Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Negotiation

How to Mediate in a Dispute

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In mediation, the parties in disagreement work out a mutually acceptable solution with the help of a neutral, third party mediator.

If you’ve been called to serve as a go-between in a dispute, here’s what you can do to help promote mutual understanding and resolution:

  1. Set ground rules. Agree on how much time you’ll give to the mediation meeting. Keep the meeting close-ended. If there’re more than two parties, each with different views of a dispute, engage more than one mediator.
  2. Have each party prepare a brief summary of their positions before the mediation and send them to you, and, ideally, to each other. The brief can explain positions, rationale, and motivation. The brief can also contain each party’s summary understanding of the opposing party’s arguments and counterarguments.
  3. Insist that the each party have a clear understanding of their underlying intentions. What’s their best understanding of the basic objectives? What do they want to achieve? What’s rigid? What’s flexible? What are they willing to bargain?
  4. At the start of the mediation meeting, remind each party that mediation is a voluntary process. Your role is to help the parties reach an agreement, not to reach an agreement for them. Say, “Nothing lasting will happen unless each of you participates in the solution. Any agreement you’re able to reach must be your own.”
  5. Announce that your intention is to foster the interaction by helping each party understand one another’s perspectives and expectations. Encourage them to consider a wide range of solutions and to shun false dilemmas (“either-or” approach.) Push them to understand the other party’s underlying interests, not just their stated positions.
  6. Outline how they’ll work together during the process. Get them to agree that they’ll deal with matters in a non-confrontational way and be open-minded about what the other wants.
  7. Let each party make a preliminary presentation without interruption from the other parties. Then, encourage each party to respond directly to the other’s opening statements.
  8. If the communications break down completely, restart the mediation process by separating the parties and talking to each party separately. Go between the two rooms to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and to exchange offers. Continue the interchange until you’ve helped define an agreeable compromise.
  9. When you’re talking to each party separately during a break down in the discussions, help each party hear the views of the other and identify areas of common ground for a resolution. After independent caucuses, if possible, bring the parties back together to negotiate directly.
  10. Don’t stop each party from venting their frustrations, but try to keep them under control. If there’s rambling, gently pull the conversation back. Refocus on what needs to be achieved. Encourage them to remain open to persuasion.
  11. Even with a well thought-out approach, some disagreements turn ugly. Re-focus the dialogue on the future. Remind the parties that they can’t fight over something that’s already happened, but they can set a course for going forward.
  12. If the parties come to a resolution, draft the terms of a binding agreement and have both parties review it and sign it. Make sure the parties own the resolution, because they’re the ones who’ll live with the consequences.
  13. If the parties don’t reach an agreement, help them decide whether it’d be helpful to meet again later, use a different mediator, or try other ways to resolve the issues.

These books are most helpful in negotiations, either when you’re the mediator or one of the parties in conflict: Roger Fisher et al’s Getting to Yes (1991, 2011; my summary) and Kerry Patterson et al’s Crucial Conversations (2011.)

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Buy Yourself Time

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The secret of “thinking on the spot” is to be prepared. Occasionally, though, when you’re put on the spot, the unanticipated questions and requests for your time and money can leave you feeling tongue-tied and wanting to head for the door.

To put your best response forward and prevent getting forced into some commitment that you might regret later, see if you can buy yourself some time.

  • When someone says something that you don’t agree with, and you can’t speak up at that moment, you can declare that you need to get educated on the subject before chatting about it further. Bonus: Conversations are often easier when you think through the nuances and get prepared to assert your positions.
  • When someone asks you to do something that you aren’t sure you want to do, buy yourself time by saying you must check on something or consult somebody before making a commitment. Bonus: Taking time before you say no can soften the news of your rejection.

Buy yourself more time and speak up later on your own terms. Even if you end up disagreeing with your interlocutor or declining her request, she’ll feel appreciated knowing you’ve given her opinion or request some thought.

Idea for Impact: Buying time—and sometimes stalling—is your prerogative. It shows consideration for others—and for yourself. It’s is a way of respecting your own wants and needs.

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Commitment, Not Compliance

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For some managers, fear is a dirty little secret … they use it when they are either unwilling or unable to persuade employees to work together to achieve goals.

