Nolan Martin :
Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us in the NEGOTIATEx podcast. We are continuing our conversation with Kim Mlinaz. If you haven’t already checked out Part A of this show, be sure to do that first. Let’s jump into the conversation with Kim.
Kimberly Mlinaz:
So how can I take that meaning that I’m creating in my mind about the situation and twist it back to a way that’s going to be helpful for me. Like we talked about earlier with looking at that tone of voice, not as an attack on myself, but potentially indicating that individual was feeling at a disadvantage and was trying to reclaim power.
And again, we could really speak at this at length, but I think a tool for me that’s really helpful in the moment is I like to take a good old fashioned piece of paper and write down my goals for that conversation or that negotiation in really clear, plain language so that if I feel myself getting caught up in the energy of the moment, I can look back down at that language and say, am I serving what’s on this paper right now?
Am I serving my goals? And if I’m not, maybe I need a break. Maybe I need a moment to collect my thoughts. Maybe we need to put a pin in this and come back again later. But I need to be in a place where I’m making decisions that are the ones that I want to make that are my choice versus my natural reaction in the moment.
Aram Donigian:
So Kim, that was a rich response. The problem with rich responses is it triggers more like follow on questions. So the first one is a $64,000 question. You got to bring us up to speed because folks are right now, they’re googling 64,000 questions. What’s the reference?
KM:
It’s a game show from the 1950s, is that is kind of like the precursor of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
AD:
Alright, the second one, this is gonna be a little, this is harder. This is the, those, no more softball questions and I know you’re limited with what you can say with working for the Department of the Air Force culture. Just as you were talking about this, just these last couple responses made me think of the role of culture in all this, and that could be different national cultures.
It could be different branches of service cultures. It could be different business cultures, but I just would guess. And I’d love to get your take on the added complexity when cultural differences are involved in these conversations, negotiations, whatever you want to call it.
The Key To Effective Communication & Business Relations [01:46]
KM:
Oh, what a fantastic question. If you are a nerd like me, you will want to Google Hofstede and please don’t ask me to spell that. But there is fantastic research that’s been done on dimensions of differences culturally. What I can say in the moment that I think would be helpful to folks is that we really need to understand that our culture in the West is just that. It’s our culture. And we have organizational cultures, like you said, maybe we have regional cultures within the country.
So those practices that we just assume are the right way to do things. That’s just our perspective. I always laugh now when I hear people say, do the right thing. Who’s right thing, your right thing, my right thing, the organization’s right thing, Google’s right thing, a ChatGPT’s right thing, so this is where you come back to that. We really haven’t talked about this much, but I’ll put a plug in here. For preparation, even if you just spend a few minutes, really understanding the person you’re coming to the table with. It gives you an opportunity to understand how do they like to do business.
There are folks around the world who really need to get to know you as an individual before they will talk any business with you. And if you move into tactical discussion immediately. You will have lost the initiative. And there are folks that are really connected to family and cultural and collective impact of things. Whereas in the West, we lean a little bit more individual. And I say things like lean a little and look at because really there are sliding scales and everybody is a little bit different. So I would just encourage folks to really be aware of the fact that this conversation, this conflict resolution, this negotiation, you’re not competing with them to get an outcome here.
You’re really trying to build a relationship with an individual in that moment that you need something from. And in order to do that, you need to understand how they like to be communicated with and how you need to behave in order to gain their respect. And most of the time they’re going to provide you that courtesy in response.
AD:
Kim, you mentioned preparation and you’ve already mentioned pulling out that old fashioned piece of paper, really getting really clear with what my own goals might be for negotiation.
You just talked about, you know, taking time to consider the other person’s perspective, what they’re thinking, asking yourself that if you were to say, hey, here are two or three other things that I think are really critical to just being well-prepared before you even walk into the room or sit down at the table. What else would you say are key to your own practices around preparation?
Leveraging BATNA: Enhancing Negotiation Tactics & Broadening Perspectives [04:05]
KM:
Yeah, so I’m gonna be a total nerd and something that i’m sure you’ve talked about a thousand times on here. But I want to re emphasize the power of BATNA, the best alternative to negotiated agreement. If you don’t know what your walk away point is and you don’t understand what their walk away point is, you are at a lost cause to begin with.
It really gives you the ability to understand the range of options available to you. And if you are in those conversations too long, you start to lose track of the fact that you do have alternatives. And so the BATNA piece is important from the perspective of knowing your walk away point, but also if you’re feeling like the negotiation or that conversation is not going in the direction you want it to, you may have an opportunity to look at how you can improve your BATNA.
