Nolan Martin :
Hello and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. My name is Nolan Martin. Joined with me today is my partner, Aram Donigian. Aram, you want to kick this one off?
Aram Donigian :
I sure will. Thanks Nolan. Dr. Susan Raines is a diplomat for the US State Department, currently serving in Mexico. Her views that she’ll share today are her own and not a statement of the State Department. Now for two decades Susan served as professor and program director for the conflict management and peace building graduate program at Kennesaw State University, which just happens to also be my wife’s alma mater.
Susan is a mediator. Yeah round of applause. Yay for your Kennesaw, the owls. Susan is a mediator and conflict resolution consultant for multinational and international organizations with a focus on dispute prevention and resolution through superior management and leadership capacity building. Her textbook conflict management for managers and leaders is used to train managers, leaders, and ombudsmen to prevent and manage conflict effectively to enhance mission achievement.
She co-authored expert mediators for advanced mediators and negotiators using data gathered from the most experienced mediators in the world. Susan served as the editor in chief for Conflict Resolution Quarterly for 12 years and has authored more than 60 peer reviewed articles. She has mediated more than 18,000 cases inside and outside of the court system. Did I get that number right? 18,000?
Susan Raines :
Yes. Yeah, there’s a lot of business there.
AD :
That’s a lot of work. 18,000 cases inside and outside of the court system. Trained mediators worldwide and coached executive leadership teams for Fortune 500 organizations. She has lived in six states and five countries and has worked in or visited more than 60 additional countries.
Susan loves to hike, paddle, run, travel, read, cook, bake, and spend time with her family and friends. Although I have no idea how you find the time to do all that, Susan, and still find the time to be with us today. Thanks so much for joining us on the NEGOTIATEx podcast.
SR :
I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for that rather long introduction
AD :
Well, it’s great to cover everything you do, including all the hobbies.
SR :
You know what Jimmy Carter was famous to say it’s amazing how much you can cram into a hundred years.
AD :
Isn’t that true? And as we record this obviously tomorrow is our national day of mourning for former president Carter. So very much in the forefront of our thinking particularly with the work that he did diplomatically, too. Well Susan, you had quite a career in conflict management. I gotta ask you: Was this always the plan where you saw yourself or did something happen? What caused you to get into this line of work?
Susan’s Multifaceted Journey In Conflict Resolution [02:35]
SR :
You know, I grew up as a hippie kid in California. Well, not, I grew up in it and I wanted to pursue world peace, make the world a better place. You know, can’t we all just get along? And it turns out that the way you pursue world peace is just thousands and thousands of negotiations and efforts to conflict and make decisions on a daily, monthly basis. Everything from when I started, I did environmental. International Environmental Treaty Negotiation.
Then I did interstate water issues, right? And then everything from divorces and how we get along in our families to our communities. International child abduction mediation, right? For custody disputes. So really bringing peace to the world starts with bringing peace to our world and resolving those conflicts through negotiation and conflict management in the home. In the community in the workplace and then internationally So I like to work at all of those different realms and to pursue world peace.
AD :
Well, I love that quote. Let me make sure I got it right bringing peace to the world starts with bringing peace to our own worlds. Did I get that?
SR :
Yeah. That’s true.
AD :
That is good. I like that. And it’s, I’ll tell you that it’s just in line with what Nolan and I are trying to do with NEGOTIATEx and highlighting the work of you and so many others that are in the field and really working complex, hard problems.
SR :
Yeah. You know, there’s a joke at conflict management. Conflict resolution is a growth industry because once you learn how to, you know, people who say, you know, that they don’t have opportunities to practice their negotiation skills, I say, oh yes, you do. Do you have a teenager? You know, absolutely. There’s no shortage. Do you have a nosy neighbor? You know, there’s no shortage of opportunities to practice our negotiation skills at work and everywhere else.
AD :
Yeah. They don’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
NM :
So Susan, we’d love to start by discussing your book and academic career. Why’d you focus on managers? You know, as we sit here in early 2025, do managers need conflict management skills now more than ever before? Or is this something that they’ve been needing more of, but just haven’t received.
The Crucial Role Of Conflict Management In Leadership [04:27]
SR :
Yeah, I think we maybe didn’t label it this way, but all managers are conflict managers, right? You become a manager not just because you’re good at whatever technical skill you started out as. Maybe you were an engineer and now you’re, maybe you were a physician and now you’re administrator at the hospital or a dean at the university. But once you’re in that managerial position, very little of your job has to do with that expertise that got you there.
Now your job is managing people and resolving problems. And we know that conflict avoidant managers almost never rise above middle management, sometimes low middle management. because it is their job to be proactive, to sometimes take risks, to pull together a team that’s not functioning well and really dig into that and pull out that splinter and figure out, you know, how do we get that fixed?
So all managers are conflict managers. I think we’re now recognizing this as a skill set that we kind of thought some people were naturally good at and some people were naturally bad at, but it turns out everybody can get pretty good at this, right? It really is a set of skills and processes. So you learn the steps of a process and you practice the skills and those things can really be helpful for all managers.
And even when I have a manager who’s conflict avoidant or just thinks they’re not good, they don’t have good people skills. I tell them you tackle it like you tackle any other thing. If you need to learn how to do budgeting, you take some budgeting class or you, you know, you learn how to budget. It’s the same thing. These are skills that anybody can learn to improve.
AD :
On this topic of skills, what do you think are the most critical conflict management skills that a new or seasoned manager needs to master?
Why Mastering Difficult Conversations Is Essential For Effective Management [05:59]
SR :
I think the first, and you know, there’s this thing called recency bias, so whatever we’re currently dealing with just pops to mind, but I do think that when you have really nice people, really nice managers, really nice people on the team, they are sometimes afraid to have difficult conversations because they’re worried about hurting their relationship and they end up hurting their relationship because they refuse to have, you know, those hard conversations.
So the number one skill for managers is to not be afraid to have difficult conversations. That’s actually all the research indicates. It is these really hard conversations that brings us together and builds our ability to function well as a team. And conflict comes from unmet expectations, right? Just, that’s one of my mantras. Conflict comes from unmet expectations.
So maybe you thought it was going to go this way, or the project would be done a certain way, or that we were going to communicate a certain way, but we didn’t discuss it explicitly, we didn’t reach agreements about it explicitly, and now there’s conflicts because I assume you should just know what I have in my head and you assume the same. And we end up making it personal and thinking you’re not doing it right.
So the number one skill for managers is that willingness to roll up their sleeves and sit down and it’s almost and I hate to use a word in business that people probably don’t want to hear but it’s almost like a fear of intimacy. It’s like I’m afraid to really tell you that I’m upset about something or I’m afraid to tell you that this is bothering me, but if I don’t tell you right, we’re gonna have volcano syndrome people just blow up because they can’t make it anymore. So the number one skill is the willingness to engage in hard conversations. And you do that by letting people know that we’re all on the same team.
And I really want you to succeed, you know, I want to succeed together. So let’s put our heads together and figure it out. So that number one skill for sure is that willingness to engage. Fearlessness.
AD :
I love that. I don’t think that’s something we always hear. And yet it is very common sense, right? That willingness to step in.
NM :
Yeah. And you kind of mentioned that, you know, conflict often gets this bad rep. Whether in business or elsewhere, but as you say in your book, conflict isn’t inherently negative. It’s about how we handle it. Does conflict and how we handle it look different in public versus private versus non profit sectors or are the nuances between these fairly small?
Strategies For Cultivating Positive Outcomes In Organizations [08:06]
SR :
I’ll give a couple of metaphors that are helpful. Conflict is like air. It’s all around us and it can be polluted or it can be clean, right? Or it’s like a garden and it’s going to grow weed. Or it weeds or it’s going to grow flowers. So how are we tending that? You know, it’s going to be there whether we handle it or not.