Fear gets results but it does so at a cost. Fear is saps enthusiasm and stifles constructive deliberation.

  • Step back and work with your employee to determine performance objectives, goals, and priorities. Then, let your employee translate those objectives into tasks and determine how best to perform the task.
  • Don’t interfere excessively or micromanage. Don’t insist that there’s only “one best way” to do the job. Trust employees to make the right choices to reach the end result.
  • Don’t be a pushover, either. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be. Managers can be strong without instilling fear. Be steadfast and unrelenting in your quest for getting results.
  • Let the employee customize the job to reflect her strengths and weaknesses to the extent possible, without compromising the core contributions expected of her role. Allowing the maximum possible use of your employees’ motivated abilities to achieve targeted results will not only use strengths to the maximum, but also drives intrinsic job satisfaction.
  • Take the time to get to know each employee’s unique set of talents. Try to dole out the available work to best match your employees’ talents.
  • Share the glory. Giving others a chance to claim credit is an easy, and effective, way to get results. As Dale Carnegie wrote masterful self-help manual How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936,) be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Learn to overlook small mistakes, but address problems before they escalate.

Idea for Impact: There is potentially no more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfaction that an employee could gain from autonomy under structure, and from using one’s motivated talents. Find ways to entice commitment from your employees. Don’t force compliance by virtue of authority.

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More from Less // Book Summary of Richard Koch’s ’80/20 Principle’

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The Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) recorded a “maldistribution” between causes and effects in economic statistics. It’s an observable fact that a minority of reasons—nominally around 20%—tends to produce a majority—80%—of the results.

Most Effects Come from Relatively Few Causes

More than a century later, the Romanian-American quality control pioneer Joseph Juran (1904–2008) embraced Pareto’s notion and demonstrated that 80% of all manufacturing quality defects are caused by 20% of reasons. Juran urged managers to identify and address the “vital few” or the “critical few “—the small fraction of elements that account for this disproportionally large fraction of the effect.

This Pareto Law, 80/20 Rule of Thumb, Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort, Juran’s Law of the Vital Few, 80-20 Thinking—call it what you want—permeates every aspect of business and life. Now that you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

A fifth of your customers accounts for four-fifths of your sales. 20% of your employees are responsible for the majority of your firm’s productivity. 20% of your stocks will be responsible for 80% of your future gains. You tend to favor 20% of your clothes and wear them 80% of the time. You spend 80% of your socializing time with 20% of your friends. 20% of the decisions you’ve made during your life have shaped 80% of your current life. 80 percent of the wealth tends to be concentrated with 20 percent of the families.

The Pareto principle is a state of nature (the way things happen) and a process (a way of thinking about problems.) The 20% are the sources of the most significant potential impact.

The Remarkable Variance of Contributors and Effects

Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less (1999) elaborates on using this seminal prioritization principle. “The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually leads to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. … The winners in any field have … found ways to make 20% of effort yield 80% of results.”

Koch explains ad nauseam that most of us work much too hard and produce much less in relation to what could be produced. If trying harder hasn’t worked, perhaps it’s time to try less.

  • Invest your time and effort more wisely. Don’t address the less significant elements. “Most things always appear more important than the few things that are actually more important.” Examine what you do of low value. In other words, eliminate or reduce the 80% of efforts that produce less-significant results.
  • Know when to stop. Once you’ve solved the 20% of the issue to deliver 80% of the impact, any further effort can only achieve diminishing returns.

Idea for Impact: In most areas of human activity, just 20% of things will be worthwhile.

Recommendation: Speed-read Richard Koch’s 80/20 Principle. It’s an excellent reminder that not all effort is equal, so it pays to focus on what matters most.

Embrace the “80-20” frame of mind in everything you do—at work and home. Unless you want to spend every waking hour working, it’s essential to learn how to focus your efforts on the most promising, impactful aspects of what needs to be done.

  • Realize that few things really matter in life, but they count a tremendous amount. These vital things may be challenging to discover and realize, but once you find these things that really matter, they give you immense power—the power that gives you more from less. Spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy making sure these decisions are made well, and you put yourself in the best position you can in the process.
  • If you want to improve your effectiveness at anything, focus only on what matters most. Be extraordinarily selective—spend time resourcefully on the few essentials that matter the most and little or no time on the massive trivia that engulfs most of your time.