So is there anything available to you that you might be able to change, to research, to do differently? Is there someone else you can connect with? That gives you some viable alternatives. The other thing that I would offer up is one thing that I see very frequently is that people have a very narrow field of vision when it comes to negotiation. They make their assumptions. They come to a conclusion about their position.
And now all of a sudden the objective becomes the position, the achievement of the position, rather than achieving the underlying interests that were driving them. And if you are able to be more aware of why you asked for those things in the first place, it opens up the ability to create more value and to create more options.
And quite frankly, I’ve seen several times where the outcomes were so much better. Then you would have ever even come in as a position when you took the time to be curious and open and learn about what might be available to you.
AD:
Nolan, don’t we wish we could ask her to give those examples, but we probably can’t because it’s all that secret stuff that we can’t ask you about.
NM:
Exactly. So how does the context of ongoing relationships where past encounters influence current negotiations? Shape your approach to negotiation strategies. And why is it important to consider the impact on future engagements when negotiations begin to become hyper competitive?
Cultivating Trust In Negotiations: Balancing Aggression & Relationship Building [06:03]
KM:
Great question. First, let me say, I fully appreciate that there are plenty of distributive negotiations out there where you’re never going to see those folks again, be as aggressive as you want to be and get what you need, but I would wager to guess that a lot more of your interactions are going to be with people that you have some type of ongoing relationship, whether they’re colleagues, whether they’re a contractor, you do a lot of work with, maybe their regulators that you work with on a regular basis, maybe your community of practice in the work that your company does as a small group of people.
And in those situations, the heart of one of your interests has got to be the effective maintenance of that relationship. You’re laying the framework in that engagement with that individual about how the two of you or three of you or however many parties there are going to interact with one another going forward.
And it’s just as likely you may be in that moment actually addressing breakdowns in the relationship that have caused you to be at this point. And a sidebar piece here that I really want to emphasize that gets lost. We in the West, to go back to your question on culture, we are very fact-focused. And we don’t really like talking about our feelings. We don’t really like looking backwards. We want to know what happened. How do we fix it? And we move ahead. And we lose the importance of reconciliation just because we have acknowledged what’s happened and we have a plan to go ahead doesn’t mean we’ve dealt with the feelings and the frustration and the trust challenges that came from that conflict in the first place.
And without that, we very well might find ourselves right back to where we started. We know trust is a vital part of successful relationships, whether those are business or professional, and if we violate that trust using really coercive negotiating strategies, it’s going to color the agreement and likely could degrade future negotiations with them and maybe even impact your reputation and your business community.
AD:
Yeah, boy, I love your response to that. There is tangible value in trust. I hear that coming through loud and clear. I also hear that even when we’re maybe rightly engaged in a distributive negotiation, reputation may still be important within the broader ecosystem, something to at least consider that doesn’t mean you don’t positionally bargain at times.
And the other thing I was going to say is when you said laying the framework for what it’s going to look like going forward, I think that gets lost all the time. We forget. Oh yeah. Kim and I are going to implement this together. And if I just push really hard and she doesn’t want anything to do with him going forward. The first time there’s an error or mistake, or we don’t meet the terms of the deal, she may not come up and let me know because we didn’t build that during the negotiation. And now the opportunity to make corrections along the way, all that gets lost as well.
KM:
Absolutely. And I’ll connect that back to the Gallup research we were talking about earlier. If this issue or this conflict is in a workplace between leadership and individuals that are a follower, if you are not focused on really figuring out how to reconcile and rebuild that trust so that folks are bought back in and rowing in the same direction, you are going to be back in the same place you were because they’re going to be looking.
They’re going to be looking for ways in which you don’t live up to the agreement. And what do we know about looking for things? You will find it. And your brain will interpret behavior to be consistent with the story we’re telling ourselves. So deliberate attempts, and Dr. Shapiro had done some really great stuff on this, and I think it’s negotiating the non negotiable. The real importance of dealing with the pain and the reconciliation. So you can work together and move forward.
AD:
Yeah, that is a great text. I am a big fan of anything written by Daniel Shapiro, just marvelous. Given your interest in adult learning and your experience as a practitioner, how do you address the challenge of ensuring that what is taught in a negotiation or an ADR course actually achieves behavioral change, that learners retain and practice the concepts.
Shifting Focus From Formal Training To Practical Application [09:53]
KM:
Excellent. So let me first say, I realized I probably should have said this a little earlier. I’ve been referencing a lot of great books. So a lot of great research studies. None of that implies that I am endorsing those in any way. I’m just sharing that learning and passing it along. And I’m about to do that again here in the center for creative leadership as a wonderful model on learning and development and what I found so fascinating in reading their research is that only 10% of learning happens in formal training experiences and I, from the beginning of my career, training and training events has been a big deal, right?
