Disclaimer: Anything discussed today represents Tavis Cyphers’ personal views and not those of the U.S. Army or the United States Military Academy.
Hi everyone! Welcome to Episode 18 of the Negotiate X in Rewind series, where we revisit standout conversations from the Negotiate X Podcast. In this episode,Travis Cyphers, instructor of Negotiations and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, joins Nolan and Aram.
Together, they explore how leadership and negotiation intersect across every mission, decision, and relationship. Drawing from his experience teaching at West Point, Travis shares how empathy, trust, and understanding form the foundation of effective leadership and meaningful negotiation.
When Nolan asks what new lessons have shaped his teaching, Travis highlights how perspective shapes every negotiation. Drawing from Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference, he explains that people can see the same facts but reach different conclusions based on experience, training, and bias. This realization helps cadets see negotiation not as a battle but as a process of understanding how others think and decide.
Moving on, Aram asks how leadership connects to negotiation. Travis explains that leadership is negotiation in action—effective leaders don’t rely on rank or authority; they build consensus. By understanding motivations, listening to concerns, and creating shared goals, leaders cultivate trust and long-term commitment. Even when a decision doesn’t go everyone’s way, the process of inclusion builds stronger teams and better results across any organization.
When asked about leading superiors, Travis notes that negotiation is equally vital when managing up. Rank alone isn’t persuasive. The key is understanding what drives your leaders—their challenges, goals, and constraints—and presenting solutions that align with both your needs and theirs. This approach transforms compliance into collaboration and enhances influence across every level of command.
Travis shares one of his proudest experiences—watching cadets evolve from students to confident teachers. During a post-COVID leadership initiative, cadets co-led negotiation workshops across Army units, teaching senior officers and fielding complex questions on their own. These moments, Travis says, demonstrate how negotiation builds not just tactical skills but confidence, adaptability, and empathy—qualities every great leader needs.
Major Travis Cyphers demonstrates that the most valuable military lessons on leadership and negotiation extend far beyond rank or authority. Effective leaders build influence through empathy, trust, and collaboration. He reminds us that success comes not from commanding others, but from understanding them—listening deeply, aligning interests, and leading with clarity and respect.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Write to us at team@negotiatex.com. If you enjoyed the show, please rate us on Apple Podcasts to help others find Negotiate X and support our growth.
Thank you for your time!
This program’s gonna air right around Veteran’s Day.
Anything discussed today are my personal views and not representative of the US Army or the United States Military Academy, which is just something we have to share and say.
So as you’ve taught negotiations, what are some of the things that you’re learning that are new and interesting to you? Are there any new topics or aspects of negotiations that you’re exploring? Anything like that going on?
Before I got here and before I started teaching, all of it was new to me. So, in that process there’s so much that is as far as new and interesting. We will talk about it a little bit later, I think as we talk, but there’s so much work that I spend time talking with cadets and soldiers.
As we understand good leadership in the army, so much of it is understanding the other people that we work with. And Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference work about understanding how other people reach different conclusions than we do has been really fundamental in getting both my cadets to understand why other people can look at the same information and reach different conclusions.
And it’s really been instrumental in working with the advisor communities that I work with and just how do we look at the same information, but because of the experiences we’ve had, the training we’ve had, what we feel is relevant will lead us to really different conclusions. While that’s not a new concept, it was new to me and really fundamental in how I’ve changed how I think about things, topics, or aspects of negotiations that I’ve found interesting or exploring a little bit.
I had the opportunity to take some cadets to ISE Business School in Barcelona this summer, and it was a really tough duty. Somebody had to take the cadets to Barcelona.
Way to sacrifice. Every red leg listening to this podcast right now has a little envy of you.
Yeah. They went to NTC and I went to Barcelona, they were in the deserts in California. So there’s a gentleman there named Kandarp Mehta who wrote a new book that came out last year: Negotiate Good, Negotiate Well and he had just some fantastic behavioral aspects of negotiations in that book that got me thinking a little bit differently about how I teach the course and the course here at West Point is so much around principal negotiations. How do we tackle problems side by side versus me against, me versus you, but the understanding, the behavioral stuff, it’s still really important. And so I hadn’t spent a lot of time on that side of negotiations and digging into a little bit of what he had in that book has just been new and interesting in the last year.
I wanted to hit on the first thing you talked about good leadership. You’ve taught leadership at West Point. You taught in the core leadership course that all cadets have to take, I assume, MG390. The negotiation course there is still called Negotiation for Leaders. Is that right?
It is.
From your own thinking, what’s the connection between leadership and negotiation? Cause I think many people would say I negotiated something I do occasionally. You seem to be framing it a little differently.
So, what was amazing about teaching the leadership course here at West Point is all of the lessons, both through failure and success that I had learned through my army career of like, oh these are my general rules for leadership.
It turns out there’s a lot of research into leadership and coming here to teach the class, it was an opportunity to take those things that were just kind of Travis’s rules or Travis’s way of leading and learn the actual research of nah, that’s why that one didn’t work. It was really good.
What’s fantastic about the negotiation course and teaching it from negotiation for leaders is there’s this outside perspective that leadership in the Army is just top down, rank driven, that I tell you what you to do and you’re going to do it. And leadership is leadership, regardless of its situation.
And it’s so much about building consensus. How do I get people on board? How do I build a team to achieve a common goal? And you can take the route in leadership of this is what we’re gonna do and this is why we’re gonna do it. Or you can work to understand the concerns of the people that work for you.
What are their interests? What are their motivations? And figure out how do you build towards that same goal, maybe in a way that you can get them on board and when you don’t want to or are unwilling to force or coerce somebody else to take the course of action that you want. It becomes a negotiation, understanding their fundamental interests, their concerns, their motivations to lay out a path forward.
And even if I don’t ultimately go as a leader with that course of action that they’ve pushed for going through that process, it allows them to feel heard that their concerns have been accounted for. And they’re much more likely to be on board with whatever the opportunity to bring them on board and work towards that goal together in a way that even if it’s not the one they wanted, it will ultimately lead to better results.
Yeah, I think that’s gonna be an interesting twist for listeners to hear who may not be familiar with the military. And assume if you’ve got all the authority and position of a power, why are you concerned about these things? And I think you’ve made a good case why effective leaders, regardless military, business, or nonprofit, why they should be concerned about the concerns of others?
Push you a little further. Does that apply leading up your chain of command too? Can you apply some of that thinking as you try to lead upward as well?
Yeah, and I actually think that’s probably even a little more applicable in this situation, right?
When it comes to my bosses, I can’t rely on rank. I can’t go and say, major Cyphers thinks that it should be done this way. So it’s understanding what is my boss’s concern. What are his or her interests? What are they trying to achieve? And can I present solutions that meet my interest as well, and maybe meet those concerns in a different way, but lead to better outcomes or are less painful for me to accomplish those tasks?
I think leading upwards has so much relationship to negotiation because it’s really about understanding the person above you, what are their concerns, what are their motivations, and then figuring out how you could present solutions in a different way that will still meet those, but might not have been in the way that leadership has originally presented them.
You mentioned Kandarp Mehta. You met him this summer, is that you were able to opportunity to meet him at IES?
Yeah, we sat down and we had a couple of different meetings actually, where we talked through his book. We talked through how he teaches negotiation there. It’s structured a little bit differently than we teach here at West Point, but obviously so many of the concepts are the same.
He incorporates behavioral stuff, a little bit more anchoring. What is it like to have some tactics at the table that might claim value a little bit better, but still talking about working together, tackling problems jointly, et cetera.
Yeah. One of his articles I just recently discovered and really enjoyed was called Five Essential Strategies for Creative Negotiations.
And it’s, as you’re talking about bringing solutions anyone can identify a problem, but if you’re gonna be an effective subordinate or you’re gonna really help your manager lead. The ability to be creative and come and say, this idea of options present. 3, 4, 5 different ways we can go about this boss commander. It really helps. It makes you a more influential and persuasive person.
Yeah. I really think so. And it’s just, it’s better for the organization if both the leader and the lead think that way.
Yeah. You’re working with some amazing cadets there through your course and the project. What can you highlight?
I think our listeners might be really impressed to hear about some of the things cadets are doing, the contributions they’re making. Or maybe some of the growth you’re seeing in them as negotiators, these young, 18, 19, early 20 something year olds.
The thing that I’d like to highlight the most is COVID Pandemic really changed things here at the Academy, like it did everywhere for a number of, for a year and a half. And in May of 2020, or March of 2020, the cadets went on spring break and never came back. And then very quickly we had to figure out how to teach in a virtual environment. That led forward a year where we’re still dealing with COVID, actively concerned about many of those things rightfully so.
We weren’t allowed to take cadets on these academic, individual advanced development programs, where coming from USMA, cadets don’t get to really do internships like normal universities would, but they’re generally given three to four week opportunities, especially from the management program where I teach to go work with businesses and see what does business look like when you’re not wearing the uniform to apply many of those skills that they have learned, whether it be finance or accounting, or strategy or marketing or human resource management.
This summer of 2021 cadets could only go do one of these programs if it was at a military base. And so we were scrounging for how do we create opportunities or experiences for cadets to get credit for this, but still take course material and apply it in a different situation other than the academic environment.
And so I crafted and created an I-ad that’s what we call them, to take two cadets with me for three weeks to train different army units. And Summer 21. And then this summer 22, I took two cadets, gave ’em quite a bit of reading to do preparation work. Then they helped me run the West Point Negotiation Project Army Leaders Workshop here at the academy, a four-day event where we bring leaders from all across the army here.
They helped with logistics and some of the basic debrief stuff, but over the next three, or over the course of the three weeks, they gradually took over more and more responsibilities where we do the workshop here. The next week we went to another unit and they taught about 35% of the course material, and then we went to another unit.
And the two cadets between ’em, each taught about a third of the course. So it was pretty amazing to see their understanding of negotiations grow to the point where they could feel confident enough teaching commissioned officers, seasoned, non-commissioned officers. And by that third week, some of the best moments where they were able to field tough questions that we hadn’t prepped, but they able take these concepts that we had been discussing for two and a half week and thoroughly understand the material well enough and these concepts well enough that they could answer those concerns from seasoned officers and sergeants in the US Army and answer ’em succinctly.
So, I think that’s the coolest thing that I’ve been able to do as far as taking cadets and helping them grow in this area of negotiations, we still have negotiation fellows who have opportunities to lead some events here on campus at the academy. They get to engage with some unique speakers, et cetera.
But that event over the last two summers has been just amazing to see that growth within a couple of young cadets.
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