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This Hack Will Help You Think Opportunity Costs

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Making decisions is all about opportunity costs. For instance, every time you spend money to get something, you should ask yourself what else, perhaps of better value, you could get with that money—now or later.

The problem is, when forced to choose between something immediate and concrete and something else that’s comparatively abstract and distant, the opportunity cost could lack clarity.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely proposes the notion of “anti-goals” to help examine the trade-offs you’re forced to make. Ariely encourages pairing goals such that if you satisfy one, you’ll impede the other. For example, when choosing to spend $100 on an evening out today, you can consider a tangible anti-goal—say, saving for the family’s summer vacation—that’ll be held back.

Idea for Impact: Thinking about what you want to avoid—the anti-goal—is a potent tool. It allows you to focus on things that really matter.

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Negotiating Without Giving In

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Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In (1981) by Roger Fisher et al. is a best-selling manual used in everything from marriage counseling to international negotiations.

Citing examples of all sorts of conflicts, the authors build the case that there’s a far greater chance of agreeable resolutions when parties aren’t bogged down in intractable positions. The tome helps highlight how the commerce of relationships is rarely ever simple and hardly ever so fair.

Behind opposed positions lie shared and compatible interests, as well as conflicting ones. We tend to assume that because the other side’s positions are opposed to ours, their interests must also be opposed. If we have an interest in defending ourselves, then they must want to attack us. If we have an interest in minimizing the rent, then their interest must be to maximize it. In many negotiations, however, a close examination of the underlying interests will reveal the existence of many more interests that are shared or compatible than ones that are opposed.

The book has its roots in the Harvard Negotiation Project. This interdisciplinary consortium started when Harvard realized that students from such faculties as law and business were ill-equipped to tackle conflicts effectively.

Negotiation Need Not Be a Zero-Sum Game

At its core, Getting to Yes focuses on what the authors call “principled negotiation”—it’s emphasizing what’s essential to you and why. In contrast, “position negotiation” is merely making demands and offering concessions until a compromise is reached. When you clarify why something is important to you and heed why things are essential to the other party, myriad solutions in your interests and theirs present themselves.

In traditional position-versus-position bargaining, the other must lose if you have to win and vice versa. With principled negotiation, you cultivate a supportive approach, “work side by side, and attack the problem, not each other.” Rather than stake out unwavering positions, you explore all possible “options for mutual gain” and present the other side with “yesable” propositions.

Separate the People from the Problem

To focus on underlying interests, the parties should try to get inside each other’s heads and consider the emotions involved—the desire for security or a fear of losing status, for example. “The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it, as difficult as that may be, is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess.”

An illustrative anecdote cites President Nasser of Egypt being interviewed in 1970. His negotiating position was that Israel must pull its troops out “from every inch of Arab territory,” with no Arab obligation in return. The interviewer switches from positions to interests by prompting Nasser to consider what would happen to Prime Minister Golda Meir if she went on Israeli TV to reveal such a capitulation. Nasser bursts out laughing: “Oh, would she have trouble at home!” His compassion for Meir’s public perception transcends one of the most intractable geopolitical crises of our times.

Recommendation: The Best Little Book on Win-Win Negotiations

Must-read Getting to Yes (1981; reissued 2011.) It’ll change your general conception of negotiation by showing you how to benefit by seeing the world in terms of mutually beneficial transactions. This simple-but-practical guide to negotiations is full of useful tips on negotiating effectively without giving in or jeopardizing your relationship with the other party.

Any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.

Some of the book’s techniques seem naive, and the authors tend to oversimplify bargaining positions. Moreover, not all conflicts can be solved as discrete judgment-based conciliations without having one party benefit only at significant cost to the other. Nonetheless, Getting to Yes teaches helpful lessons on understanding oneself and others, compromising, and searching for “win-win-win” solutions.

Idea for Impact: To persuade, focus on fairness and mutual interest, not on insisting on bargaining positions and winning the contest of will.

