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I don't know aboutyou, but I look forward to the end of theyear.
Many things slowdown, the weatherchanges, and we begin to focus more on family andfriends.
Unfortunately, this time of year can also bring with it more interpersonal communicationstruggles.
Today we will explore tips and tricks for negotiating and managingconflict.
I'm MattAbrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School ofBusiness.
Welcome to a quick thanks episode of ThinkFast, TalkSmart, thepodcast.
We recently pulled many of our listeners onLinkedIn, and we found that two topics many people are interested in are conflict andnegotiation.
So we reached out to MichelleGelfand, who is the JohnH.
Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at theGSB.
Many of you will remember my previous conversation with Michelle where we had a great talk about cross-culturalcommunication.
Let's listen in as Michelle provides us with expert guidance on how to better negotiate and manageconflict.
This notion of negotiation andconflict, I find thisfascinating.
We've talked about both topics before in this podcast with your colleagues like Maggie Neal and nearHellevy, and I'm really interested to get your perspective onit.
Do you have some best practices and advice around how we can negotiatebetter?
Yeah, Imean, I'm kind of a fanatic aboutnegotiation,research, andtraining, sort of quasi-religious aboutit, because it's so important we do it all the time with ourspouses, with ourkids, we do it with ouremployees, we do it at the internationallevel.
I think research is really trying to explain why do people negotiateineffectively, when there is a lot of value that both parties can get at thetable.
Why do we leave so much value at thetable?
One of the most fascinating findings is that the best negotiators tend to be the mostcreative.
Forexample, think aboutme, my husband Todd going onvacation, and let's say this is going to sound a little gender-sterrortypical, but let's say that I want to go to a spa at thebeach, and he wants to go to a cabin in themountains.
It looks like at first glance we're going on separatevacations.
We have a goodidea, we're going to suffer each other's likepriorities.
But then if you thinkabout, if I askedhim, what's yourpriority?
Hesays,well, it's themountains.
What if my priority is thespa?
Then we can cut a deal where we go to a spa in themountains.
That's a very creativedeal.
A lot of times negotiation is really about understanding what are the other people'spriorities?
It'sremarkable. A lot ofpeople, less than10% ofpeople, actually askpeople, what's yourpriority?
It'sremarkable. You can't get to those win-winagreements, those creative agreements without knowingthat.
One of the tricks in negotiation is to not be too competitive and not be toocooperative.
If you're toocooperative, you just split things down themiddle.
There's a greatstory. You might have heard this from Maggie orNear, that two sisters negotiating over anorange.
One of them wants the peel to make acake.
The other one wants the pulp to eatit.
They just split that resource down themiddle.
One's going to toss out the peel and the other one's going to toss out thepulp.
The creative agreement thereis, if they knew they had these different values on theresource, they would trade off versus just splitting the difference and wasting theresource.
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 toocooperative.
One of the things I like to tellpeople, and I have a list of top 10 research findings on the negotiation on my websitealso, but one of the things that we know is that we should mind ourmetaphors.
Metaphors are really not just the linguisticdevice.
How do you map the domain ofnegotiation?
What is it like toyou? So think about it as negotiation like a game or a sport or a battle or is it likedating?
I think it's not just a linguisticdevice.
We know that people actually start thinking about negotiation through metaphor without realizingit.
They enact scripts orbehaviors, communication strategies that reflect those metaphors and they are evaluating the situation based on thosemetaphors.
What we know is that we need to match metaphors appropriately to thecontext.
Sometimes people use uber competitive metaphors like battle and sports when it's actually an integrated context like the vacationexample.
Sometimes people use super relational metaphors when it's actually competitive context where you should be claiming or valid foryourself.
So we try to help people think about their metaphors and then negotiate metaphors with theirpartners, try to come up with a sharedmetaphor.
So that's something I think is really an exciting area of new research that we've been workingon.
I'll just mention one or the things that I'm across culturalpsychologists.
So a lot of the literature that weknow, all the findings aboutnegotiation, many of them are from theWest, 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 reallyimportant, trust butverify.
Those findings are not necessarily applicable in places like the Middle East or EastAsia.
We do a lot of research onnegotiation, try to understand people'smetaphors, understand what are we trying to get out of thesituation.
Often we're not just negotiating thetangibles, the salary or theprice.
We're negotiating something deeperin, forexample, the Middle East where respect and honor arereally, reallyimportant.
Infact, we can show that with some of ourresearch.
We have a new honor dictionarytoo.
We can assess how much people talk about honor talk and we can see how that predicts agreements in Egypt and other contexts in theUS.
And so that's just to say that we need to be culturally intelligent and that's a realterm,CQ.
It's different thanIQ, it's different thanEQ.
It predicts negotiation effectiveness in intercultural contexts better than IQ orEQ.
And so it's reallyimportant.
A lot of times when we send peopleabroad, we send people abroad because of their technicalcompetence, not because of their culturalintelligence.
So whenever I teach negotiation or talk aboutit, we always talk a lot aboutculture.
I find so many things fascinating about what you'vesaid.
This idea of negotiating themetaphor, sort of a meta-negotiation that you have to have first is fascinating and you have to align thatfirst.
And the point you made about understanding the other person's perspective requires a lot oflistening.
I think people think of negotiation as veryactive.
You'respeaking. It's that used car dealernegotiation.
