Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:02:30: Listeners' questions
00:03:21: Forget rational
00:06:32: Positive emotions make us smarter
00:08:11: What I would like to deny
00:09:39: BATNA
00:12:35: Fight, flight and make friends
00:14:23: Value
00:16:05: Wondering to knowing
00:18:14: Stay calm and collected
00:19:33: DJ voice
00:20:07: Take a break
00:21:42: Calibrated questions
00:25:18: Improve your negotiation
00:27:37: Chris's Career Advice
00:28:55: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast where every week we talk about a different topic to help you navigate the ups and the downs of your job today and take control of your career in the future.

This week we're focusing on negotiation and you're going to hear my conversation with negotiation expert and ex-FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss.  He's also the author of a brilliant book called Never Split the Difference and he applies his ideas, tools and techniques all across the world, whether it's teaching students at places like Harvard, or working with organisations and teams to help them with practical negotiation skills.

What I particularly enjoyed about my conversation with Chris is that his ideas felt very grounded in the real world, and I could imagine myself using everything that we talked about.  So, we started off by chatting about how having the right mindset really impacts our negotiations and the difference between what he describes as positive and negative emotions.  Then we talk about loads of tools, so thinking about things like calibrated questions, the difference between wondering and knowing which was a particular standout moment for me, because that just really resonated as we were chatting that through.  And the importance of practising your late-night DJ tone, and how that can be useful if you're just trying to stay calm and collected in perhaps a particularly difficult negotiation.

If you do have a lot of negotiations as part of your job or perhaps you've got an important negotiation coming up, it might be worth grabbing a copy of Chris's book as in the appendix, he outlines how to prepare what he calls your Negotiation One Sheet.  This really helps you to prepare for a negotiation and he says that preparation yields about a 7:1 rate of return, and I really like that that negotiation one sheet really distils all his ideas and his thinking into one place, and really helps to think things through before you get started.

I hope you enjoy today's episode.  As a reminder, you can now get all of the podcast resources that we produce, so the Podsheet, the Podnotes in one place by signing up to the weekly Podmail and the link is in the show notes, so that's just helpful if you would like, on a Tuesday morning, something to pop into your inbox that puts everything together for you.  In the meantime, enjoy listening and I'll be back at the end to say goodbye.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us today on the Squiggly Careers podcast, I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Chris Voss: Sarah, my pleasure, thanks for having me on.

Sarah Ellis: No problem.  I thought it would be useful to ask our careers community what they need help negotiating with, so that we can be really specific about how we can help our listeners today.  There were four areas, so I thought we'd just bear these in mind as we go through our conversation.  Lots of people asking us about flexible working; time and resources generally, so I guess in people's day-to-day jobs, maybe you're negotiating with your boss about you've got too much to do and not enough time; or maybe what projects you'd like to work on because they'd be good for your progression and your experience.  Then the third area, which I would guess is the one that comes up quite frequently whenever you're talking in a work context, is promotion and pay.

I wanted to start off with, I loved this quote that you included in your book, which is from Daniel Kahneman.  You mention that he says, "It is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish and that their tastes are anything but stable".  I wondered if you could just start by talking a bit about this idea of, we often approach negotiations as if we were talking to a rational human who is fully logical all of the time.  I appreciate in your experience as an FBI hostage negotiator, of course that irrational, it feels probably more front of mind; but it sounded to me, certainly when I read the book, that actually that probably applies to all of us.  So, I wondered if you just wanted to talk to us a bit about that, about how can understand how almost our brain works and how that helps us to negotiate better.

Chris Voss: Yeah, right, I mean that's a tough question, because there's two assumptions that are probably wrong: the other person's rational; and here's the one that everybody finds himself in, the idea that you are.  And a way I try to take the sting out of this with people is, you make decisions based on what you care about, which by definition makes decision-making an emotional process.  It's really odd for some people to wrap their minds around, because they think of themselves as rational people and of course you do.  Not that many people think of themselves as irrational, or even people that recognise their own emotionality.

The neuroscience just doesn't support that.  The only way you could be rational is to completely disconnect your emotions in your brain, and the only people that have ever done that had brain damage.  We make decisions on what we care about; that can be good and bad, but it just kind of is, it's like our respiratory system.  Our respiratory system is functioning as long as we're alive.  Our emotional interplay with our thinking is functioning as long as we're alive, it just doesn't go away.

