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I don't know about you, but I look
forward to the end of the year.
Many things slow down, the weather
changes, and we begin to focus more
on family and friends.
Unfortunately, this time of
year can also bring with it more
interpersonal communication
struggles.
Today we will explore tips and
tricks for negotiating and
managing conflict.
I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach
Strategic Communication at Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to a Quick Thinks episode
of Think Fast,
Talk Smart: The Podcast.
We recently polled many of our
listeners on LinkedIn, and we
found that two topics many people
are interested in are conflict and
negotiation.
So we reached out
to Michele Gelfand,
who is the John H Scully Professor
of Cross-Cultural Management, and
professor of organizational
behavior at the GSB.
Many of you will remember my
previous conversation with Michele,
where we had a great talk about
cross-cultural communication.
Let's listen in as Michele provides
us with expert guidance on how
to better negotiate and
manage conflict.
This notion of negotiation and
conflict, I find this fascinating.
We've talked about both topics
before on this podcast with your
colleagues like Maggie Neale and
Nir Halevy, and
I'm really interested to get your
perspective on it.
Do you have some best practices and
advice around how we can negotiate
better?
>> Yeah, I mean I'm kind of
a fanatic about negotiation,
research, and training,
sort of quasi-religious about it.
because it's so important,
we do it all the time,
with our spouses, with our kids.
We do it with our employees, we do
it at the international level.
And I think research is really
trying to explain why do
people negotiate ineffectively.
When there is a lot of value that
both parties can get at the table,
why do we leave so
much value at the table?
One of the most fascinating
findings is that the best
negotiators tend to be the most
creative.
For example, think about me and
my husband,
Todd, going on vacation.
And let's say,
this is going to sound a little
gender stereotypical, but
let's say that I want to go to
a spa at the beach, and he wants to
go to a cabin in the mountains.
It looks like at first glance,
we're going on separate vacations,
not a good idea, or we're going to
suffer each other's priorities.
But then if you think about,
if I asked him,
what's your priority?
And he says, well,
it's the mountains, and
what if my priority is the spa?
Well, then we can now cut a deal
where we go to a spa in
the mountains.
So that's a very creative deal.
And a lot of times, negotiation is
really about understanding what
are the other people's priorities.
It's remarkable, a lot of people,
less than 10% of people,
actually ask people,
what's your priority?
It's remarkable, and you can't get
to those win-win agreements,
those creative agreements,
without knowing that.
And one of the tricks
in negotiation is to not be too
competitive, and
not be too cooperative.
Because if you're too cooperative,
you just split things down
the middle.
There's a great story, you might
have heard this from Maggie or Nir,
two sisters negotiating over
an orange.
One of them wants the peel to
make a cake,
the other want the pulp to eat it.
If they just split that resource
down the middle, one's going to
toss out the peel, and the other
one's going to toss out the pulp.
So the creative agreement there is,
if they knew they had these
different values on the resource,
they would trade off, versus just
splitting the difference and
wasting the resource.
So it's a fascinating balance
between being not too competitive,
where you're just trying to get
that whole resource,
or take your own vacation,
and not being too cooperative.
One of the things I like to tell
people, and I have a list of
top ten research findings on
negotiation on my website also.
But one of the things
that we know is
that we should mind our metaphors.
So metaphors are really not just
a linguistic device,
it's about how do
you map the domain of negotiation?
What is it like to you?
So think about, is negotiation like
a game, or a sport, or a battle,
or is it like dating?
And I think, it's not just
a linguistic device, we know that
people actually start thinking
about negotiation through metaphor.
Without realising it,
they enact scripts or behaviors,
communication strategies
that reflect those metaphors.
And they are evaluating the
situation based on those metaphors.
And what we know is that we need
to match metaphors appropriately to
the context.
Sometimes people use
uber-competitive metaphors,
like battle and sports, when it's
actually an integrative context,
like the vacation example.
Sometimes people use
super-relational metaphors when
it's actual competitive context
where you should be claiming more
value for yourself.
So we try to help people think
about their metaphors, and
then negotiate metaphors with their
partners, try to come up with
a shared metaphor.
So that's something I think is
really an exciting area of new
research that we've
been working on.
I'll just mention one other thing,
because I'm a cross-cultural
psychologist.
So a lot of the literature that we
know, all the findings about
negotiation, many of them are from
the west, they're from the US.
And they work really well in our
ecology, where we have very strong
institutions, and we have a lot of
mobility, where swift trust is
really important, trust but verify.
Those findings are not necessarily
applicable in places like
the Middle East or East Asia.
We do a lot of research on
negotiation, try to understand
people's metaphors,
understand what are we trying
to get out of the situation.
Often we're not just negotiating
the tangibles, the salary,
or the price.
We're negotiating something deeper
in, for example,
the Middle East where respect and
honor are really, really important.
In fact, we can show that with some
of our research.
We have a new honor dictionary too,
we can assess how much people talk
about honor talk.
And we can see how that predicts
agreements in Egypt and
other contexts and the US.
And so that's just to say that we
need to be culturally intelligent.
And that's a real term, CQ,
it's different than IQ,
it's different than EQ.
It predicts negotiation
effectiveness in intercultural
contexts better than IQ or EQ.
And so it's really important.
A lot of times when we send people
abroad, we send people abroad
because of their technical
competence, not because of their
cultural intelligence.
So whenever I teach negotiation or
talk about it,
we always talk a lot about culture.
>> I find so many things
fascinating about what you've said.
This idea of negotiating
the metaphor,
sort of a meta-negotiation that you
have to have first, is fascinating,
and you have to align that first.
And the point you made about
understanding the other
person's perspective requires a lot
of listening.
I think people think
of negotiation as very active.