So the question is how we handle it makes it positive or negative. How we tend our garden, makes it grow weeds or it makes it grow fruit and flowers. So, just assume conflict is there and then building those skills and the comfort level to manage it really matters. And then public, private, sector, the only thing I would say is that small organizations and younger organizations move faster, respond quicker, and they don’t have all these layers of bureaucracy so that if you want to try a new program or make a change or pivot, you can do that a lot faster than in a really big organization.
And, sometimes in a big organization, you actually have to go through a bunch of layers just to get permission to engage in the negotiation, not to mention permission about what your parameters are, what’s the most or least you can agree to, for example. The big thing I see is that older, more bureaucratic organizations, whether they’re public or private, are at a disadvantage in an environment that’s rapidly changing and an environment where innovation matters.
But, public agencies are meant to not make really snap decisions. We’re meant to really do everything with transparency and have committees that make the idea that more minds on this is going to yield a better result. So there’s pros and cons to that, but we definitely need to think about all these what I call multi level games, right? So a two level game means I have to negotiate with my team and get us all on the same page before I can negotiate with the other side, right? The other negotiating partner, I don’t like to see them as opposition.
But sometimes it takes a lot in a big organization, a bureaucratic organization or a public organization to get the team on that same page that you can then go and engage in that external negotiation. So we always think about, we miss those internal negotiations that have to happen first so we can get everybody behind the fact that a change is needed or that we’re ready to go ahead and engage in some kind of negotiation. I think that’s harder, the bigger the organization and the older it gets.
AD :Yeah, I find that interesting because, you know, Nolan, you and I, we often will talk about the greater difficulties or challenges with internal negotiations. And I don’t know if I’ve thought that it’s possibly more of an issue for a more mature business than maybe for a younger developing company.
NM :
What advice would you have for a leader that identifies that their personnel are either willing to kind of address the conflict? You as a leader understand that you do need to address the conflict, but you don’t know how well it’s going to be received or how well they’re going to engage with what you’re trying to talk to them about or just get on the table. Is that something that leaders should be able to identify as? When the timing’s right or situation or scenario, I’m not sure.
The Key To Effective Communication & Collaboration In Management [10:50]
SR :
Yeah, so I think part of it is what we call communicating intent before content. Intent before content means if I’m going to have a conversation that I think might be difficult, whether it’s a performance review, whether it’s coming up with a new idea that I want us to consider pursuing, or I want to get rid of an idea that I think is pretty bad that we’ve been pursuing, that’s even harder.
So intent before content is when I would say to someone, hey, I don’t know if this is going to work, but I wonder, you know, my goal is. Whatever it is. My goal is for us to not miss this opportunity. Something’s happening we can take advantage of right now. Or, my goal is to fill in the blank, right? So, Intent Before Content sets out that positive intent so that someone doesn’t think, here’s Susan making more work for me.
Susan doesn’t care that I’m really invested in this other project and now she wants me to do this. Or, if I’m thinking about my boss, that kind of thing. So, Intent Before Content allows the person who’s communicating the need or the change to kind of set that positive tone and then just say, I want to hear your thoughts and ideas.
Let’s put our heads together and figure out, you know, what’s next, if anything, right? Like, what should we pursue or not? So that intent before content, I think is really helpful for managers that want to get their team on board. And then I think it is, if you’re willing to actually take into concern or take into consideration the needs and thoughts or ideas of your team.
And it’s, of course, more complex the problem, the more different perspectives we need to solve it. So you want to make sure that you’re getting that input. And the worst thing is when someone says an idea, but the culture of the organization is so toxic that there’s ten people around the table who know you tried that idea five years ago.