Sarah Ellis: So, your advice would be first of all probably accepting, I guess, that we are all emotional and that we bring those emotions to any negotiation, so it's not about trying to ignore or avoid those emotions, let's accept that first and foremost.  What is then the advice in terms of, if you're then going to start to prepare and you know you've got a negotiation coming, maybe you want to talk to your manager about moving from a five- to a four-day week, what sort of preparation is most helpful?

Chris Voss: Yeah, great question and then let's go a little bit further down this emotion path.  Typically we say, "Don't be too emotional", and let's make a distinction between positive and negative emotions.  Really what people are talking about when they say, "You're being emotional", or, "You're being too emotional", they're talking about negative emotions; anger and fear and those are intertwined.  Pretty much every negative emotion is an outcrop from fear at some level.  Negative emotions, fear and anger, actually make us dumber and positive emotions actually make us smarter, and so you're either being driven primarily by one or the other or a combination of the two.

How can I say positive emotions make us smarter?  Shawn Achor did this great TED Talk, he's a Harvard Psychologist, that's the source of my data; I think it's the called The Happiness Advantage.  Shawn says you're 31% smarter in a positive frame of mind.  So, if you're smarter when you're positive, by definition you're dumber when you're negative.  One of the problems with the negative emotions is they're simultaneously frequently self-righteous.

There's an old phrase, "Give a speech when you're angry and it will be the greatest speech you ever regret", it just closes our thinking.  So, in your preparation first of all, sort the two out.  Neuroscience has also told us that the crossroads or the command post of our emotional wiring is something called the amygdala.  Almost everybody's heard of the amygdala hijack, your emotions have hijacked you.  Science has mapped the amygdala, and three-quarters of the space in the amygdala is devoted to the amplification of negative thoughts.

Now, I'm a layman; in my view, if three-quarters of the crossroads is dedicated to negativity, then that gives me a pretty good rule of thumb for the ratio of what I've got to deal with negatives to positive.  We find an application that if I want somebody to listen to me, the negatives are going to be swirling in their brain till I deactivate it, and that kind of gets us back to this preparation sheet.

Don't just summarise the other side's perspective, summarise the bad things that you just assume weren't there, that you would prefer to tell them, "Please don't feel this", or, "I don't want you to think the denial".  If you listen to your gut instinct about what would I like to deny, that's actually a great analytical device for what instead of denying, you've got to identify.

We call this the elephant in the room; you don't get rid of the elephant in the room by looking at somebody and saying, "Look, I don't want you think there's an elephant in the room", there's an elephant in the room.  If you deny it, it angers them.  They're like, "You think I'm stupid, you think I can't see that elephant?  You don't think that elephant's weighing on my mind". 

Our approach which is so counter intuitive in a Black Swan method, instead of denying it say, "There's an elephant in the room"; what we think is reinforcement of the negative emotion, and that's really the crux to tactical empathy.  How it is for the other side is a vastly different experience and we feel that we're reinforcing the thoughts while they're thinking like, "Wow, this person is honest.  This person understands what I'm faced with, this person understands what I'm up against".  It becomes a bonding experience for them.  While we're horrified, they feel closer to us.

Sarah Ellis: I wanted to talk about BATNA because I was taught BATNA, and I think lots of people will be familiar with BATNA; but in case people, aren't it stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.  It often gets taught in lots of negotiation training courses and workshops, you would hear BATNA quite a lot; and even my friends who I've worked with on similar leadership teams, we would even like joke and say, "If you're trying to buy a house or buy a car", people are like, "Have you worked out your BATNA?"  It always felt like the thing you had to spend some time thinking about. 

You talk in the book about how it felt like it was genius when people first came up with it, and when it was first used, but perhaps it is problematic and there may be a better way.  For all of my friends who I've worked with certainly over the years and I think lots of our listeners who might go, "That's the kind of go-to tool, and I think lots of people would know that", why can it be problematic and perhaps what should we be considering instead?

Chris Voss: Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up, because that's probably one of the classic reasons why the getting to yes and the intellectual approach pioneered by my brothers and sisters at Harvard, they've been saddled with this BATNA idea and it's a cornerstone.  It's intellectually brilliant and human beings, not being intellectually brilliant, rationally unassailable which means it is massively flawed in application with human beings.  What actually happens is one of two things: first of all, if you don't have a good BATNA, you're taking yourself hostage, you're horrified, you're scared to get into the negotiations.  "I've got no leverage", leverage is such a two-dimension concept.  You're a hostage if you've got to have BATNA.

