What do you do when the person across the table stops arguing about the deal and starts attacking you personally?
For most negotiators, that moment is harder than any fight over money.
Somebody says something they can’t take back, and suddenly the issue on the table is your character. Conventional wisdom gives you two choices: 1. hit back, so they know you won’t be pushed around, or 2. end the meeting, so they know they crossed a line.
Both feel good, but both usually cost you something. Hitting back turns a business dispute into a personal war. Ending the meeting leaves the insult standing, unanswered, for everyone in the room to remember.
There’s a better option, and I found it in a small book I picked up at an independent bookstore.
The book is Lessons in Leadership, Laughter, and Love by Dr. Gail Southwell, a Nashville-based writer and executive coach. Starting in the 1960s, Southwell worked in labor relations at the Ford Motor Company, one of the first women to do that work. For years she worked alongside a man named Medford Lee, and her book is a tribute to him, built largely from interviews with the people who knew him and negotiated with him.
You’ve probably never heard of Medford Lee. A Brooklyn native, he went to the University of Louisville on a football scholarship and stayed on for law school, graduating in 1969. He then spent more than 30 years at Ford as a labor negotiator, sitting across from the United Auto Workers, the union representing the company’s plant workers. By the time he retired in 2002, he was a legend.
In 1991, Lee was in his office with Roosevelt Roberts, the UAW’s safety representative and a respected leader in the Black community.
They were arguing over discipline for a Black employee who had broken a plant rule. Roberts wanted the infraction written into the man’s record and nothing more. Lee had already cut the man’s unpaid time off and believed some real consequence was fair, and neither one was moving.
The argument got heated, and Roberts called Lee, also a Black man, an Oreo – Black on the outside and white on the inside, a man who had sold out his own community to keep management happy. Coming from a union leader Lee respected, in front of a colleague, it was about as personal as an insult gets.
Lee didn’t raise his voice and didn’t throw Roberts out. Southwell started to leave the room, and Lee asked her to stay, because there had been a witness to the insult and he wanted one for the answer. Then he sent her for the plant’s affirmative action records, the hiring numbers Ford reported to the federal government every year.
Lee had spent years making sure Black workers were hired and promoted throughout that plant, and the records proved it. He walked Roberts through them without editorializing. Then he told Roberts the two of them were after the same thing for their people and only disagreed about how to get there.
Within a few minutes Roberts had backed down. The two men shook hands, and before Roberts left, Lee invited him out to his farm to go fishing that Sunday. Southwell’s account of that afternoon, including exactly what was in those records, is worth hearing in full on the episode.
Until you listen to the episode, though, here's the bottom line: a personal attack is almost always a claim without proof. That’s what makes it so effective in the moment and so weak under scrutiny.
The strongest answer to an insult isn’t a better insult. It’s evidence.
A number or a document nobody in the room can dispute pulls the conversation back to the merits, where the person who made the attack has nothing left to argue.
This works in a boardroom the same way it works in a union hall.
When a client accuses you of padding the bill, or a counterpart says you’ve never dealt with them in good faith, your instinct will be to defend your character. Your character isn’t really the issue in that moment. Your record is, so bring the record.
Think about the second half of what Lee did, too. Once the facts were on the table, he named the goal he and Roberts shared, and that gave Roberts somewhere to go. People rarely back down when backing down means admitting they’re the villain, but they’ll often back down once you’ve shown them you’re on the same side.
On the podcast we talk a lot about tit-for-tat, the strategy that won political scientist Robert Axelrod’s famous computer tournaments on cooperation in 1980.
You start out cooperative. When the other side turns aggressive, you respond right away and in proportion, and the moment they go back to cooperating, you do too, without holding the past against them. Lee’s answer was firm and immediate, and the fishing invitation was the forgiveness half of the strategy.
You can prepare for this before you ever sit down. Think about what the other side is most likely to accuse you of when things get tense, and put the document that answers it in your folder.
Think about the last time someone made it personal with you at the table. Did you answer with your temper, or with evidence?
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