We all want to get into training classes. There are all sorts of industries on this. But the research is pretty clear that we only learn about 10% of our knowledge from those situations. And there’s other research studies out there that indicate that within about a week of any training event that we partake in, we’ve lost about 90 percent of what we’ve learned in that session. And so it’s fantastic to have this great opportunity to step away from the workplace and meet new people. But if we’re really looking to change behavior, we need to think about what is the other 90 percent of learning and that’s application and engagement with others.
I like to think of things in a learn, apply, refine type of approach. So first you’re learning and that’s an interactive environment. I’m sharing new information with you. We’re applying it right away. Maybe we’re testing it in the classroom. There’s some great discussion. We’re having that discussion in the contact that you can understand and apply to how you’re going to use that. And then you move into apply, a role play or some kind of activity where you’re testing that new material and you’re seeing, did what I just learned, does it bear out in reality? Is this actually the way that things are going to go? And then the refined piece is that debrief afterwards.
Talking with an instructor who has some insight you might not have, your peers, did you try the things that you wanted to try? Did it work out the way you wanted? Where were you nervous to apply something? How might you have done some things differently? What did you notice about how you felt in that moment? Did you get more information than you might have otherwise gotten? And repeating that process over and over again until that becomes something that seems like it fits into their paradigm.
Now the piece of this that I’ve been thinking about a lot more lately is even in the classroom, adding in that interaction environment, it’s really not enough to sustain the learning, because we all know, regardless of what industry you are in, as soon as your feet land back in the workplace, you are going 110 miles an hour to catch up on the stuff that you missed while you were out. All of us have more than a full-time job that we’re doing. And so best of intentions are not always going to see us through to application.
So part of the things that are helpful is when you’re finishing up that course. Give the students an opportunity to write down one or two, maybe even three things maximum that they are going to take back from that course and apply so that instead of going back to their 30 pages of notes, they can go back to a note card with three points on it. And then we’ve been talking a lot more and I’ve been looking at this myself.
How can we provide follow-on coaching and reinforcement to those folks who are actually trying to apply it? I think about it like office hours. All right. I just taught you this great stuff in a couple weeks. Give me a call. Tell me how this is going. How did you try to apply it? Did it not go so well? It’s like that agile software mindset. Do the 80% try. Let’s break it down. Let’s try again. Let’s try again until we get it right.
AD:
That’s powerful. When you first started off with the statistics, I was getting a little depressed since I make a living out of teaching and training these concepts. And I think about how much is being retained, but you brought it around, gave me some optimism about things that I think I’m trying to do when it comes to learn, apply, refine things I can do better. You mentioned coaching. I wanted to ask you, cause I know that you completed an accredited coaching program. And I just wonder how that coaching mindset really shows up and is applied to conflict management, especially with regard to early intervention.
Coaching vs. Mentoring: Empowering Self-Solution In Conflict Management [13:59]
KM:
I love it. This is where my heart is at the moment. And I think the best place to start here is to talk about what the difference is between coaching and mentoring. A mentor is someone you go to who has great knowledge about something. They’re going to listen to your woes about that situation and then they are going to shower upon you recommendations for what you should do when you go back. Wonderful mentors are amazing. I have some great ones. They are a critical part of your development, but coaches don’t do that.
Coaches use appreciative inquiry. Great question asking to help people come to their own understanding of the dynamics of a situation. And in the case of conflict resolution, what are the possibilities for resolution? So a lot of training is about what to do, and the best trainings are about how to do it, right? When you get back into the workplace, what you’re going to do. But actually applying things in the real world is really challenging. Most of the time, we’re going to do something different.
And what we’ve already learned about our brains and the pattern making systems they are when we do something different in the workplace that interrupts the pattern of my relationship with the people around me and those individuals are going to give me some pushback and sometimes it’s not much pushback, but sometimes it’s really pretty difficult pushback.
And if there’s enough pushback to my changed behavior, then it’s uncomfortable for me that I don’t really know what I’m doing with this material. My natural human default is to go back to doing things the way I did them before, because at least we were all on the same page and that was okay. That was the custom. So where a coach comes into play here is this is an opportunity for that individual to reach out to somebody to help them work through that resistance and figure out how to keep doing, we already talked about that agile adjustment, right? All right. You try that. It didn’t go the way you wanted. Let’s break that down. How can we do that differently?