My good fortune was, in my entire approach from the beginning in negotiations was no BATNA and I just accepted that, "Okay, we got no BATNA, we got to get in here".  We don't need to sound like we have to make a deal.  There is a big difference between whether or not you sound like you have to make a deal, or whether you know that you do.  It's like walking on a tightrope with no net.  That's a psychological crutch.  Your ability to walk that tightrope is not changed by the fact that there's a net under you, because you can't touch it, you can't feel it.  It doesn't make you any weaker or stronger, it doesn't mean you've got a better or worse night's sleep, it doesn't change the shoes that you have on, all the other preparation, it doesn't change your focus; it's a figment of your imagination.  What does BATNA do?  "Oh my God, I can't negotiate, I'm a hostage, I've got no BATNA". 

The other thing that we see, we think the world breaks down into three basic types, descended from the caveman days in terms of conflict; and negotiation is conflict, whether or not you want to accept that or not.  So, there is fight, flight and make friends.  When the caveman that we're descended from saw something mysterious on a jungle path, they either fought it, they ran from it, or they made friends with it.  Those are the three cavemen that survive.  We completely agree with Harvard on this, we call the names a little bit differently.  Literally pulled tens of thousands of people globally from all countries and have seen that the world splits pretty evenly into thirds: fight, flight, make friends.

Now, the make friends type wants a BATNA, because that's as far as they know they can get pushed and they're going to keep backing down quickly, quickly to preserve the relationship and they'll stop at that point.  The intellectual reason for BATNA is not so you get shoved to it right away; intellectually it's supposed to make you feel better, consequently you will stick to your original position more effectively.  In point of application that's not what happens, because we're human beings; and those of us that come from the hostage negotiation world, they're like, "BATNA practically speaking is not just a useless idea but it's an idea that more often than not handicaps our thinking".

Sarah Ellis: So, if BATNA isn't the answer, what would be a good alternative then?  So, if somebody is going into what can feel more black and white, more binary as a negotiation, which is you'd like a pay rise or you want a promotion and perhaps with your pay rise you've got a number in mind; or maybe you've got a new job, you've been offered a new job and you've got a number in mind that you want that salary to be; rather than going, "Well, this is my BATNA", and then you're probably going to end up there or maybe even worse off than that, what's a better way to mentally approach those conversations?

Chris Voss: How do I become more valuable?  As you make yourself more valuable and you talk with your employer about becoming more valuable, you get a great read out as to whether or not you're in the right job.  If you're in the right job, and nine out of ten times you are, this specific conversation is going to accelerate your career and you're going to get paid more.  In the one in ten times, that's a great diagnostic of you beginning to plan your exit, because your future looks bad.

When I was teaching at USC, the first time I ever got asked this question and I'm sure the dynamic was there otherwise, one of the women in my class said, "I'm working in a job where they're famous for paying women less than men and I want to know how to negotiate a better deal with the company".  I said, "All right, so I'm answer this question like I was your dad and you just said, 'Dad, my boyfriend beats me, how do I get him to stop beating me?'  My answer to you is, 'You need a new boyfriend'". 

Now, if you're working in a place that is not going to work with you to increase your salary and your value intentionally, that's actually a bad business strategy and that company's going to go out of business, which means you're going to eventually lose that job because they're going to go bankrupt or they're going to get bought, which effectively is like losing their job, because when a new company comes in, you've just been taken hostage by a whole new set of rules.  Or, they are not going to make enough money to pay you anyway.  None of these scenarios are good if they're not willing to work with you to be more valuable.

It's coming to a close on the near horizon, one way or the other.  You might not like that information, but you've just been made smarter.  Always be willing to be smarter today than you were yesterday.  Going from wondering to knowing even if knowing is bad news, that's another thing we teach people in a Black Swan method.  Wondering if something is a dead end leaves you in a state of uncertainty and limbo which is bad for your decision making.  Knowing it's a dead end was not the news you were looking for, but you just got smarter and you're always better off going from uncertainty to certainty. 

This is why we encourage people to explore options to find out where the dead ends are, because you just got smarter, plus you may have picked up some information on the way to that dead end that's going to be useful to you in the future.  If knowledge is power then, information is influence and the more information and data you get, the more influence you're going to have.