Or whatever, and it was a horrible failure, or, you know, you have thoughts, but you don’t share it because you don’t feel like your views are valued, or your expertise is going to be listened to, or you don’t fit in, or whatever, you’re too new, whatever it is, and then the whole organization actually misses out the opportunity from that input, so managers really have to be aware that they have blind spots they can’t see, none of us can see our own stuff, our own blind spots, other people can see them, and so we want to invite people This is a concept of having someone in your cabinet, if you’re president, for example, one or more people from the other party. Having advisors that are from all different walks of life because they’re going to notice things you don’t notice, right? So we really want to as a manager communicate that we’re super open to all that feedback and our intent is for example not to make your job harder give you more work, but instead figure out how to do it better.
AD :
And that’s a nice lead in to talking about organizational culture, which was something that you tackled in your book. And my hat’s off to anybody who wants to tackle discussing organizational culture, because that is the worst thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my professional life.
And I would love never to have to deal with an organizational culture change again, but I know that’s probably not a choice I get. You talk about the challenges when you try to change culture. In your experiences, Susan, what are the best organizations? How do they train, empower managers, and then help them effectively lead organizational change when they’re trying to build a more healthy culture?
Harnessing Challenges To Foster Positive Organizational Change [13:51]
SR :
You know, I say certainly leaders. And a crisis provokes change. And I typically get called in to organizations that have experienced a scandal or a crisis or proactive organizations that say we’re at a point where we think we really could make a change and a positive change in our culture or whatever. Or we want to make sure we continue to have good culture but a lot of times they wait until there’s been a crisis or a scandal.
And that is a great opportunity to make big change because you can’t pretend anymore that you don’t need it. That there’s nothing wrong. And people from outside an organization can look at it, can understand a culture and see it because many of the elements of that culture become invisible to people who are in it for a while.
Like, how do we talk to each other? What is said or unsaid? What is the process for decision making? Who holds the real power? Do we actually live our mission? Or do we just give it lip service and do these other things? You know, all of these things that are kind of the unwritten HR manual that everybody knows we do it this way, but we don’t put it in writing.
Or we have it in writing, but we don’t really follow it. You know, all of those things you don’t know when you’re brand new in an organization. So, leaders and managers need to constantly be tending that garden of organizational culture. They need to be measuring it, first of all, through very simple surveys that can, like, would you recommend this as a place to work?
Would you recommend your team as a place to work? If you were able to work with your manager again, because he got promoted to another unit, would you want to follow that manager to that new unit, for example? Very simple questions that give us a feel about organizational culture. So, you have to measure it and know what it is because otherwise we’re kind of oblivious sometimes.
And then it’s not just people at the top, it’s every one of us. Because in my unit of, let’s say, five people that I see every day, I impact the culture in that organization and in my unit, even if I’m not the leader. So don’t wait. This concept that, you know, my prince will come and someday rescue my organizational culture, you know, our hero is going to come and fix this place.
You know, I’ve had people say that for 15, 20 years, that’s a very long wait, tight? So you make your organizational culture change every day. And if you want to make a change by going into your team and saying, hey, what if we huddle up and just talk about what are the ways in which we could communicate that would work for everybody? Or, what is working, what could be done better?
And you go around the room and you talk about that, and then you reach agreements on what you’re going to try to innovate and change in that area. That affects culture. And then those active bystander kind of activities, if someone is saying you’re doing something that you find inappropriate, if someone says, oh, sign my time card, even though I really wasn’t here last week, or whatever it is, inappropriate comments they’re saying about a particular group, anything that, you know, you can use humor, you can redirect people.
But to just say, you know, ouch, you know, that kind of, that thing you just said kind of struck, you know, a nerve. Could we maybe, you know, talk about that, but those are ways that we affect organizational culture every day. And it really is the unit that you’re in every day that affects whether or not you’re happy in an organization.
