BOOK - ‘Negotiating the Nonnegotiable’ at Work and at Home
Daniel Shapiro, director and founder of the
Harvard International Negotiation Program, has negotiated some of the most
challenging conflicts with heads of state, corporate executives and even
families. Shapiro recently joined us on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM
channel 111 to talk about his new book on the
subject, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve
Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: I
found it interesting that your book takes a look at both ends of the
spectrum, both the personal and the professional. When it comes to resolving
conflict in the office, a lot of the same types of incidents and issues arise
at home and work that could be negotiated in the same kind of manner.
Shapiro: Yes, our research
has shown that the underlying dynamics that make our conflicts so miserable —
whether at work with a tough colleague or at home with a tough spouse — tend to
be quite similar. The power of them might be more at work or at home, but the
impact is just the same. It’s difficult.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
break it down into a very simple and straightforward point: Whether you’re
talking about conflict in the office or conflict at home, the biggest common
denominator is that both involve humans. And humans are still a very flawed
species.
Shapiro: We are both a
flawed species and an incredible species. How do you deal with these
emotionally charged conflicts — with your board, with somebody at work, at
home? On the one hand, fighting back doesn’t work, it just escalates the
conflict. Two, ignoring the conflict doesn’t work because the conflict
continues to fester. Three, and here’s the twisted part, even if you try to
collaboratively work things out — with your spouse, with your tough teenager,
at work — in emotionally charged conflicts, even that tends not to work.
Because we’re not getting to the underlying dynamics that are at play, the underlying
emotional forces that tend to drive us toward conflict.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
are those forces? What are people just missing that would enable them to
resolve difficult conflicts?
Shapiro: Let me start with
at least one example. In the book, I talk about a concept that my research has
shown is quite powerful in any conflict, and I call it vertigo. Think about the
most recent conflict that you’ve gotten into. You don’t need to tell me what it
is — at home, at work. Vertigo is when you get so emotionally consumed in that
conflict that you can think of nothing else other than that evil person who did
not consult you before making that decision, or whatever the problem is. You go
home after that long day of work, and yes, you are physically at home — your
body is at home — but your mind is still racing about what happened at work.
You are in vertigo. We all know the experience, but to give it a name empowers
you to decide, do I want to go there, toward vertigo? Or do I want to try to
have a collaborative, positive conversation here?
As an example, just last week I was working with Israelis and
Palestinians in the Middle East, and sharing with them some of the ideas of
this new book, some of the new research, including this concept of vertigo. I
got an email two days ago from one of the very senior players on one of the
sides of the conflict. She said to me in that email, “I just got out of a
meeting right now.” This was a meeting between sides, in fact. She said, “As I
was there, in that meeting, I felt that tornado of vertigo moving toward me,”
ready to sweep her away. She said, “I thought in my head, do I want to go
there? Do I not?” She decided no, and she said it was an incredibly productive
conversation. We all have that choice, whether it’s vertigo or some of these
other research points in the book.
Knowledge@Wharton: In
some respects, taking a different approach ends up being the best path then,
correct?
Shapiro: Absolutely. But
it’s hard to do. Another concept that we’ve really worked to mine in the book
is a concept that Sigmund Freud initially called the repetition compulsion.
This is the idea that we tend to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns of
behavior again and again and again and again, even though we’re shooting
ourselves in the foot. You can send all of your employees to corporate training
on negotiation. They come back from the training, and they think, “Oh, I’m much
better.” Yes, they might be better for a day or two, but unless you deal with
these underlying dynamics, your solidified and imprinted patterns of conflict
resolution, unless you can deal with these and try and really work at them and
change them, it’s lost money for your company.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
talk also in the book about the taboos that exist in the office, and can be in
the family as well.
Shapiro: Yes, whether it’s
the office or home, there are those issues that are socially prohibited from
talking about. Yet it’s often those issues that are the ones that are driving
so much of the dysfunction either at work or at home. In the home setting,
everybody knows it, but nobody can talk about mom’s drinking problem. Or at
work, everybody knows that there is dysfunction going on in that one
department, but nobody dares tell the CEO or the senior executive for fear of
getting socially punished in some way. Yet if you don’t talk about those
issues, you’re suffering. It affects the bottom line.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
did an interesting experiment, which I want you to share because it was a
rather unique tack in terms of trying to mitigate and work through what you
call the Tribes Effect.
Shapiro: Yes, most senior
business people think, “Ah, I’m immune to that stuff. I’m good at conflict
resolution.” As you said at the beginning of our conversation, people are
people; we are all human beings. There’s this exercise I did at Davos at the
World Economic Forum. The first time I did it there was back in 2006.
Forty-five global leaders come into the room. I divide them up into six groups.
I ask them to create their own tribes at their tables — what are their values,
what are their beliefs, so on. I ask them to dress up in their own tribal
outfits. Literally, I have the greatest [stories for] blackmail in the world —
a deputy head of state in that room with balloons on his head, VCs helping to
create some of the most well known companies, and so on.
They create these six tribes, and then I get up in front of the
room and say, let’s debrief the exercise. All of a sudden, the lights go
completely black in this room, and into the room bursts this intergalactic
alien who says, “I am an intergalactic alien. I have come to destroy Earth. I
will give you one opportunity to save this world from destruction. You must
choose one of these six tribes to be the tribe of everybody. You cannot change
anything about your own tribe, and if you cannot come to agreement by three
rounds of negotiation, the world will be destroyed. Ha! Ha! Ha!” And out floats
the alien.
Three rounds of negotiation, the intensity builds and builds.
They are talking rationally, emotions start to pick up, and by round three, in
the middle of the room, you have six chairs. Five men and one woman come to the
middle of the room. One of the most well-known VCs in the world is one of those
negotiators, [as well as] a media mogul, a president of a university. These men
start yelling over one another.
They start yelling over this woman, “Our tribe!” “No, our
tribe!” “No, ours!” This woman gets so upset that she literally stands on her
barstool, and she yells, “This is just another example of male competitor
behavior! You all come to my tribe!” One other tribe comes to hers. The others
refuse. Five, four, three, two, one, boom! Our world explodes at Davos. I have
run this exercise dozens and dozens of times with groups around the world, and
almost always the world explodes again and again.
Knowledge@Wharton: What’s
the reaction after the fact, by all these executives?
Shapiro: This is our reality
right now, and this is a beautiful question because it’s exactly the point of
the book. Someone who is listening to your show right now might be in the midst
of a miserable divorce, and yet on some rational level, you’re not supposed to
be mean to your spouse that you’re divorcing. You have two kids or whatever it
is.
At work, I should not be doing this behavior with my colleague.
You get sucked into it. That’s the problem. The book offers ideas on how to
deal with it. How do people deal with it? At Davos, I asked the group
afterward, how do you feel? This one guy points to me, and he says, “This is
all your fault!” He said, “You set us up for this!” I said, “You know what? I
did everything in my power to try and make the world explode, but at the end of
the day, you had a choice. You could have saved the world.” That is the
reality.
Conflict is one of the greatest costs on any business, any
company, in any family, and it is also one of the things that we have more than
any other power to do something about. Exactly to your point at the beginning
because we are human beings, and this is a human problem, there is a human
answer.
Knowledge@Wharton: But
a lot of the time the conflict, and you talked about this as well, is something
that you can’t see with the naked eye. It’s just behind the scenes and
festering a lot of times.
Shapiro: Yes, and at the
same time, if you take just a little step back, there often are a small set of
factors that tend to drive a lot of our conflicts. Let me lay out a few that I
talk about. One, autonomy: this core motivation to have the freedom to make
decisions without somebody else imposing a decision on you. At work, if one of
your teammates makes even a small decision but didn’t consult you, it can have
a big emotional impact. That’s autonomy — recognize it.
Let me give you just one more. Status: We all like to feel high
and good in our social standing. If someone comes along and says — “Yeah, why
did you do that?” — you suddenly feel smaller, shrunken. Those are the kinds of
things we can be aware of. What are the underlying emotional factors that tend to
stimulate our negative emotions and get us all revved up?
Knowledge@Wharton: How
much harder is it for people who are not only dealing with this type of stress
and conflict at work, but then they have it at home? Being the dad of a
9-year-old and two 7-year-olds, I get this quite a bit right now.
Shapiro: So you have a
9-year-old and two 7-year-olds. I have a 10-, an 8-, and a 4-year-old. So we’re
quite similar in our family lives. It’s the same tools. Are the tools perfect?
