray.
Pete Mockaitis
So, we don’t know how to negotiate. That’s quite a statement in that, on the one hand, it’s like, “Well, of course, because very few of us have had formal training in it.” But, on the other hand, it’s like, “Well, if we’re negotiating all the time, every day, wouldn’t it be as natural to us as breathing, talking, walking, and yet it is not?”
Joshua Weiss
It’s not because to be effective in negotiation, like if you think about most of your jobs, right, and how to be awesome at work, it requires strategy, it requires thinking, it requires preparation to do things well, and negotiation is no different. And I think that’s the key. You know, lots of people engage in it. The question is, “Are you really learning from it? Are you learning best practices?”
Somebody asked me the other day, “Do you really think you can learn negotiation from a book?” And I said, “Well, there’s really two primary ways that we learn. One is experience and one is through education and learning and knowledge.” And I think it is critical that you learn both. In addition to getting involved in negotiations and doing a lot of training, I teach and I run a master’s program.
And one of the things the students tell me after they take the first class, which is an introduction to negotiation, they’re like, “I had no idea what you could know, all of the aspects that you need to know to be an effective negotiator, the strategy, the analysis, the skillsets, all of that.” And so, their perspective on negotiation, even though they’ve been doing it for a long time, changes dramatically because they become aware of concepts and ideas and dynamics that they really hadn’t thought about.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very intriguing. And could you give us an example of a concept, or a dynamic, an idea that is just like a revelation eye-opener for people like, “Whoa, I never thought of that, Josh”?
Joshua Weiss
So, if you ask people, “What’s the first word or two that comes to mind when we hear the word negotiation?” usually, one of the words that is uttered is compromise. And I don’t believe that compromise is an effective way to negotiate. In fact, it’s kind of a lazy way to negotiate. And most people are like, “Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? When we get stuck, I often will say, ‘Well, let’s just split the difference.’”
I’m like, “Okay. But have you really thought through and understood what’s going on in your negotiation before you actually compromise?” It’s actually why a lot of people don’t like to negotiate because they perceive that what they’re supposed to be doing at the negotiating table is giving away something of significant importance in order to reach an agreement. And that is not how you negotiate.
Negotiation is not about reaching agreement. And that may also surprise people. It’s about meeting your objective as best as possible. And if you have the metric or if the bar is that, “My purpose in this negotiation is to reach agreement,” it’s not hard to reach an agreement. You can give away all kinds of things to reach an agreement. It’s the wrong bar, though. What you’re doing is you go into a negotiation and you have an objective that you’re trying to meet.
And if you can reach an agreement that gets you there in the best way possible, great. And if you can’t and you realize that, that it’s better to walk away, that’s actually success because it’s about meeting your objectives. And compromise rarely meets your objective. Most people listening probably have negotiated, given up something of great importance to reach an agreement, and then walked out of the room and said, “Ugh, I can’t believe I did that. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t feel like what I wanted from this process.”
And that’s the problem with compromise. Compromise is expedient. It helps us to move along and move forward. But rarely do compromise solutions actually meet our objectives and goals.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, for many people, that’s an eye-opener right there in terms of, “Oh, negotiation is compromise.” And you say, “Au contraire.” And so, then what is an alternative path, I suppose, like deeply understanding our respective needs and values and interests and positions and finding a creative, awesome thing that makes people feel pretty good about it?
Joshua Weiss
So, to me, and in the book that I published recently called Getting Back to the Table, I talk about the idea of unlearning certain things that are getting in the way. And one of the things I say is unlearn compromise and replace it with creative problem-solving. So, Pete, if you and I go into a negotiation, one of the important things about negotiation to always understand is we are always working with incomplete information.
When you and I sit down, you know certain things that I don’t, and I know certain things that you don’t. And part of the challenge, and if we’re going to make a negotiation work in a way that’s, like, to its maximum benefit, that there are things that you value and you care about, and there are things that I value and I care about, we have to exchange information. And if we don’t, then we can come to an agreement, but it’s not going to be the best one. It’ll be just good enough.
And I remember talking to a woman, because four years ago I wrote a book called The Book of Real-World Negotiations, and that’s really about 25 cases of successful negotiations. And if you look at it, what you find is actually there’s very little compromise. It’s all about understanding what’s really driving and motivating people in a negotiation.
