In The Shadow Negotiation, author Deborah Kolb examines negotiation at the level that rarely gets spoken about but that can either make or break the deal: personal feelings and biases, nonverbal communication, and frames.
Key Takeaways
- Negotiations have hidden and unspoken frames, biases, and personal beliefs that will impact the negotiation (shadow negotiation)
- Power goes with warmth: advocate for yourself (pushing) and connect. See our foundational article on warmth and competence
- Calibrate: more advocacy for short-term, one-off deals and more connection for lor long-term relationships
Notes
About the Author:
Deborah Kolb is an American researcher, author, and teacher. She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management, MIT. Kolb serves as a women’s-leadership consultant to, among others, Google, Fidelity, and the White House.
She is the co-director of the Negotiations in the Workplace Project at Harvard and pens her own blog at DeborahMKolb.com.
What’s the Shadow Negotiation
Says Deborah Kolb:
The shadow negotiation is where hidden agendas and masked assumptions play out. Often it is defined by a whole array of attitudes of which the participants are only dimly aware.
It’s important to know and understand the shadow negotiation because those hidden agendas impact the negotiation as much as the explicit issues and differences do.
To negotiate effectively, you must recognize the shadow negotiation and bring those misguided assumptions to the surface.
For example, when women negotiate at work, the assumption is often that work was “her choice”, and that she will always put family before work. Hence, she shouldn’t be negotiating hard.
A woman who doesn’t address those issues will face an uphill battle.
But the shadow negotiation also includes nonverbals, body language, power dynamics, and interpersonal relationships, all of which influence the negotiation but are rarely talked about.
Says Deborah:
Even though they seldom address the subject directly, they decide between them whose interests and needs command at tention, whose opinions matter, and how cooperative they are going to be in reaching an agreement.
Before “Creative” Negotiation and “Making the Pie Larger”, You Need to Show Some Strength
Strength matters.
If your negotiation partner thinks you’re a pushover, or that you will make all the concessions, no amount of creative problem solving will help you reach a good outcome.
Says the author:
The people you negotiate with need to know that they cannot push you around before you can convince them to take you and your interests seriously.
Frames in Negotiation: Strategic Turns
Deborah Kolp calls “turns” what in the end are “frames”.
If the other party is trying to make you the issue of the negotiation, negotiating becomes impossible (and it’s often a negotiation power move to manipulate you).
You cannot defend when someone accuses you, or you continue to operate within their frame of choice, which is helping them and damaging you.
Some framing techniques the author recommends:
- Interrupt the move: by changing the pace you break the momentum and the frame might never have the chance to establish itself.
- Correct the move: offer an alternative explanation to whatever they are accusing you of. Often, you will go from a negative explanation of your motives and behavior, to a positive one (for example: “you don’t have enough appetite for risks”, “my appetite for risk hinges on having good information, which is what I am asking you to provide me with”
- Divert the move: go from personal, back to the problem
- Name the move: this is the equivalent of “going meta”, such as you explain what they are trying to do
The author also presents examples for each, and one of them was particularly impressive.
Charlene won the promotion to committee chair over Ellen. At their first meeting, Ellen was late. And when she arrived, she had printed a memo that she handed out to everyone. Ellen was acting as if she were the chair. Instead of pushing back right away and look territorial, Charlene looked at the memo and said “what a lot of work”.
Then asked people if they wanted a refill of coffee before restarting. Once the meeting restarted, Charlene said:
Charlene (boss): We have not made so much progress as Ellen did independently.
We have yet to identify the approach we want to take, let alone the priorities.
Perhaps, Charlene suggested, it would be better to consider Ellen’s memo when ideas had been discussed a bit more.
So, let’s start with the ideas now…
Without the interruption, the committee would have focused 100% on Ellen’s memo.
But with the break, she prevented Ellen’s memo to dominate the discussion, and thwarted Ellen’s attempt to act as the leader.
Also read:
Advocacy, Connection, And Striking the Right Balance
The author distinguishes between two different approaches:
- Advocacy: pushing for what you need. When you’re dealing with one-off negotiation and single items, like selling/buying cars and houses, it will be more about advocacy
- Connection: the relationship side of the negotiation. You will use it more for repeated interaction and for complex negotiations. When negotiation is defined as a search for joint gains, connective skills become more important.
Also see: the basic strategies of power.
Advocacy: You Need to Be Able to Push
I totally agree with Deborah Kolp:
Pushing has a taint associated with it.
(…)
But being able to push effectively is an important skill for all negotiators. Despite whatever collaborative inclination we may have, some deals, by their very nature, require pushing, and some people drive us to push simply to protect our interests.
Also read:
Pushing, Packaging, and… The Third Way
The author defines two typical negotiations we engage in:
- Pushing: this is advocacy only, and it’s used in competitive negotiation with a win-lose frame
- Packaging: you seek to make the pie larger. Rather than push for what you want, you try to discover the different interests in play, and make a trade based on those differences to make a “package deal”.
And she adds a third way:
- Mutual inquiry: builds explicitly on the open relationships and trust forged in the shadow negotiation. Bargainers may re-evaluate what they want, and redefine the problem itself
Says the author about mutual inquiry:
You work together to learn more about each other’s experience, and agreements emerge not from floating attractive options but from this exploration.
In other words, new ideas don’t come from brainstorming, as in problem solving, but from listening, learning, and creating together.
Promote Yourself Well
The author uses several real-life examples, just like we do here:
Real-Life Applications
Some good ideas for your negotiations:
- Time your negotiations to when you’re most needed, when the company needs you the most and when you’re literally more in demand
- Use intermediaries to positively prime the other party: if you can send someone higher up, or someone the other party is friends with to start influencing your target
- Only share sensitive information after some trust has been built or it won’t be believed and may be used against you
Review
“The Shadow Negotiation” is a wonderful book by an author with a sharp mind who sees and understands frames, social dynamics, as well as deeper power dynamics.
Check the:
