Want To Win A Negotiation? No Need To Get Aggressive

This article by Karen Dillon was originally published on Inc.com.

spent the first decade of my career in New York City, which was quite a cultural education for a girl from suburban Boston. By the time I left, I felt I had earned the title of New Yorker, with the requisite mix of self-confidence and swagger. It wasn’t until years later, when I took my preteen daughters to the city, that I realized how different that person was from normal me. They started calling me “New York mom”—and not in a good way.

In the years since, I’ve wondered if it’s a good thing that we can manifest different versions of ourselves for different purposes, whether consciously or not. At work, must a person who takes pride in being fair to employees find a pugnacious alter ego for tough negotiations? Or is it possible to be a single, authentic version of ourselves all the time?

I recently sat down with long-time Harvard Law School professor and current senior fellow Bob Bordone to get to the bottom of the matter. Bordone, who co-authored the new book Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In, has been teaching and writing about conflict resolution and negotiation for nearly 30 years. What many people get wrong, he says, is believing that you must be a ruthless version of yourself to succeed. “One of the most common misconceptions about successful negotiators is that they’re aggressive,” he says. Instead, he suggests the following playbook.

1. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.

Make sure you come into a deal negotiation armed with facts about comparable deals. Be prepared to show that you know the market, but share reasonable arguments about why your deal is worth more than others that might seem similar.

2. Resist Getting Sucked Into Haggling.

If the other side starts throwing out extreme offers, don’t come back with a counter. Tell them you’re happy to have a conversation around reasonable offers but that you won’t respond to wildly discounted or inflated ones.

3. Practice Active Listening.

Instead of making a counter-offer the moment you hear something you don’t agree with, take a step back and ask a question to make sure you understand your counterpart’s point. Even a brief pause can help keep the conversation on track, because it demonstrates empathy. If the other side seems emotional about a point, ask an open-ended question to allow the person to explain themself and vent some of their steam. When you better understand the opposing point of view in a negotiation, you can better devise a solution that appeals to everyone.

4. Don’t Show Off.

Bringing a co-worker to a negotiation can be useful if you are each clear about your strengths and weaknesses and can work well together in a conversation. But too often, Bordone sees people channel the most hard-charging version of themselves just to prove to their colleagues that they can.

5. Take Your Time.

In his years of teaching negotiation, Bordone has found that students are often uneasy sitting in the discomfort of disagreement, so they want to finish a negotiation quickly rather than get to the best resolution. But, he says, it’s possible to turn conflict and negotiation into a chance to bring people together rather than it being simply a source of contention. The ability to disagree well—which he calls “conflict resilience”—offers not only a chance to get to yes, but also to get unstuck from the bad habits that sabotage our best selves.

Bordone is quick to acknowledge that being pushy and assertive can be a valuable business skill. In my own case, I succeeded in New York in part because I was willing to be a bit more aggressive than I might otherwise have been. And many entrepreneurs owe some of their success to manifesting their dreams, often relying on pure force of will. But it’s too easy to let that become your default, and it won’t always solve your problems. Becoming a great negotiator is as much about navigating the whole conversation as it is about winning any individual concession. “Good negotiators are empathetic and good listeners,” Bordone says. “They know how to frame a conversation so that both sides end up with a reasonable outcome.”