But when I was talking to this woman, she said, “You know, to me, the best negotiations are where everybody leaves the table a little unhappy.” And I said, “Well, why would you think that?” And she said, “Well, honestly, like my boss who kind of taught me how to negotiate, that was his mantra.” And I said, “That way of thinking is a race to the bottom.”
And you’re always thinking, “Let me give something up of importance in order to reach an agreement.” And half the time, at least, if you dig in and figure out what’s actually going on, those compromises are not necessary. But you have to take the time. If you don’t have time, compromise becomes more logical. But if you do have time, then the notion of exploration, understanding, asking good questions, and like gathering information is what you really should be doing early on in a negotiation process.
Hold off on putting offers on the table and things like that, and figure out what you can learn from the other side, because this is an interdependent process, “I need you to say yes for me to get where I want to go, and vice versa. So, I have to understand where you’re coming from.” And the best way that I know to do that is ask good questions and listen very carefully to what is coming back to you.
Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us a quick illustration of how we might think, “Ah, compromise is just what I got to do,” versus, “No, no, here’s a real-world example of folks. They learned some things and then they didn’t have to compromise, and both folks felt good”?
Joshua Weiss
So there’s a book called Getting to Yes, which sounds like you might’ve heard of, and other people may not have, but it was a book that really changed the landscape of negotiation. It was written in 1981, and it’s still on the bestseller list. So, it tells you that there’s something in there that’s still valuable, right?
The book really begins with a story of two sisters who are arguing over an orange. And they go back and forth, each claiming that the orange is theirs. And they decide that the only good solution is to compromise and to cut the orange in half, and they each get half, right? Logical solution. Okay. So, when they do that, one sister goes over to the garbage and peels the orange, takes the peel, throws it away and starts eating the fruit. Then she walks away.
The other sister walks over to the garbage and peels the orange, throws away the fruit and takes the orange peel and starts grinding it up to make an orange cake. Now, if they had talked about why it was they wanted the orange, they each could have had twice as much, but they didn’t. They rushed to compromise. And so, instead, each had less because they just did a split the difference kind of thing.
The key in negotiation is figuring out what is motivating people and what they really want. It’s a little bit like being an investigative journalist, right? So, when a story breaks, here’s the headline. And we’re all like, “Oh, my God,” right? And then over time, we learn more about that story. And the story is often not what we thought it was. And it was not what the headline was all about.
And that’s kind of, like, when people say certain things in negotiation, when people put their positions on the table, which is what we call it, right, like that’s the headline. But what’s going on under the surface is what we need to figure out and what we need to come to understand. Because there are a lot of things that motivate people in negotiations that are unspoken because they’re worried that you might take what I say and manipulate it or things along those lines.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well done with regard to the orange. It’s, like, of course, and we just have these assumptions, “Well, of course, they want to eat the orange. That’s what anybody wants with an orange.” And it’s, like, “Well, there could be all sorts of things. Some people might want to put the rind down the disposal to freshen up the scent in the sink.” There are multifaceted reasons for anything.
It’s funny, I think about this in sales too, in terms of my other businesses is Cashflow Podcasting. So, we help businesses launch podcasts. And we just assume, “Well, of course, what they want is more sales in their business. And then that’s why they’re thinking about launching a podcast.” But sometimes it’s totally different.
It’s like, “Well, no, this is really about legacy and passing things on, or to be of service to those who cannot pay us for our products.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.” And so, it really pays to not just assume, but to see what’s really driving things.
Joshua Weiss
And, by the way, assumptions, to me, are the silent killers of effective negotiation because they, essentially, destroy any understanding between people because you don’t know I’m making an assumption, right? And what happens when we make assumptions is we build entire stories off of one assumption. It happens all the time, right, especially around people’s motivations or their intention.
There’s a problem that we often talk about in negotiation of intent and impact, right, where you take an action with a certain intention and it comes across in a way that you didn’t intend and that is actually quite destructive. I mean, just think about if you’ve ever tried to be respectful to somebody and they took it as disrespect.
Or when you get an email from somebody and you read a sentence, and you’re like, “What the hell’s wrong with them?” And that could be read different ways, but you’re adding in meaning to what they’ve said and done.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s amazing how we can read a tone into something. And I think one of my favorite examples was I sent someone an email. I asked the question, “Where is she coming from?” Like, I had the most open-hearted, curious, you know, my intentions were as wholesome as they could be. And then the other person said, “Just look at this interrogation of an email, ‘Where is she coming from?’” I was like, “Wow!”