So if you’re in a big organization like the department of events or a university, if your team is really good, like mine was really, really good, even if the bigger organization. It’s having ups and downs and has some really, they have good leaders, bad leaders, they have bad leaders. But your daily work is pretty insulated because you’ve got a great team that supports each other and works great and has a great culture.
And at a minimum, we should all strive for impacting the culture in our immediate team as well as trying to impact the organization more broadly, but leaders also, they have to invite that information about the culture and figure out what’s working and not working. And this is my other mantra, behavior continues as long as it is working.
So if you are a colleague or a supervisor or a manager, and you see someone’s behavior that’s inappropriate and you don’t do anything about it or worse you reward it then you’ve just made sure that that organization is going to continue to be going down a bad path So we have to be willing to in lots of ways make bad behavior stop working.
AD :
Which is easier said than done when the bad behavior is really rooted deeply in an organization.
SR :
I got a metaphor for you. I have a friend, I do dog training because I do people training and it’s all the same thing.
AD :
I agree.
NM :
You can come over here. I have my dogs.
SR :
I have a friend whose dog will literally, come to my house for dinner and brought her dog. And her dog would literally put its face in your lap while you’re eating to try to get food from you.
Literally put its face in your lap while you’re eating. And she says, oh, I’m going to make up the name, protect the innocent. She says, okay, Fido. You know, please, you know, don’t beg at the table. And then she gives Fido a piece of bacon. Okay. Not that there was bacon at my table, but whatever there was, she gives Fido.
I don’t want to reveal too much. So, again, what is Fido going to do? Fido’s going to beg at the table, right? If you’ve got a 28 year old who’s playing video games in your basement and isn’t in grad school, isn’t, you know, getting a job, There’s a real easy way to fix that, right? We stop, we just say this isn’t because it’s a punishment, it’s because there’s growth opportunities out there and you’re going to find them because you don’t need to, right?
But we don’t reward, we need our words and our actions to be in alignment. So if I say the meeting starts at nine and I’m leading the meeting, I will start talking at nine because if I wait till 9:05, everybody who was there on time thinks, okay, well now the meeting starts at 9:05, next time I’m going to be late and the late people come even later, right?
So we can’t reward behavior unless we want that behavior to continue, and that’s true with our kids. That’s true with everybody in our workplace, and it’s not mean at all. People don’t even see it that way typically.
NM :
Now, how do we engage our middle level managers, right? Because I don’t want to be, I face this a few times throughout my career where I’m the bad guy, I’m the only one that’s going around and correcting everybody, but there’s plenty of leaders between me and that individual. How do I engage them to get them kind of on the same train as me?
Navigating Leadership: Balancing Directives & Building Trust In Organizational Settings [19:18]
SR :
Wow, that’s a good one. Well, so I generally having been a leader, I’ve been a follower. I’ve been a mid level manager. I’ve been a high level manager, I’ve had all those perspectives. And I think it’s important that individuals not receive direction from multiple bosses, right? Because this boss tells you go do it this way. This boss tells you the other way, and you’re in a no win situation.
So I don’t ever direct someone else’s employee typically, other than kind of setting healthy boundaries about how I’m treated, for example. If you email me at midnight and you want an immediate response, I don’t care who you are, you know, I’m not going to reward the behavior if the agreement is we don’t do that, right?
I will email you back at 8:05 or whatever, right? But I won’t directly direct someone else’s employee. What I’ll do is I’ll talk to that person’s supervisor and say, Hey, there’s something I just want to bring to your attention. No harm, no foul if you decide not to pursue it, but I wanted to raise this concern and get your thoughts about it.
I think that’s okay to do because again, if they decide not to do it, then you have that issue of how bad is the behavior and is it impacting you and your team? And then in my team, I definitely create that culture where we trust each other. We can have hard conversations. We know we all mess up. Right? Somebody tells a joke, and it’s a little bit on the edge. It doesn’t mean that you’re coming down like a box of rocks. You’re just, you know, if folks are uncomfortable, they need to all feel able to say something. Right? That’s the rule in that team, for example. So we have to figure those things out in our team, and then have those kind of delicate conversations, but don’t be afraid to have them.
