I’m concerned that we are becoming more and more polarized when it comes to some issues. You turn on the TV or check your social media feeds and what do you see?
You see people speaking emotionally from their point of view. Getting more and more entrenched in their position. Not respecting the other side’s stand or listening to what they have to say. Focusing on their differences instead of the things they have in common. Failing to take constructive steps to solve the root cause of the disagreement. In other words, reaching an impasse.
Reaching an Impasse
In my more than 40 years in business, with responsibility for operations in as many as 200 countries, I’ve been involved in complex, billion-dollar negotiations with people from different nations, cultures, industries and backgrounds.
I’ve seen great deals come out of negotiations, and I’ve seen others come dangerously close to an impasse.
Often that happens when emotions and ideologies take over logic. People begin to get entrenched in their positions and stop listening to the other side.
As a leader, if you’re not able to turn that around, your desired win-win will quickly become a win-lose proposition.
My Framework for Getting Past an Impasse
I have advice for you. Not about negotiation skills in general. There are hundreds of books and seminars out there on that topic. Rather, I want to share a framework that has worked for me during my career in helping stalled negotiations get back on a productive path.
1 – Seek to Understand
Before you even start putting your negotiation position together make sure you fully understand the other side and address some of their concerns. You need to make an effort to see the world from their point of view. Walk in their shoes, as the saying goes.
I learned that early on in my management career while negotiating with a workers union. A local union leader gave me a booklet by Eric Harvey and Steve Ventura titled “Walk Awhile in my Shoes,” which I’ve kept to this day.
The booklet is divided in two. One half talks about seeing the issue from the management side. The other half, which requires you to flip over the booklet, talks about seeing it from the employee side. Quite makes the point.
Seeking to understand the other side may seem simplistic. It’s not. Not only do you gain insights into their position, you also gain respect. And remember that individual respect breeds mutual respect.
There’s more. Understanding the other side helps you remove unconscious biasesthat we all have about those who sit across from us.
And another point. While you are in their shoes, so to speak, you need to look for the underlying causes of disagreement. Don’t be surprised if these causes are not on the table. Most often they are not. But if they are not addressed, they will continue to fuel emotions. And that leads me to my next point.
2 – Cool off when Emotions get High
Some of the biggest deals that I worked on happened after the lead negotiators, facing an impasse amidst heated discussions, decided to take a walk together from the conference room.
I highly recommend that. A change of scenery, a bit of leg stretching and fresh air do wonders to cool off a volatile situation and often allows one’s unconscious to come up with a way to get over the impasse.
3 – Aim for Small Wins
Small wins build momentum and pave the way for a larger solution. You can achieve small wins once you realize you have more in common with the other side than you have differences. Find things that unite you instead of divide you and build on them.
4 – Expect to be Uncomfortable at the End
A true win-win situation is not a zero-sum game. You have to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s particularly true when negotiations involve future advancements or future technologies where the outcome is not certain.
At the end of some of my most difficult negotiations, my peers and I knew that we would feel somewhat uncomfortable the moment we signed the agreement. But we signed because we knew it would help move both companies forward. In some cases it helped to shape the future of an entire industry.
A Real Example From My Career
I have a real example from early my career that I think will help make the point.
It happened when I got a new assignment to lead the provisioning of telecommunications service in an area that was having service problems and experiencing high growth.
On day one I realized that the job was going to be much more difficult than I had imagined.
It turned out that we had reached an impasse with the City Engineer. He was responsible for issuing the construction permits that we needed, and he had been turning them down. Without construction permits we would not be able to get the work done, even though we had the funds and the personnel for the project.
By the time I arrived, things had escalated to a point where the two sides were no longer talking. There had been talk of suing the city to break the impasse.
I realized that no matter how bad the impasse, a lawsuit would delay us by months, perhaps years, and would do irreparable damage to the relationship.
Instead, I did the first thing in the framework: seek to understand.
I made an appointment with the City Engineer and learned that the underlying reasonfor his discontent was the way our contractor crews had mishandled the jobs: leaving sidewalks unfinished, blocking streets at busy times, and requesting to rip open a major street precisely during the area’s critical tourist season.
You will recall that one of the tenants of the framework is that understanding the other side helps remove biases. True, the City Engineer was a difficult person to work with, but I appreciated that he was doing his job and looking out for the citizens of that community.
In other words, I saw his point. And he saw mine: unless we found a way to collaborate, we would not be able to improve service and expand the network for growth.
I got out of that meeting with a list of things we needed to fix for him, and he got my commitment that they would get done in 2 weeks.
By ticking off the items on that list, we created small wins that brought mutual respect. We then went on to tackle a much larger issue, which was how to expand the network in order to accommodate growth.
It was a Catch 22: Network expansion in this case involved tearing up streets to add more ducts to run cables. That would disrupt traffic, which the City Engineer did not want. Yet, unless we did that, we would not be able to expand the network.
So, we had gained mutual respect, but we were still at an impasse because what I needed to do was not aligned with that he wanted to do.
So we took a walk along the route of the project. After a long discussion, we came up with an innovative plan.
He would allow us to do something he did not like because of aesthetic reasons: put aerial cable on an existing pole line. But only temporarily; 6 months, to be precise. We had to finish the job before the start of tourist season. During those 6 months we would need to move telephone traffic from the existing underground cable to the aerial cable; put fiber optic cable in the vacated duct space underground; and, finally, bring the aerial cable down. Fiber optic cable is far more efficient than copper and would be able to accommodate the growth that was anticipated in the area.
That was the agreement that we made, but I confess we both felt somewhat uncomfortable.
From his point of view, he allowed us to put in an aerial facility that was not going to look good and might result in complaints.
From my point of view, I made a commitment to finish the job in 6 months. We had no history of being able to do that, but I committed to it because I had trust in my team.
In the end, we got the job done, on time.
He was happy. I was thrilled. The team celebrated a big win-win of what could possibly have been a win-lose.
Bottom line: when you seek to understand, when you walk a while in their shoes, and when you look for small wins, you will have an opportunity to turn a win-lose situation into a win-win. You may be uncomfortable with the agreement at the end, but being comfortable with being uncomfortable is a necessity to grow and prosper as an individual and as an organization.
CAN YOU THINK OF OTHER SITUATIONS WHERE THIS FRAMEWORK MAY HELP?
There are many issues today where people have become so entrenched in their positions, they have lost the ability to arrive at win-win situations. Can you think of a few? If you share with me some current ones (via your comments), I will be glad to address some of them using this framework in a future post.
I look forward to hearing from you.