Joshua Weiss
Yeah, that’s what happens.
Pete Mockaitis
It’s astounding.
Joshua Weiss
It is. It’s amazing. And I think that’s what makes negotiation difficult is that people come into negotiations. Our instinct typically is to be defensive when we come into things. Human beings are all about protecting themselves from loss. That’s what persuades us because of how we got to here from being hunter-gatherers. If we lost out back then, we got eaten.
And so, nowadays, we go into things with a bit of a protectionist mentality. And the problem with that is it’s very hard to be creative. It’s very hard to think differently and in a curious manner when you’re defensive and trying to protect. So, your mindset matters a lot. That’s another piece of this that I think is incredibly important, is that how you come into a negotiation matters greatly.
Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Okay. Well, these are great big principles for negotiation and just being a human, in general. Could we zoom in a bit to your book, Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations. What’s the big idea here?
Joshua Weiss
So, the big idea is that if you look out at the landscape of negotiation, very few people talk about failure, and yet it’s a really important part of this process. I’ve been involved in some peace process work in different places around the world, and the norm is to fail.
And so, the key is, “What do we do with that when we fail?” It’s going to happen. And in the book, I talk a little bit about that there’s three sort of responses to failure when it transpires. And I use the analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, so your kids will like this one. The first response to failure is blame and rationalization. It’s too-hot response, right, “The porridge is too hot.” And what that means is that, “When I fail, when things don’t go well, I blame the other side, I blame the situation, and I rationalize my own behavior.” I don’t learn anything doing that.
The second response, which is the too-cold approach to porridge, is that, “If I fail, I don’t want to negotiate again. It’s too anxiety-producing. It’s too uncomfortable. I’m going to struggle, I know when I sit down, because I’m going to be thinking about those previous experiences that didn’t go well.” Again, can’t learn much that way.
The third process is really what I talk about in the book, which is that if we’re going to fail, and if it’s part of the landscape, which it is, and if you talk to anybody who negotiates on a regular basis, they will tell you they fail. And so, the question becomes, “What are you going to do with that failure? How are you going to use it to become resilient and to learn and to grow as a negotiator?” because negotiation is not a destination. To be a really good negotiator, it’s not a destination. It’s a journey.
And there’s a lot to learn from our failures if we give it the space and time. Nick Saban, the winningest college football coach, likes to say, “Never waste a good failure.” And that’s what I’m trying to get at, is something happened, it didn’t go the way you wanted, how do you really learn from it? And what are those things maybe that got you in trouble that you can try to avoid in the future?
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when it comes to these learnings, well, maybe let’s just pause for a sec. When you say, for negotiation to fail, in some ways, just the word fail in itself is so intense. Maybe we should define it. Is it simply when, “Hey, you did not get what you were after when you had that conversation”?
Joshua Weiss
So, yes, failure is not meeting your objective as you defined them prior to the negotiation. Now that’s distinct from a setback, right? And a setback is you haven’t gotten there yet. You can see a pretty clear path back to the table. And so, can you seize on that? Can you figure out a new way to come back to the table with the other side because it’s still of benefit to you? You can see that.
A failure is less so. It’s you can’t really see a way back to the table. And if you’re going to come back around, it might take some time but you probably have damaged the relationship and/or created a challenge and a problem that cannot be fixed right now.
And sometimes that happens and we have to just understand that a lot of times, we’re talking about setbacks and we can find a way back, but if we can’t, then we need to shift the conversation to “What did we really learn? And how do we become better negotiators in the future?”
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, then, toward the very beginning of your book, you had some really good perspective on failure that, “Hey, it’s all good. It happens to everyone. This too-cold response, really, we need not take it personally.” And, in fact, I was struck with your Steve Jobs iPhone story. I think that’s rather telling when it comes to setbacks or failures. Can you share this with us?
Joshua Weiss
Yeah. So, when the folks around the iPhone were sort of working on its development, they brought the initial concept to Steve Jobs and he wasn’t a fan. He was like, “This isn’t going to work. It’s not going to make sense. We’re not doing it.” And the engineers had a kind of a better sense of this and they felt like he’s not quite getting this, “We need to help educate him as to why this makes sense.”