Yeah, that's ametaphor.
There wego. And yet it's really listening to understand what's important for the person you're negotiatingwith.
That'sreally.Yeah, I totallyagree.
Most times people are thinking about how to influence otherpeople.
Right. Andthey're, even if they're asking aquestion, they're thinking about what are they going to saynext.
And we try in our classes tosay,hey, listening is reallyimportant.
And if you feel reallyvulnerable, you don't want to ask people about what their prioritiesare.
You don't want to reveal yourpriority.
Then you have to ask questions indirectly to get atthat.
And that's very important in cultures that have lowtrust.
It is a really importantskill, whether it's indirect or directlistening.
Absolutely. And that last piece you've said about the cultural context ofnegotiation, Ithink, is reallyimportant.
So, culturalintelligence, beyond just normal intelligence and emotionalintelligence, I think is a really fascinatingone.
And as we become even more global in how we work andinteract, that becomes even moreimportant.
So, we've talked aboutnegotiation.
Conflict is another piece of this puzzle aswell.
I'm wondering if you have suggestions and best practices around how to manageconflict.
And this can be betweenindividuals, between team members or evenorganizations.
How can we manageconflict?
And I'm takingnotes. I have twoteenagers.
I needhelp.Yeah,conflict, youknow, are these rejected claims that they usually have a lot of really negativeemotions.
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 andwrong.
And we tend to associate ourselves with fairbehaviors.
And we tend to associate other people with unfairbehavior.
So we rarely think about how is I unfair in thesituation?
How are theyfair? Infact, we can document just how pervasive this self-serving bias of fairnessis.
And my class is 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 thanothers.
Andthey, if other people do it more thanthem, they do that for fiveminutes.
And then they do the same thing for unfairbehaviors.
And then we have them count how many behaviors they came up with on bothlists.
And in the US inparticular, we see that people have huge numbers of eye fair and they have huge numbers of theyunfair.
It's a very pervasive bias in how we see theworld, it'sself-protective.
But what we think we need to do here is help peopleunderstand,like, think about how you might have contributed to thisconflict.
Think about how they might have beenfair.
So this is also about empathy andlistening.
Youknow, the other thing I think along the issue of communication andnarrative, we're starting to study conflict as stories that people get very attached to and kind of the bias in the stories that tellthemselves.
And forthis, we did a recentpaper, we were probably familiar with the telephonegame.
Yes. But we were looking at how people transmit conflicts over chains ofpeople.
It's one of my favoritestudies.
It really is realistic because what we did in the firstchain, we had two parties in conflict that were of equalblame.
And we piloted so each ofthem, there was issues like between two apartments having a conflict in terms of parking and noise and garbage andwhatnot.
But they were both equally toblame.
And then we had each person in onecondition, they didn't know either of the apartment buildings and they reproduced the story to anotherperson.
And then that person reproduced to another and down to fourpeople.
And in anothercondition, they knew one of theapartments.
They knew the people in the apartments and we had them do the samething.
It was remarkable to see over the chains how thatgroup, who at a motivated kind of stake in theconflict, started leaving out details of their ownblame, their owngroups.
And they started embellishing the blame of the outgroup.
And as this conflict was reproduced across thechain, they were getting more and morerevengeful.
And youknow, that'ssomething.
So whenyou, so it tells you astory.
And I ask all your audience to think aboutthis.
When someone gives you a story about aconflict, think about it as a story and think about it about what are they leavingout?
What are theyembellishing?
Even if they don't even realizeit, it's not something conscious that we don't think people realize they were doingthis.
And infact, we've done some more recent research withpartners, relationalpartners, because actually byaccident, when we go to our spouses or to our friends and we tell them about aconflict, we choose people that are going to help validate thoseconflicts.
This is kind of the dark side ofempathy.
I told you Todd is alawyer.
He's a while going home and telling them about aconflict.
And he's alwayslike,really?
Is itlike, you sure thathappened?
And I'mlike,listen,dude, I want empathyhere.
So we always like tonegotiate,like, first he gives me a littleempathy, but then he tries to poke holes in mystory.
And I think it's really important in a recent study we showed thatnaturally, people really like to have empathy in theirconflicts.
But the more their partners empathize withthem, the more revenge they become of the person they're in conflictwith.
So we're trying to figureout, youknow, how do we help manage that process ofconflict?
But that's just to broadly say that self-serving biases are really rampant in conflictsituations, how we perceive ourselves andothers, how we tell stories about this and what we're leaving at and what we'reembellishing.
I find a lot of what you have shared with us really has us challenge the way that we see and do the work wedo, how wenegotiate, how we experienceconflict.
In the role that communication narrative listening plays in it is socritical.
This notion of a dark side ofempathy, I find fascinating because everybody's always talking about you want to be moreempathetic.
But I can certainly see how in my ownlife, when I'm inconflict, I search out the people who are going to support my point ofview, which only hardens my point of view and makes me more revengeful or upset at the people I'm in conflictwith.
So thank you verymuch. Thank you for havingme.
Thanks for joining us for another episode of ThinkFast, TalkSmart, thepodcast.
This episode was produced by JennyLuna, Michael Riley andme, MattAbrahams.
For more information andepisodes, visit gsp.stanford.edu or subscribe to our show wherever you get yourpodcasts.
Find us on social media atstanford.gsp.
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