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You’ll Never Get a ‘Yes’ If You Never Ask

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It never does any harm to ask for what you want

During a Q&A at Vanderbilt University in 2013, lifelong Billy Joel fan and piano player Michael Pollack plucked up the courage and stood up to ask his childhood idol a question.

Pollack, an 18-year-old freshman at Vanderbilt, asked to accompany Joel in a performance of “New York State of Mind,” Pollack’s favorite song: “I was very fortunate to play with Richie Cannata [Joel’s saxophone player] many times in New York City, and I was wondering if I could play it with you.”

With just a hint of hesitation, Joel said, “Okay.”

Joel gave a remarkable vocal performance to accompany Pollack’s piano skills. The crowd applauded.

“Remember that name,” Joel told the excited audience. “Guy’s got chops.”

An online video of the performance quickly went viral.

Stop Overthinking Every Simple (and Not so Simple) Request

Pollack took a risk and traded the possibility of embarrassment and rejection for a lifetime of memories and a huge payoff.

Before long, Pollack signed publishing deals and began collaborating with other musicians. After graduating from Vanderbilt, he wrote dozens of songs for celebrity musicians. This year, he achieved his first U.S. Top 40 radio #1 with Maroon 5’s “Memories.”

Idea for Impact: All it Takes is a Simple Ask

Most folks know that the key to getting what they want is merely asking for it. But they’re too wimpish to speak up.

Take a chance. A little bit of courage can open doors for you. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Ask for what you want. You sometimes won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.

Try something today that has a small risk and a huge payoff.

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How to Project Positive Expectations

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If you want to be seen as a doer, somebody who can be depended upon to get a job done, answer with “I will” whenever possible.

According to George Walther, author of Power Talking: 50 Ways to Say What You Mean & Get What You Want (1991,) expressions such as “I’ll try” make you seem hesitant—even ineffective.

Recall all the people who’ve promise to do something by saying, “I’ll try to get back to you tomorrow.” They rarely do. They have to be reminded, prodded, and nagged.

Those who announce, “I’ll have an answer for you by two this afternoon,” typically follow through.

Idea for Impact: Watch Your Language

Your choice of words matters. You are building your reputation—your brand—one interaction at a time.

Your assertions set the tone for what others can expect from you. They also motivate you to get the job done as you’ve promised.

Speak the language of success.

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The High Cost of Winning a Small Argument

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Winning a conflict with a colleague over who’s right may feel good at the moment. But you could lose a future battle when you may need her cooperation and support the most.

Insisting upon being right when disagreeing with your boss could be dearer.

It’s futile to win any argument by overpowering or silencing the other person. Even causal denigration and occasional microaggressions can eventually lead to feelings of alienation and anger.

Conflicts sometimes evolve quickly from simple disagreements into high-stakes battles. So, before it’s too late, consider if taking a step back is wiser. Take the initiative and concede a point—even if you may end up losing the argument.

Seeking small glory now may only spoil your chance of bigger success in the future. Focus on the outcome—often, it’s the result that matters, not your role in it.

Idea for Impact: When you think you can nail someone with a winning argument, take a deep breath, and check if you could control your ego and back down. You may actually lose something small, but avoid losing something bigger.

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When One Person is More Interested in a Relationship

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The American sociologist Willard Waller coined the term “Principle of Least Interest” to describe how differences of commitment in a relationship can have a major effect on the relationship’s dynamics.

In The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (1938,) Waller noted that, in any relationship (romantic, familial, business, buyer-seller, and so on) where one partner is far more emotionally invested than the other, the less-involved partner has more power in the relationship. In a one-sided romantic relationship, for example, the partner who loves less has more power.

Moreover, appearing indifferent or uninterested is a common way by which people try to raise their own standing in a relationship. Recall the well-known “walk away” negotiation tactic—tell a used car salesman, “this just isn’t the deal that I’m looking for,” and he may call you the next day with a better offer.

An imbalanced relationship can only last for a while.

A nourishing relationship shouldn’t involve a constant struggle for power.

Idea for Impact: Watch out for relationships where the other seems to care less about the relationship than you do. Such relationships can drain you dry.

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