But in doing that, they also knew that they needed to find the right messenger. So, there was a colleague of his that he had worked with for quite a while who became that messenger. And in business like that, creating a prototype is often, there’s a guy at Duke University named Sim Sitkin, who I spoke with in writing the book, and he talked about intelligent failure.
And the idea with that is that you create a prototype, you expect to fail, but you learn, “How do we build on that? How do we improve or make it better?” And so, the process with Steve Jobs was to go back to him on a number of occasions with improvements so that he could begin to see what they were seeing. But he really dismissed them out of hand initially.
A lot of people, when that kind of thing happens, they just throw their hands up and say, “I guess it’s not going to happen.” And I think one of the keys to negotiation is that resilience and persistence. The best negotiators that I’ve worked with, they always say to me, “Look, we haven’t found a solution yet.” And it’s always yet.
Like, “There’s a solution out there. If we stay at the table long enough, roll up our sleeves and keep working at it, we will get there.” And I think that was the mentality around the iPhone because they were so convinced that this product was going to revolutionize how we communicated, and they were right. It just took multiple times and thinking about what’s going to resonate with Jobs and make sense with him.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, what I find so comforting about that is, you know, iPhone is a big deal, Steve Jobs, super brilliant person. We could think that, and with hindsight, we could say, “For a company seeking to make shareholders richer, launching the iPhone is the right move. And yet, brilliant Steve Jobs was not feeling it at first.”
And so, I just find that all the more encouraging for us in terms of, “We got something. We’re trying to share it. They say no. And that doesn’t mean it has to be the end. And it doesn’t mean that we’re bad, stupid dumb-dumbs or that we really botched it. We may have botched it. But not necessarily, doesn’t mean that we suck.”
Joshua Weiss
No, I think that’s exactly right. And that’s why part of the point of the book is to normalize this aspect of things. And I want people to understand that they will fail. Like, that’s how negotiation works. But I want them to feel exactly what you just said, which is, “We don’t suck at this. Like, maybe this didn’t work out. We need to take a different tact.”
And when I was working on the book, one of my students came to me, and asked me, “What are you working on now?” And I told her about this, and she said, “Oh, thank God.” And I said, “Why would you say that?” And she said, “Because everything we read in the program, I love it, but it’s all about these unbelievable successes that people had. And if we don’t succeed every time, we start thinking maybe we shouldn’t be negotiating.”
And I’m like, “Well, if that’s what you have taken away from all of this, then we’re not doing a good job of helping you to understand the real nature of negotiation in the world around us.” And so, yeah, I’m trying to, in one sense, as one of my friends put it, he said, “You’re trying to decouple shame from failure when it comes to negotiation.” And I think he’s exactly right, that what we want to do is help people to kind of realize this happens and it’s okay.
And part of the purpose of the book is to, when people have these experiences, is to give them a process for trying to figure out what happened. And I think when you go through that process, you might come around and be like, “You know, in hindsight, I’m realizing, I don’t think they ever really had an intention to get somewhere.”
Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, you mentioned process, you’ve actually got a five-step strategy for reviving stalled negotiations. Can you walk us through it?
Joshua Weiss
Yeah. So, the first one is, actually, believe it or not, about the emotional component of this. So, when we experience setbacks or failures, it hurts. It stings, right? We’ve all had that. We’re like, “I didn’t get where I wanted to go, and that sucks.” And the thing is that, what I notice is when people don’t allow themselves to feel the sting of failure, they can’t move through it.
And so, I actually use a model that was originally developed by a woman named Elisabeth Kubler-Ross about death and dying and about grieving as a way of trying to understand the kinds of things that you’re feeling, and that that’s normal and natural. And so, I kind of take people through, and I say, “Look, if you don’t cope with the loss that you’ve experienced, it’s a little bit like a backed-up sink. Like, nothing gets through, no learning gets through until you kind of take in the emotional piece of this.”
And, you know, it’s funny because a lot of people, when it comes to negotiation, they want to keep emotions out. They do their best to sort of say, “I’m not allowing emotions in here. I’m not going to get emotional.” And you can’t do that. Human beings are logical and emotional creatures. And it doesn’t mean that emotions need to blow up a process. It just means that you’re going to feel them.