The part about coaching that I think is so important for conflict management is this is a skillset we all need to have, right? And we are always going to need professionals at the next level, trained mediators and facilitators, individuals who are at that higher level of skill.
But the better that we can become as individuals managing conflict in the workplace, the more likely it is we’re going to have effective outcomes with our teams. So if I’ve got a coach who can help me work through these challenges. Who, by the way, is teaching me how to do that myself in the future, so I won’t always need the coach to do that. I’m going to be able to resolve more of that, those challenges, those issues at the lowest level than I would have been without that implementation.
NM:
So Kim, with that being said, do you think that all mid level managers should receive mandatory coaching training to help them navigate the situations you’re describing?
Understanding The Role Of Coaching In Adult Development & Its Limits [16:42]
KM:
I love that question. And I’m sure that there are going to be people who are mad at my answer to that. So I love reading some of the really great stuff on adult development. And I don’t want to wade into that. That could be its own discussion, but what I will say, the Harvard research is pretty clear.
Adults are at different levels in their progression. And there are some people that having a coach is not going to do them any good and forcing them to go to a coach is just going to make everybody’s lives a lot more difficult than they have to be. But what I would offer is that if there are individuals who understand that they could use some coaching to do things better, that they would appreciate a confidential individual to help them work through some challenges as they’re growing their executive presence, as they’re growing their ability to be more effective. I sure do wish those folks would have access to that because it is really a game changer. I hate to use the big word, but this is metacognition, right? This is thinking about our thinking in a way that’s helping us progress.
NM:
That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And now it’s going to be time for a couple really easy questions. So do you have an example of a negotiation or other time you were involved in a conflict and didn’t achieve the outcome you wanted? What’d you learn from that experience?
Recognizing Hidden Negotiations In Professional Conversations [17:52]
KM:
So, I’m here in my personal capacity. So I can’t give specific examples. So I’m going to try to be pretty broad on this one, but I think the message is going to get across. So, I look back at my professional conversations and I am surprised how many of them are negotiations in disguise. And I find myself with my peers, with stakeholders in my organization, with people who are my allies that are supposed to have shared interests, my default approach has always been competitive, right?
I want to win. We’re hard chargers. And a lot of those conversations became distributive and I lost the opportunity to create value. But more importantly, I think I’ve lost the appreciation for the intersection and the work that we do and how we really are important to one another. So the lesson learned there for me, it is really about the power of focus, that looking at how are you and I working together to advance the larger mission.
It’s not about me, it’s not about you. It’s that larger mission. And this is where reframing is such a wonderful tool. If we reframe the problem as we need to figure out how to better support the company or better support the mission or better support the people, how can we work together? The problem’s not you and I. The problem is this challenge that’s getting between us doing the best we can for the folks we serve. And being able to build buy in to that perspective, I think is really helpful.
NM:
No, that’s great. I love the professional conversations or negotiations in disguise. Love that. On the flip side, do you have any examples of success and what made things come out different?
The Power Of Curiosity & Collaboration In Professional Settings [19:34]
KM:
Connecting it back to the conversation before, so many times when I talk about stuff like this with supervisors or leaders, or colleagues or peers that do this work. I hear the question, but why do I have to be the one who’s curious and calm and focused and pulled together? Presumably you’re having this conversation because you need something from that other person. You can’t get without their cooperation, and the best way to get them to cooperate, to meet your interests is to be all of those things. Curious and calm and focused. It goes back to that Stephen Covey: Seven Habits, right?
Seek first to understand and then to be understood. And I think that the curiosity, that deep curiosity to me is where the real money is and the real opportunity. If I start with genuine curiosity, I’m going to learn how to speak their language. And if I learn how to speak their language, I’m going to be able to connect my interests to theirs in a way that serves their interests. And it gives me space to use some of those nerdy facilitation tools that make this easier, right? Anybody who knows me will laugh about my whiteboard, right? I love my whiteboard. If you try to take it out of my office, you’re going to be in big trouble. Cause I just like to say, all right, let’s throw that up there.
Let’s draw it out. Let’s do it. Let’s draw a stakeholder map. Let’s see how these things connect. And it’s surprising how just seeing it on paper, capturing thoughts will help alleviate some of the stress. Because you don’t have to worry if I’m not thinking about that thing you just told me. It’s written on the whiteboard and we know we’re going to come back to it.
