Aram Donigian :
What do we as three white men, all middle aged. What do we need to be learning from our women counterparts and partners?
Rethinking Negotiation: How Feminine Traits Like Empathy and Creativity Outperform Competitive Tactics [00:07]
Maarten van Rossum :
And we as men will learn from the women? No, I think first of all it’s a Harvard study. It’s not me. I’m just reproducing basically what they found. But we use it a lot here in the Netherlands and the actual, the full result is that women are better negotiators, but not for themselves. And I think if you translate it into the sort of energy that people have, I think people with a lot of, let’s say feminine energy are better negotiators than typical masculine.
Or a male energy, I don’t know how to translate that well. But, so basically if you have a lot of empathy, if you have good listening skills, if you have a lot of creativity and you all, those kind of things are really helpful if you negotiate the way we all negotiate which is not an arm wrestling match.
Because if you make it into an arm wrestling matter. My gain is your loss. Yeah, of course. Then probably men are classically better at it because ultimately we start to fight and fighting is more of their masculine trait of course. But what I see is the creativity part to me, and the really understanding part is really yeah, on your question, what can we learn?
I think that is a part where what we can learn, but also sometimes the courage part, it displays a little bit different maybe every now and again. But the courageous part is also a key thing, I think any negotiator should adapt and of course making yourself smaller and saying, I don’t deserve this, or the other party will probably do this, and this.
That I think is a downside of the feminine traits in negotiation. And that, I think what explains the comma in the line, better negotiators, comma, not just for themselves. Because if you go to the table and they say, you know what I’m gonna ask, I don’t deserve this or what I’m going to ask, maybe other people are better.
The insecurity isn’t helpful to anyone. So I think that part is the part where we really put a lot of, it’s not, I don’t think it’s nature, to be honest. I think it’s nurture in a lot of systems, and at least in Dutch society, we’re very, everybody talks about how progressive we are.
I think we’re really traditional here. We bring up our girls, we bring him up differently than our boys. And if you’re a boy and you’re a little bit you have a big mouth, it seems, oh wow look at him. He’s a good, he’s a good kid. If girls do that, we appreciate that differently.
And I think it starts there and then goes all the way up until, you know, if I, not me, but if I, as a father, I dunno, I see an ambulance, I tell my son, hey son, look an ambulance. And if I don’t grab my daughter and say, hey girl, look at that, there’s an ambulance. It’s also the choices you make as fathers and as mothers, but also the choices you make in the school system as all the way up until the first jobs and the first contracts, they’re gonna negotiate.
And this is where, to me, the interesting difference comes in because if they start to negotiate contracts on behalf of someone else. Wow. That’s a different story, right? We always tell the people basically, we shouldn’t fix the women in this part, but it really helps if you externalize yourself.
So you have yourself, and then negotiating yourself if you negotiate. There’s a few tips we can give you, but they’re basically good for everybody. But we also, we really want to talk to the organizations and the men involved because everybody has to negotiate in a culture. And if the culture that you’re negotiating in is not fit for women or not made for women, then as an organization you should maybe think about clipping that.
And what role can men play in that? I always end up with a sort of a joke at the end because it’s interesting to see that most HR departments here in the Netherlands, the big majority is women who work, negotiate with the new men and women that wanna join the firm. Okay. So the rest of the joke I won’t make, but it’s also, it’s really key that you see it’s a systemic thing, right?
It’s the organization that chooses to reward certain negotiation behavior. And what they don’t reward. And to me that’s a really the illustration of women, of the HR department negotiating with new women is a weird one. So here they’re really good in negotiating ’cause they can externalize themselves. It’s not for them. But here it’s difficult. So that to me lies a bit of the, maybe the key to unlocking more value there.
AD :
Yeah, it’s a deep answer there in terms of societal and then organizational and then personal dynamics occurring.
MVR :
Yep. Yeah and I like, this is also what we try to help people with. And even though I agree with, you shouldn’t fix the women, you should fix the system. What we try to do is we look at the three, so the men, the organization, and the women. And with those three, we can try to, I don’t know, close gender pay gaps or visibility gaps or whatever. But I do tell people I don’t agree with don’t fix the system as a dynamics for not doing anything.