No. This negotiating the nonnegotiable, is it a quick fix? If you read the
book, you’re going to have beautiful relations immediately? No, and that’s not
the point. The point is it takes work, but there is a path to get there.
At home, for example, my wife and I, we both know this concept
of vertigo, and she doesn’t reject it even though I’ve been working on it.
She’ll be the first to say to me, “Hold on, Dan. We are moving toward vertigo.
Do you really want to go there now?” Some of the time, it’s like, “You know
what? I do.” Some of the times, no, I don’t. But we’re taking back power: We’re
not letting the conflict control us; we’re controlling the conflict.
One other connected point: A huge point is to shift the dynamic,
so it’s no longer me versus that other person in the conflict, it’s the two of
us facing the same shared conflict. It’s not me versus my colleague, me versus
my wife. They are not the problem. The problem is the conflict. How do we deal
with it? That mindset shift is what takes people out of that Tribes Effect,
that adversarial mindset, and what allows people to save the world.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
talk about how identity is such a strong factor in this. There are many times
when people hold things sacred, which is the term you use. How do you deal with
that?
Shapiro: Business people
might think, “Wait a minute, sacred! That’s outside the workplace, that’s the
religious element.” My notion of the sacred is anything that you find deeply
meaningful, within your organization or beyond. It can be religion but it is
much bigger — it’s sacred.
Looking at the current situation between Apple and the
government, the FBI, around the phone situation. There is a sacred value that
it appears that Apple holds, which is privacy of information. They are willing
to sacrifice a lot to risk elements of their reputation for that. So the sacred
is there with us. One huge point is, just recognize it. And even more than
that, think carefully — with your various different teams, with the leaders of
teams in an organization, what do you hold sacred? What is your identity within
the organization?
In the book, I talk about a simple model called BRAVE, you can
walk and think through it with your organization. What are the beliefs that are
important to your organization or to you personally? What rituals do you find
are useful to do — the holidays, the monthly outing that your team does? What
are the allegiances that are important to your company? What are the values
that are most essential? What are those emotionally meaningful experiences that
define your organization? Way back in the day, when all those Microsoft, Apple
people were in a garage building their computers, that was a big deal, and that
story still affects these companies to this day.
Knowledge@Wharton: Do
the companies themselves truly understand how important a topic
this is — not only to the bottom line but for the corporate culture
as well?
Shapiro: Your point hits it
dead on. When a company looks at their financial spreadsheet, what they see is,
one, cost, typically around conflict, which is the legal fees, the litigation
and so on. Yet, like you are saying, the burden of conflict is tremendous with
all of the hidden costs. You have the poor decision-making because that team is
so dysfunctional. … It is extraordinary, in terms of cost, the amount of time
devoured when resolving conflicts between the disputants [and people who get
involved such as] the manager, HR, the [folks doing the] grievance
investigation.
You have your superstar players that end up walking from your
company to go next door to your competition. Is it about the salary? Absolutely
not, it’s because I can’t stand you guys. Then you get the toxic corporate
culture, the damage to the reputation, and on and on and on. And it stacks up
to be exponentially more.
Knowledge@Wharton: If
you get to the point where you really just have irreconcilable differences, how
do you deal with that?
Shapiro: That’s the number
one reason I get called into organizations to consult. A CEO brings me in,
closes the door to the office and says to me, “Look, how do you deal with
irrational people?” The moment I hear that question, 99% of the time, a siren
goes off in my head and says, you know what? This is completely negotiable.
What people tend to do, once you get into this adversarial mindset, all of a
sudden I am closed off to the other side, to their world. I start to believe my
way is right and legitimate; their way is wrong and illegitimate. I am living
in a closed world.
So often what I’ll do with people in the corporate world, and
even in the family world, in crisis, is to have them literally move seats. I
want you sit over here in this other seat right here, take on the role of that
other person who they find completely irrational. We systematically walk
through what things look like from your perspective as the other party. This
little exercise alone has allowed breakthroughs in international conflicts —
Peru and Ecuador is an example.
I was working with someone recently who was doing a multibillion
dollar merger, and it hit some problems. It was a problem between the two CEOs;
they just didn’t like each other. I did it there, and it broke the impasse.
These aren’t foolproof methods. I’m not saying these are all the answers, but
this stuff does work and it can save extraordinary amounts of money. It
leverages the organization. It helps your family.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/negotiating-the-nonnegotiable/
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