And the great thing, the physicality of it, is now you and I are standing side by side, looking at the whiteboard. So the problem is not us, it’s on the board. And now we’re working together to solve that problem. And again, if I could come back to reciprocity here, that curiosity, that space, that interest, that ability to really understand how you can serve the other, your counterpart. Very regularly, they’re going to serve that right back to you. If you do that from a genuine space and you’re going to come up with outcomes that you would not have come up with. If it wasn’t for taking that moment to be in that creative space.
AD:
You get me excited, Kim. Now one, I’ve been in your office. I’ve seen your whiteboard, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. And any one of my students would say the same thing about me. I am a huge whiteboard fan for all the reasons that you described, but it’s such a beautiful kind of flow from curiosity to then doing something right. And being able to put it up for us to see and the power of reciprocity.
Now, when you’re talking about the kind of the failed question that Nolan asked, I just thought it was wonderful. Everyone listening can relate to being in a conversation and then realizing later, how that was a negotiation, right? So do I even realize I’m in a negotiation or I need to show up a little differently? And then the other layer to that complexity was, wait, the person on my team, that internal stakeholder whose office is neck, we have different goals or objectives. We have some different perceptions on how this should be done. What are you talking about? That’s my toughest customers is my buddy next door.
KM:
And even quite frankly, something I’ve noticed, you get so wired to protect your corner that you can’t always even appreciate when someone’s trying to help you. It’s really fascinating.
AD:
You mentioned reframing too. And there’s that story. You can probably tell it better than I can. I think the two monks that both approach the more senior monk and the first one goes and says, can I get permission to smoke while I pray? And the answer is no. You’re not allowed to smoke. The other one goes up and asks just a little differently. In moments of weakness, would it be all right to pray while I smoke? And the difference in the framing there gets different responses.
KM:
Absolutely.
AD:
Kim, listen, as always, it’s just very enjoyable and a pleasure to get to visit with you. And I’m glad that we’ve been able to highlight your expertise with our listeners. And I know they’ll benefit from this. As we prepare to conclude. Just like to give you the floor one last time and say, hey, you have rich experiences covering many different industries. What advice would you give to a mid career leader seeking to build their negotiation influence and persuasion skills? Any thoughts?
Building Stress Resilience To Navigate Mid-Career Challenges Effectively [23:45]
KM:
First, let me say, Aram, Nolan, this has been really fun. I was so excited to do this and it has been just as fun as I expected. So thank you so much for having me. I want to tell a story and it’s a little embarrassing and my dad will probably kill me for telling this story. When I was in college, I remember my freshman year coming up to exams and I would call my parents on the regular and I would say, I’m so stressed out.
You don’t understand. I’m just so stressed out. And I clearly remember my father saying, Kimberly Ann, you do not know what stress is. And I was so mad at him in the moment and looking back, of course, now I can appreciate I didn’t have a mortgage. I didn’t have anybody to take care of. I didn’t have a job. My whole life was a handful of college classes and hanging out with friends, right?
But I’m sharing this here because my capacity, my stress tolerance at that time was only big enough to handle college exams. And that was testing the edge of my stress. And so how this applies to your question to folks as they get to mid career, your problems are only going to get bigger. They’re only going to get messier. They’re only going to impact more people. And the thinking that you’ve used to get to where you are is not the same thinking that’s going to get you to the next level.
And so if you want to maintain this composed presence that we’ve been talking about, if you want to be able to be really in the moment and making smart decisions, to me, one of the most important things you can do is actively build your stress tolerance. That’s your ability to keep calm in those high stress environments. We know that this goes to all the healthy eating, sleep well, eat well, all of that good stuff. But what I would add to that from our discussion today is that this is where we come back to that metacognition stuff, right? Know what sends you up the wall.
Know what really frustrates you. Know what makes you lose your cool and takes you to a place where you don’t want to be. And create more space between the action happening and your reaction to it, so you can make better choices. So as your mid-career folks are gaining steam, the more you can do to expand your stress tolerance, the better off you’re going to be.
And a side effect of that, I think that’s really wonderful because a lot of those folks are probably supervisors and leaders is reciprocity and mirror neurons, right? If you make the time to take care of yourself, if you make the time to stay calm and collected in stressful situations. Your team will see that they’ll know that they can do that. And they’ll build up those skills themselves. And you’re able to go from being that person who has to be the sole go to person, to being able to create teams of go to people. And that’s our job in that layer of management.
AD:
Boom. Mic drop! I got nothing to add. I’m just going to say, yeah. Wow. That was a great challenge. Thanks for laying that out. And that’s exactly what I hope our listeners take away from getting to hear you today. Kim, thanks for being with us. Appreciate it.
KM:
Thank you gentlemen.
NM:
That is it for us on today’s podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.