Sarah Ellis: I think that will really help people, because what that gets us away from, and that people sometimes find really hard, I think, because negotiation ends up feeling very binary sometimes as a skill for someone.  And so, maybe they would like to work part time, maybe they'd like more money, maybe they'd want to work on different projects; but I think if you stress-test those things and you have those conversations and you do all the things that we've started to describe today, you've done your preparation, you've had those conversations with that tactical empathy, and you've explored and you've built that relationship, and if ultimately you get to, "That thing that is really important to me is not going to happen", then you've got some choices and some decisions to make.

But that is so much better than being in that state where you think, "This is not right for me, but I'm making no progress.  I'm not moving forward and I'm not learning and growing, because I'm not finding out anything".  I think, if you saw this as a process of discovery and learning versus a process of winning versus losing, for me certainly when I've approached it more that way, it completely changes your mindset and helps you stay more adult to adult, in those conversations; you're more calm.  You talk a bit in the book about how you stay calm and collected and not let those negative emotions take over in the moment, which can feel really hard. 

If people do have that, because I think that might be quite a common feeling where, let's imagine you're now in the moment and it's not going very well, so you feel like you're maybe getting shut down by the other person, maybe it's stalling, you're feeling really stuck.  If I'm imagining myself at this moment, I'm probably getting quite hot, quite sweaty and you're starting to feel quite flustered and you feel like, "I had got the best intentions, I felt really in control, and now I feel really out of control", what would you advise to people to do in that moment?  Should you try and stop that conversation as soon as you can and walk away and come back and try again?  Do you try and slow yourself down; do you ask a question?  Are there just any tools and tactics, so if people do find themselves a bit stuck in the moment, things that might be helpful?

Chris Voss: Yeah, it's a great question and there's a variety of tools.  You should have two or three ready in any given point in time, because each one is going to work more or less effectively for you, depending upon the moment and the circumstance around the strategy.

I know if I use the late-night FM DJ voice, it'll calm you down and begin to take the anger out of that negotiation.  It'll also calm me down.  Sometimes I use the voice override to calm me down, because besides using it, I also hear it.  When it comes out of my mouth, it goes into the ear, it goes into these two sets of ears; one of them is my own.  So, if I'm really having a problem in the moment, and I do, I will go to that.

I find that frequently, the President of my company, The Black Swan Group, is my son Brandon, and so we get heated with each other sometimes and we'll try to use the voices in override.  And there have been moments when either he has said or I have said, "Before I say something that gets us out of control, I just need to take a break".  Because we respect each other, we always do that, and we get a cooling-off timeframe.

Now, if you need a break and the other person is not willing to give you a break, your boss or whomever it is, that's a great indicator of someone that you need to be planning your exit strategy from.  It's good to know what deals can't be made.  Hostage negotiators get a 93% success rate and that means that 7% of the time, it's going to go bad; it's not because of you.  No matter how talented you are, the circumstances can override your best intentions, and your best abilities.  It's that way in business.  You could have done the negotiation perfectly and the other side is never going to make a deal with you based on your fears, based on the constraints, based on a bunch of things.

If you're in a contentious negotiation and the other side will not give you a time out, that's what we would fall into the category the 7% is, and accepting the difference between best chance of success and guarantees of success, because there are no guarantees, you just need your best chance.

Sarah Ellis: The last tool I wanted to ask you about, because I just thought it was really interesting.  We talk a lot about asking open questions and how useful they can be as part of negotiations.  You talk about this idea of something called calibrated questions, which is not a phrase or a term that I'd come across before, before reading your work.  You suggest that maybe why questions, and lots of people talk about why questions and why they're so important, may not be as useful, certainly not in a negotiation scenario.  So, I wondered if you could just describe what calibrated questions are and also, how they're useful?

Chris Voss: Sure, we say our list of calibrated questions are, "What", "How", and rarely, "Why".  Why, is a surgical strike.  People loved to be asked what and how, "What do you want to do?  How do you want to pursue this?  What's the biggest challenge you face?  What are our options?"  What they do is they trigger in-depth thinking.  We call them calibrated questions, because they're calibrated for a fact and they're actually more calibrated to trigger thinking than they are to actually get an answer. 

The answer is a secondary gain; the primary gain is you try to get somebody to think about something.  You're asking them a deferential question in a deferential way, and they have no idea that you just put their brain on a topic specifically.  You put them in a deep-thinking mode, and that's the design of a calibrated question.

