The fastest way to lose a negotiation is to answer a question before you understand it.
Most of us are problem solvers by trade. Somebody puts a problem on the table and our hands start moving. We've seen this before. We know the fix. We start prescribing.
Stephen Covey — the business consultant who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which has sold north of 40 million copies since 1989 — had a line for this. He asked you to imagine going to an optometrist with trouble seeing. Let's say the optometrist listened for about thirty seconds before taking off his own glasses and handing them to you. "Put these on. I've worn them for ten years and they've been great!" You put them on. Everything's a blur. He tells you to think positively.
You would never go back to that optometrist. And yet that is how most of us negotiate.
Here is the clearest example I know of.
October 1992. The second presidential debate, in Richmond, Virginia — a town hall format, which was still fairly new at the time. Three men on stage: President George H.W. Bush, running for reelection; Bill Clinton, the Democratic governor of Arkansas; and Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire running as an independent. All of them negotiating for votes. The moderator, Carole Simpson of ABC News, called on a 25-year-old woman in the audience named Marissa Hall.
Her question was simple. How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn't, how can you find a cure for the economic problems of ordinary people?
While she was asking it, Bush looked at his watch.
Not a glance. He looked at it. Tens of millions of people watching at home saw him do it. And then he answered: Well, I think the national debt affects everybody, obviously.
Everybody. She had asked about him. She tried again — "you personally." The moderator jumped in to help her. Bush started talking about interest rates, then about his grandchildren, and finally turned it back on her: Are you suggesting that if somebody has means, the national debt doesn't affect them? I'm not sure I get it. Help me with the question and I'll try to answer it.
He argued with the voter. On national television.
Then it was Clinton's turn. He got off his stool. He walked toward her — something neither of the other two candidates did — and he looked her in the eye.
Tell me how it's affected you again.
That's it. That's the whole move. He didn't have a ten-point plan. He asked her to explain her own pain to him, and then he reflected it back: You know people who've lost their jobs and lost their homes. She said yes. Only then did he answer, and by then she was listening, because he had shown her he'd heard.
A CNN/USA Today poll after the debate had Clinton winning the town hall with 58 percent. Bush got 16.
This isn't about politics or personal opinions on each man. It's about a bigger lesson: You don't get to prescribe until you've earned the diagnosis.
This isn't only a debate-stage phenomenon.
Covey tells the story of a Chicago commercial real estate broker who was six months into a deal, watching it die in a room full of principals and lawyers. He'd tried every closing technique he had. So he stopped and said something like: let me see if I really understand your position and your concerns. When you feel I understand them, then we'll see whether my proposal is even relevant. He kept going until the man on the other side felt heard. Mid-conversation, the man stood up, called his wife, and said the deal was done.
Notice the phrasing there. Not let me tell you why you're wrong. Not even let me tell you what we can do. He gave the other side control of when the listening was finished — and only then asked for a hearing.
That takes patience, which is a currency most negotiators refuse to spend. It also takes something harder: getting your ego out of the room. Covey's word for the alternative was autobiographical listening. That's when you're not listening at all — you're waiting, filtering everything the other person says through your own experience, looking for the seam where you can insert your story, your case, your fix.
I've done it. A few years ago a friend started telling me about a bad health diagnosis, and I was tired, and I had my own bad news from that same week, and I cut in and told him about mine. He's gone now. I still think about it.
Bush wasn't a cruel man. He just wasn't there. And people can always tell.
So think about the last deal you lost that you should have won. The terms were fair. Your logic was sound. They said no anyway, and you've been telling yourself it was the price.
Are you sure they turned down your proposal? Or did they turn down the feeling that you'd already decided what they needed before they finished the sentence?
Somebody is across the table from you this week, watching you the same way that room watched Bush check his watch. You don't get to decide what they see.
Remember: negotiation is life.
– Gene