And I do think if you do it to say, like, I’m on your, again, intent before content. Hey, Bob, I really want to make sure this thing I’ve noticed doesn’t kind of escalate. I’m wondering if I could bring it to your attention and then put it in your capable hands. Whatever you choose to do is fine, right? And sometimes people need to hear something from more than one person before they believe it’s true because denial is the most powerful force in the universe.
Stronger than gravity, stronger than love, denial, when you’re trying to take the keys away from grandpa. You know, I mean, like, denial is so strong. So, sometimes I remind myself, it’s okay if Bob heard this one thing from me and didn’t do anything, because what’s going to happen is, Bob’s going to hear it from three or four other people, and eventually Bob will be like, dang, Susan was right that six months ago, I should have nipped this in the bud, right?
So, just, you know, trust the fact that you don’t control the outcome, you just control your part in the process. So, I do my part. And then I let it go.
NM :
Now, to put you back on the hot seat, now what do you do if it is an equal peer and their lack of, you know, paying attention to the company culture that everyone is building. It’s impacting your team because your team’s seeing things that go unnoticed. What advice would you give that leader to talk to their peer?
Setting Boundaries & Choosing Battles In Management [21:54]
SR :
I think two things we have to remember is, as they used to say, it’s not Lake Wobegon where all our children are above average. So the reality is you’re going to get some great managers, and you’re going to get some managers that maybe aren’t so great, and it’s not about experience necessarily.
Because you get some really bad managers that have been there a long time and then you get some really good young ones, right? So I’ve had, age is not a factor necessarily. So I think you have to setting healthy boundaries is how we succeed at work. And with our managing up, setting boundaries to help our boss manage us better.
And then also with our peers as well. So if something doesn’t affect me and my team, I’m maybe judicious about deciding which things to just let go and which things to say something about. If something affects me and my team, then it’s my job to try to affect it and impact it. Now, the broader mission matters a lot too.
If I saw somebody doing something, and of course, probably most of us have. If you’ve seen somebody do something that’s just truly counter to the mission and it is just not okay, then you have to decide what’s the best way to get that handled. Is it by talking to the person directly? Is it by making an anonymous complaint? Is it by making a not anonymous complaint? Right? Then you get strategic.
But aside from kind of those really bad things that happen, but remember that’s what I’m called in for, so I see those. We have to create systems where people can be whistleblowers or where people can complain anonymously about things they’ve seen or done, right? Or things that are happening. But aside from those really egregious things, just those everyday things, we have to decide that I don’t control everything and I used to really try really hard and I was not a happy person. So I picked my battles. Is this something that affects me and my team, the mission that I’m part of?
If not, sometimes I just acknowledge the fact that this guy, you know, isn’t interested. For example, if they’re not introspective, maybe they’re not really that interested in being a better manager either, or they think they’re hopeless and helpless, right? That’s where depression comes from. When you’re hopeless and helpless, there’s nothing I can do about this. You might share some information that might counteract that view, but I only push it so far.
AD :
So much of what you’ve been discussing, Susan, I feel kind of lands in the realm of what’s my mindset. I mean, I love the language you’ve used earlier, you mentioned. Not calling your counterpart an opponent. That’s about mindset. In your book you talk about cognitive biases that often go unchecked in negotiation.
Specifically, you mention seven. Irrational stubbornness. Zero sum thinking. Anchoring framing. Sacrificing the all about me and overconfidence. Why is it so critical to check one’s mindset when it comes to conflict? And do you have any practical tips for doing so, especially when someone is in the moment of negotiating?