You're speaking, it's
like used car dealer negotiation.
>> Yeah, that's a metaphor [LAUGH].
>> There we go.
And yet it's really listening
to understand what's important for
the person you're negotiating and
doing that.
>> Yeah. >> That's really diagonal.
>> Yeah, I totally agree, most
times people are thinking about how
to influence other people.
And even if they're asking
a question, they're thinking about
what are they going to say next.
And we try in our classes to say,
hey, listening is really important.
And if you feel really vulnerable,
you don't want to ask people about
what their priorities are, or you
don't want to reveal your priority,
then you have to ask questions
indirectly to get at that.
And that's very important
in cultures that have low trust.
It is a really important skill,
whether it's indirect or
direct listening.
>> Absolutely, and that last piece
you said about the cultural context
of negotiation, I think,
is really important.
This idea of cultural intelligence
beyond just normal intelligence and
emotional intelligence, I think,
is a really fascinating one.
And as we become even more global
in how we work and interact,
that becomes even more important.
So we've talked about negotiation,
conflict is another piece of this
puzzle as well.
I'm wondering if you have
suggestions and best practices
around how to manage conflict.
And this can be between
individuals, between team members,
or even organizations.
How can we manage conflict?
And I'm taking notes,
I have two teenagers, I need help.
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, conflicts
are these rejected claims,
they usually have a lot of really
negative emotions.
And I think part of the issue that
happens in conflicts is that we
become very self-serving in our
sense of what's right and wrong.
And we tend to associate ourselves
with fair behaviors, and
we tend to associate other
people with unfair behavior.
So we rarely think about,
how is I unfair in the situation,
how are they fair?
In fact, we can document just how
pervasive this self-serving bias of
fairness is.
In my classes, I ask people to come
up with a list of things when we
think about fair behaviors, and
put the letter I if they do it
more than others, and they, if
other people do it more than them.
They do that for five minutes, and
then they do the same thing for
unfair behaviors.
And then we have them count how
many behaviors they came up with on
both in lesson.
And in the US, in particular,
we see that people have huge
numbers of I fair, and they
have huge numbers of they unfair.
It's a very pervasive bias
in how we see the world,
it's self-protective.
But what we think we need to do
here is how people understand like,
think about how you might
have contributed to this conflict.
Think about how they might
have been fair.
So this is also about empathy and
listening.
The other thing, I think, along
the issue of communication and
narrative, it was trying to study
conflict as stories that people get
very attached to,
and kind of the bias in
the stories they tell themselves.
And for this, we did a recent
paper, you're probably familiar
with the telephone game.
>> Yes.
>> And we were looking at how
people transmit conflicts
over chains of people.
It's one of my favorite studies.
It really is realistic, because
what we did in the first chain,
we had two parties in conflict that
were of equal blame, and
we pilot tested.
So each of them, there was issues
between two apartments having
a conflict in terms of parking and
noise and garbage and whatnot, but
they were both equally to blame.
And then we had each person,
in one condition, they didn't know
either of the apartment buildings,
and they reproduced the story to
another person.
And then that person reproduced to
another, and down to four people.
In another condition, they knew one
of the apartments, they knew the
people in one of the apartments,
and we had them do the same thing.
It was remarkable to see over
the chains how that group who
had a motivated kind of stake in
the conflict started leaving out
details of their own blame,
their own group's blame, and
they started embellishing the blame
of the outgroup.
And as this conflict was reproduced
across the chain, they were getting
more and more revengeful.
And you know what's fascinating?
So when someone tells you a story,
and I ask all your audience to
think about this, when someone
gives you a story about a conflict,
think about it as a story, and
think about
what are they leaving out.
What are they embellishing,
even if they don't realize it?
It's not something conscious,
that we don't think people realize
they were doing this.
And in fact,
we've done some more recent
research with relational partners.
Because actually, by accident,
when we go to our spouses or
to our friends, and
we tell them about a conflict,
we choose people that are going to
help validate those conflicts.
>> Yeah. >> This is kind of a dark
side of empathy.
I told you Todd is a lawyer, so
I'll go at home and
tell him about a conflict,
and he's always like, really,
you sure it happened?
And I'm like, listen, dude,
I want empathy here.
>> [LAUGH] >> So we always like to
negotiate, first,
he gives me all empathy, but then
he tries to poke holes in my story.
And I think it's really important.
In a recent study, we showed that,
naturally, people really like to
have empathy in their conflicts.
But the more their partners
empathize with them, the more
revengeful they become of the
person they're in conflict with.
So we're trying to figure out,
how do we help manage
that process of conflict?
But that's just to broadly say that
self-serving biases are really
rampant in conflict situations, how
we perceive ourselves and others,
how we tell stories about this, and
what we're leaving out and
what we're embellishing >> I find
a lot of what you have shared with
us really has us challenge the way
that we see and do the work we do,
how we negotiate,
how we experience conflict.
And the role that communication
narrative listening
plays in it is so critical.
This notion of a dark side of
empathy, I find fascinating.
>> [LAUGH] >> Because everybody's
always talking about you want to be
more empathetic.
But I can certainly see how in my
own life, when I'm in conflict,
I search out the people who are
going to support my point of view.
Which only
hardens my point of view, and
makes me more revengeful or upset
at the people I'm in conflict with.
So thank you very much.
>> Thank you for having me.
[MUSIC]
>> Thanks for joining us for
another episode of Think Fast, Talk
Smart: The Podcast from Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
This episode was produced
by Jenny Luna, Michael Riley, and
me, Matt Abrahams.
For more information and episodes,
visit gsb.stanford.edu, or
subscribe to our show wherever you
get your podcasts.
Find us on social media
@StanfordGSB.
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