I have never seen the system change by me sitting on the couch waiting like this for the system to change. So you should at least do something. This is my or and a lot of the people that work here and our, let’s say things that we can do to change the system and maybe it’s not the right one.
Let’s talk about it. Let’s disagree and let’s find a better way, but not doing anything and saying I shouldn’t fix it. The women fix the system and then sit on your couch and do nothing to me . It has a bit of a comfortable way of not doing anything.
Nolan Martin :
So having worked both in the public sector and private sector, I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of dirty tricks and hard bargains. How do you handle counterparts that are disrupting the negotiation through less than savory tactics?
Countering Dirty Tricks: Why Strong Relationships Outlast Short-Term Tactics in Negotiation [05:15]
MVR :
I think it depends on the tricks. If they’re small tricks, let’s say and. We tell people, when we train people, we tell people, we’re not training you on the dirty tricks, but we show them to you because we want you to recognize them. And here’s what you can do against them. So if it’s debts, let’s say the tricks at the table, they’re so easy to counter. We always tell people it’s skilled negotiators. Don’t even try with skilled negotiators cause it’ll only lead to irritation. Is that a good English word?
An annoyance in the relation. So don’t even try it. It’s a waste of time. But, and then there’s two other categories of tricks. I think one is where you use tricks to manipulate and in a fair way. I can manipulate a lot with the, when we talk about stuff, when do I come back to you taking a lot of time, for example, those kind of tricks.
Sometimes they’re justified, but the first time I always do is a deadline check, right? You give me a deadline and I always say, oh, that’s hard, Nolan because I still have to talk to Aram and I only see him next week on Thursday, so I can’t, I can’t work with you with the deadline of Monday.
And if you then say, oh okay, fine. Talk to a ERM person. Then I know your deadline was fake, right? So it’s these little tricks at the table. I always say, see if they’re justified cause it can be just, it can be a deadline that you have to work with. But if they’re not, then at least take all the, there’s some smart tricks with which you can challenge those span dynamics or deadlines.
So that’s one. And then the other is, of course, the big tricks in, but that’s sometimes cause we are part of big public negotiations or negotiations where journalists really want to know, what’s going on there. Yeah. If you then use media for example, or all kinds of ways to put pressure or you get, I dunno, parliamentarians or ministers or high ranking civil servants, all of a sudden picking up the phone, putting a lot of pressure on the other side.
Yeah. Those are of course tricks that are really harmful for the relation, but sometimes can flip the table immediately and all of a sudden you’re in a losing streak. I tell people there’s one thing you have as a negotiator, which is your image, your, your reliability. You don’t wanna play around with that too often because people will hold it against you for a long time.
And if you’re, especially like us as professional negotiators, if you negotiate once at this table and the next time you run into the same, and this is a small country, if you run into the same people again or people do their research on you and oh, that’s the guy that pulled the trick in the other negotiation.
Yeah, that’s that, that’s a, is, that’s a trust issue. Yeah and we also, again here, the answer to me is also relation, really making sure that through the relation, and even I did a few big negotiations. One was with the Mexican government and it was stone cold in the beginning and there were virtual negotiations.
So the first thing I did was really work on the relation and getting the temperature below, above what is it?
NM :
Freezing?
MVR :
Thirty two Fahrenheit. We call it zero here. But getting the temperature back to normal. And with that, building a relation and finding that unity that Cialdini always talks about. So how can we solve this problem together? It took us months and then the deal phase went quite quickly ultimately because we had a good relation, but that also make sure you don’t jump in find something common to work on, show interest in the other person.
And it ultimately resulted two years later, one of the parts of the deal that we had to travel up and down to look at implementation. And during the first trip I shook hands with this person that didn’t come across as very friendly in the beginning. So we had an all joint program and it was also to make sure that we would keep this formulation because we needed each other for the implementation.
But the second evening I ate something bad or touched something bad. I had a bad night, let’s say. And the next morning this person, he said, you know what let me stop by the pharmacy. He got me medication, he got me the special water you guys have there if you he and we made pictures of us standing together on a village square.
It was hilarious. So that story, I always try to say, if I just started to negotiate with that person without first de-icing, let’s say the relation we would’ve got, probably, I would probably still negotiating with them. Yeah. To me that’s still that picture of us standing together is still while I keep it to myself, but it’s still a very nice nice picture.