Navigating Attribution Errors & Cognitive Biases In Negotiation Conversations [24:23]
SR :
Yes, we have this misattribution, right? So attribution error occurs when we attribute someone’s behavior, we put a motivation to that behavior that’s typically negative, right? Especially if we have no relationship with our negotiation partner or either no relationship or a negative history of a relationship, we’re going to tend to put a negative attribution and say in our head, the reason they’re doing this is because fill in the blank.
They don’t like me. They’re vicious. They, you know, whatever. And we tend to go to our very dark places sometimes and assume that our worst fears are someone else’s reality. We could engage in projection, for example. Something I’m afraid of happening, now I’m just sure it’s happening. And maybe I’m overblowing it, whatever.
So I have learned a few things where I’ll ask folks, the person that I’m in this We’ll say in a conflict way, for example. I like this framing where I say, the story I’m telling myself is blah blah blah blah blah. Can you please edit that story and tell me where I’ve got it wrong? And that seems to be less likely to provoke defensive reactions than to say, hey, you know, you’re being a jerk, knock it off, but I can say, you know, the story I’m telling myself is maybe we have different goals here or that you really don’t like me very much.
And as a result, you know, this is happening or whatever it is. And just check that and say, and again, intent before content. My goal is to make sure that. We work together the best we possibly can and we get the most out of this interaction for both of us, right? Because if you’re negotiating, you’re inherently interdependent.
I can’t get what I want all by myself or I wouldn’t even be talking to you, I’d go get it. So, that means we need to find a way to work well together. The story I’m telling myself, I use that sometimes. I will remind myself, what is my conflict management style out of the five main styles? Avoidant, accommodating, collaborative, competitive, and compromising, right?
So, what is my main style and is my style affecting this interaction? Because maybe the other person has a style, because each style comes with a language, a body language, all these things, right? So maybe their style is very different than mine, maybe they’re very accommodating or avoiding and I’m taking that to mean they don’t see this as a problem or whatever, right?
So I want to think about not personalizing what they’re doing. And then sometimes you deal with, 10 percent of the time, with, there’s a great book called Snakes in Suits, right? Someone who has an actual personality disorder. Narcissistic, bi borderline, antisocial personality disorder, which labels sociopaths or psychopaths, all these things, right?
If for some reason I’m dealing with someone like that, that’s just, that I’ve figured out, like it’s all about me, the narcissist, then I’ll use that to my advantage in the negotiation, totally pure manipulation. I’ll say things, but for good, okay? I’ll say things like, you could be the hero here, and make this confession that shows how, you know, generous you are, or whatever.
So there’s ways to kind of use, if you think you can figure out what that is, there’s sometimes ways to use that to your advantage, to make sure that you’re not getting, taking advantage of it in a negotiation.
AD :
How about when it’s obvious to you that they, your counterpart is suffering from some strong cognitive biases. Is there a way to reverse that and help them unpack what’s going on for them?
SR :
Yeah. So I would give that number one is denial where someone thinks something’s not a big problem or they think they can handle it or they think the way we’ve been doing things is fine and we can just keep doing it that way.
Even though the world has completely changed and the problem has changed and the competitors have changed, right? So that denial, so with denial, you have to chip it away. You can’t rip it away. And the idea there is that the purpose of denial is to protect us psychologically from a reality that is so devastating it can provoke a breakdown.
And so the only way to kind of get through that is just like little persistent, little by little. It typically doesn’t necessarily happen quickly if someone’s in a strong amount of denial. And sometimes, this is awful, but sometimes you have to let the other person fail a little bit. If it’s not terminal for the organization and come back, you have an employee or a teenager who’s not doing their homework, not preparing for meetings, not meeting deadlines.
And sometimes after you have to be careful, cause as a leader, it does reflect on you, but in the end it reflects on them. So you set them up to succeed, but there’s also consequences if they don’t, and you let them have those consequences. And then eventually those consequences may help get that denial to go away.
NM :
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for part A of the show. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. If you haven’t already, and join us next week for Part B of this awesome interview.