If you care about something, you’re going to feel the loss and you have to take it in and be like, “Okay, this is not what I wanted. Now I need to figure out what happened.” So, the first step is like, “Okay, I’m angry. I’m frustrated. I’m sad, whatever. I have to cope with it and accept it. And then I can sort of address the rest of the process, which is then moving into more of an analysis and to figure out what happened.”
And so, there’s sort of the big picture and there’s the minute details. And I really encourage people to kind of look at the big picture of the forest, if you will. And in the book, I talk about seven ways in which you can fail in negotiation. And I didn’t mean that to be an exhaustive list. I mean it to be, essentially, a conversation starter because there’s not much written on the subject.
But what I’m trying to do is make people aware of these seven ways so that they don’t fall into those traps. So, part of what you want to do is, in that big-picture forest kind of view, you want to ask yourself, “What type of failure did I have?” So, for example, one type of failure is called the slipping through your fingers failure.
And that’s all about from the point of view of you and the other negotiator, like a deal was kind of on the table, it made sense, and yet somehow you didn’t get there. Something got in the way, somebody insulted someone, whatever it might be, there was a real opportunity to reach a good agreement and you didn’t get there. So, what I want people to do is say, “Was that the kind of negotiation? Was that the kind of failure I had?” and then move to the granular, right?
Because in most negotiations, we can pinpoint a critical moment or a conversation, a back and forth, where things started to go south. And so, I want people to identify that and think, “Well, what could I have done differently? How could I have adjusted or modified things to not go down that road?” And once you’ve done the analysis, then the question is, because one of the really important things is, “What are the lessons that you learn from this?”
And one of the things that I found, like when I do my trainings, a lot of times people will come up to me at lunch or at the end of the day, and say, “I’ve got this negotiation coming up. Can we just talk about it for a few minutes, and what might I keep in mind?” And, usually, when I do, what happens is that people are often transferring the wrong lessons from one negotiation to another.
So, if they’ve had success in a negotiation, they’ll think, “Okay, I’m just going to do that same thing in this other negotiation, this upcoming negotiation, and I’ll get success again, right?” But the problem is that, and there was a quote that I use in the book by a woman named Kathryn Bartol who teaches at University of Maryland’s Business School. And she said, “When you’ve seen one negotiation, you’ve seen one negotiation.”
And part of why I like that, I agree to an extent, but not fully, like I believe there are lessons that are transferable, but what she’s really highlighting is you need to be comparing apples to apples. Like, are there the same number of parties in the two negotiations you’re looking at? Are the dynamics the same? Or, in one negotiation, is there a power difference, in another, the power is equal? Is there a deadline in one negotiation or whatever, right?”
So, you can see there are lot of dynamics that you need to keep in mind when you’re analyzing and thinking, “Can I use this approach in this upcoming negotiation?”
And then the fourth step is, really, this idea of unlearning things that led you to your failure. And that’s where, for example, I talk about the idea of compromise, and that I recommend to people that they may want to unlearn compromise and replace it with this idea of creative problem-solving, because that’s going to hold you in better stead in most of your negotiations.
And that’s hard, because it means we have to look back at what our negotiation approach is, what are the pillars of how we do things, and why do we do them. And we have to examine that and say, “Is this still meeting my needs? Is this actually making me a better negotiator or not?” So, I just try to lead people down that road of thinking about all of this.
And then the last piece is, again, getting back to the table. And I talk about kind of moves that you can make. If you believe that you’ve got a setback, what are you going to do differently? What did you learn from the first process? How might you approach this negotiation a little bit in a unique way compared to the last time? And if you can’t get back to the table, what did you really learn about yourself as a negotiator so that you can improve and get better?
And so, that’s the process. And I think that what I’m seeing is it turns the mirror on people, on an individual. And that’s a hard thing to do. People don’t like to really look at themselves and examine their behavior and maybe the things that they didn’t do so well. But that’s actually the only way that you really learn from your failures and grow.
And I’ve had a lot of people email me and say, “This is really interesting because I’ve never reflected in this way on who I am as a negotiator and how I do better.”
Pete Mockaitis
Excellent stuff. Well, let’s hear about the addressing the emotion piece of things. If we notice it and we say, “Okay, there it is. I feel sad and rejected. I feel really anxious and nervous about getting back in there,” or, “I feel really angry. Like, that was some bull crap. That was wrong. We was lied to,” what do you recommend we do with it once we’ve identified, “Yep, that feeling is there, big time”?