Now, what's wrong with "why"?  Globally, every human being on Earth, whether you are a Buddhist or a Christian or a Muslim or Jewish, when you were a little kid, two years old, three years old and you did something wrong, you pulled something off the table, "why" is what somebody says when we've made a mistake, and the real problem is even adults do that.  They may ask why when they genuinely want to know, but you watch adult behaviour; every single time somebody thinks somebody did something wrong, they will say, "Why did you do that?"  So, there's even a lot of reinforcement that they don't want.  We call it a surgical strike, because it's going to trigger defensiveness and that is not good for your relationship, unless you're getting them to defend you.

We train people all the time to say, "Why me?"  An employee can say it to an employer in a job interview, I mean, "Why are you guys looking at me?  Why me?  Why have I caught your eye?"  They're going to defend you.  When you're up for a raise, "Why are you keeping me around?  Why have I still even got a job?"  It's so counterintuitive, but this defensiveness -- and actually, when you do that, you're punching two buttons emotionally that people just cannot resist.  They're defending you, but they're also correcting you and correction is an addiction.  The phrase, "People don't remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel".  People will tell you stuff by correcting you that they would never tell you otherwise and since it felt so good, they'll never regret that emotion.

Sarah Ellis: We've covered a really wide range of different -- some of it is more about our mindset that you take to negotiations and some of it's a skill set, and I think often we're trying to bring together those two things when we think about a skill that we want to practise and improve and get better at; it's, what's the mindset that we need and what's the skillset that we need?

When you've worked with people, is there one thing that you think every time it just seems to have a really big impact on people in terms of their ability to negotiate really well?  I know there are lots of things, but is there one thing where you think, "Well, if everybody just remembered this [or] if everyone tried out this thing", it just gets you started in the right path or in the right way if they're trying to improve their negotiation?

Chris Voss: Either hearing the other side out first, or summarising their perspective first, which then leads to hearing them out.  I mean, that is such an accelerator of outcomes.  People are principally reluctant to do it, because it seems really indirect, or it seems against your own interests to summarise the other side's perspective that they might use against you, or they are articulating.  What it ends up doing is just accelerating things, like in my book I talk about when I bought my SUV; not only was it the brand that I wanted, but it was the colour that I was just completely seduced by.

The salesman's going to pick up how in love with this SUV I am, and how much I love the colour and he's going to use that against me unless I say, "I love this SUV, I love the colour", I literally said to him, "This is the sexiest colour I have ever seen.  I mean, I'm so in love with this colour", and then I told him I couldn't pay his price.  All the reasons why the SUV was valuable and worth the price, I said for him, "Your brand is impeachable, it's the most durable, it's the highest quality brand out there.  This is the most beautiful colour I've ever seen; I love it.  I love it, I'd probably pay more for it and on top of that I can't find this anywhere else.  I've looked the entire metro area, you're the only one that's holding onto this, so I can't get it anywhere else, but how am I supposed to pay your price?"

I articulated all of the reasons he was going to use why I had to pay the price, pro and con, and as soon as I said them, he just blanked, he didn't know what to say, he just looked at me and blinked, went in the back and got me a better offer.

Sarah Ellis: Last question that we ask all of the guests that join us on the podcast which is, is there a piece of career advice that you would share with our listeners that can either be your own career advice that you'd like to share, or perhaps it's some advice that someone's given you that's just really stuck with you and has been really helpful in your career.

Chris Voss: I've heard some advice which I probably did a little bit in my career as an FBI agent.  I heard one guy say, "Run to trouble".  If it's all hands on deck, people want people that want to jump in.  A similar version of that, you're not running into trouble, you're running to strategic critical futures, which is an even better step up, because also there's far fewer criticism there and people are rooting for you much more. 

I did a keynote for a company and then part of the deal was a follow-on conversation with the owner of the company and his top employees, his top producers.  Of course, they're going to ask me how to get more money, how to get a better salary, out of him in front of him.  I said, "Sit down with him and say, 'How can I be guaranteed projects critical to our strategic future?'"  He was a little leery as to what I was going to say, and when I laid that out, he said, "I wish every employee I had came to me and asked that question".

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to today's episode, I hope you now feel more confident about the next negotiation you need to have.  As a reminder you can get all of our podcast resources now in one place by signing up to our weekly Podmail; the link for that is in your show notes.

If there's a topic you'd like us to cover in the future, if there are guests that you would like to hear from, please do let us know.  You can either contact us by messaging us on LinkedIn or on something like Instagram where we're @Amazingif.  In the meantime, thanks so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.