Joshua Weiss
Part of it is becoming emotionally intelligent. If people have not invested in emotional intelligence, then I would really recommend that you do. And so, part of it is, if I know, if I’m angry, then the question is, “Okay, what is it that the other person did or said that really pushed me over the edge here?”
And I’m a fan of actually bringing that into the process and saying, “Look, I got to tell you, I’m kind of disappointed with where we’ve gotten to. I thought that the stars kind of lined up here in a way that made a lot of sense. But I’m just not clear why we haven’t gotten where we’re getting. And I’m frustrated.”
Like, to me, what you’re doing there is you’re bringing your emotions into the process without them destroying the process. And the interesting thing about this is, if I sit down with you, Pete, and you interpret something that I did, right, and I can tell you’re, like there’s something going on from an emotional point of view, because human beings are not so great at hiding their emotions. In fact, most of us wear them on our sleeves and we can tell there’s something wrong. It’s not that hard, right?
But if you don’t tell me whether you’re angry, sad, frustrated, whatever, then I’m left to guess at what’s going on, and that never ends well. So, like I said, for me, it’s when you’re doing this, find a way to bring it in. Be like, “You know, I got to tell you, like the way in which we’ve gone about this has really not sat well with me, but I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”
And for you, in terms of processing your emotions, one of the best things that you can do is something that we call going to the balcony. And, really, what it means is temporarily step away from the table in order to process things and then come back to the table without your emotions overwhelming you. And a lot of times people, say to me, “Well, can you really just step away?” I’m like, “Yeah, you can. There’s no rules.”
And, frankly, it’s actually in the moment like that where we make our biggest mistakes. And we all feel that, right? Like, we can feel ourselves getting so angry that we’re just going to say whatever we feel. And once we’ve done that, that’s all well and good, but now we’ve just made this process a lot harder, because now we might have insulted the other, and now they’re in the same place we are, and all that kind of stuff.
So, I think it’s important to be able to step away. There’s a great quote by a guy named Ambrose Bierce who’s an American writer and humorist, who said, “When angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” The balcony is designed to help us to not make that speech. And it doesn’t, again, mean denying the emotional piece. It means recognizing it. It’s happening, whether you want to admit it or not.
And a lot of times, people would be like, “Oh, well, you know, in negotiation, you’re not supposed to show emotion.” I’m like, “Well, that’s not really true. Like, you have to be authentic. You have to be who you are.” Some people don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves, but they’re still feeling them. We’re all human at the end of the day. If someone deceives us, we feel angry, frustrated, whatever.
And so, you know, there’s a lot of self-talk. There’s a lot of self-management. And, in fact, in negotiation, it’s actually the one thing we have control over is our actions and our behavior. We don’t have control over the other side. So, how you react and respond is up to you. And, for me, I’ve been doing this a long time, and so I’m pretty attuned to the different things that get me going.
Like, when I was in a negotiation about a year and a half ago, and a guy said, “Clearly, you’re not smart enough to understand what I’m telling you, so let me break it down for you more simply.” And I was like, “Hmm, time for a balcony break,” because I knew I was wanting to say what he could do with himself. But I also knew that that would mean I was losing sight of my objectives, and so I needed to manage that.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I think you’re plenty smart, for the record. Well, tell me, any final things you want to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Joshua Weiss
I guess the most important thing that I would say is negotiation is a difficult realm. And I think people don’t understand how challenging it is to do it and to do it well. And so, try to go easy on yourself. I think our own worst critics are ourselves, and I think it’s really important to recognize that you’re going to have successes and failures, and both of those are opportunities to grow and get better at this.
And to the title of your podcast, I mean, if you want to be awesome at work, this is a realm where, if you invest in it, it will really help you. I have students in my program that are mid-career folks, and they all come to me, and they say, “I’m very good at what I do in the sciences, insurance, law,” it doesn’t matter, right? “But when I have to deal with people who I don’t agree with, or have to get people to come along on a project, I don’t know how to do that.” And this is how you do that. This is a deep dive into working with people effectively.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Joshua Weiss
Well, I’ll give you two, if I might. So, I’m a big Ted Lasso fan. I believe genuinely that there’s a lot of really great lessons from that show in terms of how do you negotiate, how do you deal with conflict. And the very famous scene where he’s playing darts, and it comes down to the notion of be curious, not judgmental.
The best negotiators are people who are really curious. They come in, they ask great questions, and they’re open. When you’re curious, it’s easier to gather information and to sort of be in a mindset where you’re looking for possibilities as opposed to roadblocks.
The other is by Voltaire, the actor and dramatist, who said, “If you think uncertainty is an uncomfortable proposition, try certainty.” And I think what he’s getting at is that the more certain people are in their views and in their beliefs, the more doors get closed. And when you can sit with uncertainty, we actually have a much better chance of finding a good solution.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Joshua Weiss
I mean, honestly, I would have to say that the research that I did in my dissertation was probably my favorite bit of research, where I looked at how mediators in very big conflicts, like peace processes and things like that, how they sequence issues.
Because in the literature and when people would talk about this, they would always talk about, “We have to start with easy issues and work our way up to the harder ones.” And a lot of people believe that about negotiation and dealing with conflict in general. But I sort of thought that seems strange. It seems like there are some conflicts out there that would require a different approach.
And so, I did 20 interviews with lots of interesting mediators and things like that. And I was able to uncover five different strategies for how people try to sequence issues. And it’s actually been an interesting contribution to the field. And I’ve seen people sort of gravitate to it because sometimes you just have to deal with the harder issues first. And if you’ve got that logic and you understand why, it can be really valuable.
So, I would say something along those lines, which is also something that a lot of people don’t tend to think a lot about is, “Where do I begin with what issues and why?” and things like that. And it’s interesting because it can actually be a source of problems. People want their issue addressed right away. And if it doesn’t get there, sometimes they can get really fixated on that and worried that it may never get addressed.
Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?
Joshua Weiss
There’s a book called Negotiating the Nonnegotiable by Dan Shapiro, and it talks about some of the most difficult negotiations out there and how do you deal with identity-based issues in negotiation, like the really difficult stuff related to values, like when we see the world very differently than others. How do you do that kind of thing? So, I really like that book.
In terms of more broadly speaking, I’m a big Malcolm Gladwell fan, primarily because I really like how he connects very disparate ideas, things that seem like there’s no connection whatsoever. He finds a way to weave those together. So, The Tipping Point, Blink, David and Goliath, Revisiting the Tipping Point. Like, they’re all really interesting books, and he’s a really interesting read.
And I think, when it comes to negotiation as well, like, his way of thinking is a way that I think is very helpful in negotiation.
Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Joshua Weiss
I mean, that would probably be the preparation that I do for my negotiations, and that process that I go through because it’s invaluable. But I do it in such a way that I’m always thinking about a contingency plan because I think one classic mistake that people make in negotiation is they want to have a plan, they want to go through the planning process, which is the right way to think about it. But you can’t have a very definitive plan.
What you have to do is really have more of a contingency plan that you’ve got your end goal that you’re trying to reach. But you want to have three or four different avenues to get there because it’s very possible that one of those avenues is going to be blocked or more than one.
So, when you prepare, I’d really encourage people to think about your end goal, but then think, “What are three or four different ways that I can get there?” And that gives you the confidence to be able to try some of these different avenues.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget, a Josh-original sound bite that resonates with folks, and they quote back to you often?
Joshua Weiss
I think it’s probably that compromise should be the last stop on the train, not the first. You can always compromise if you absolutely need to, but make it the last stop on the train, not the first.
Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Joshua Weiss
So, I have website that has all my books and material, including some of the children’s books that I’ve written that we talked about before we came on air. And that’s just www.JoshuaNWeiss.com. So, N as in Noah, which is my middle name.
And if people do end up getting the books or things along those lines, I’d love hearing from people and what they thought of this stuff and how it helped or what kind of further questions they have. So, an open invitation to your listeners to get in touch.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Joshua Weiss
Don’t downplay the importance of negotiation. It is a central component to your success and your future. And so, I would encourage you, if you don’t know much about it, embrace it, dive in. There’s a lot of great stuff that’s written out there, largely for public consumption. It’s not very academic in nature. And so, invest the time and energy to do it, and you won’t be sorry.
Joseph Nguyen discusses the hidden relationship between thinking and suffering—and offers a powerful framework for achieving peace of mind.
