with

Eileen Babbitt

Date: December 8, 2009

Time: 4-6 PM

Where: CGIS Building, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs,

1737 Cambridge Street, Second Floor, N-262 (Bowie Vernon Room), Cambridge MA

Contact Chair: Donna Hicks (dhicks@wcfia.harvard.edu).

Speaker Bio

Eileen F. Babbitt is Professor of International Conflict Management Practice and Director of the International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She is also a Faculty Associate of the Program on Negotiation at the Harvard Law School and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her research interests include identity-based conflicts; coexistence and trust-building in the aftermath of civil war; and the interface between human rights concerns and peacebuilding. Her practice as a facilitator and trainer has included work in the Middle East, the Balkans, and with U.S. government agencies, regional intergovernmental organizations, and international and local NGOs.
Before joining the Fletcher faculty, Professor Babbitt was Director of Education and Training at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. and Deputy Director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.

Professor Babbitt’s latest publications include the forthcoming article, “The Evolution of Internaional Conflict Resolution: From Cold War to Peacebuilding.” Negotiation Journal, 25th Anniversary Issue, and Human Rights and Conflict Resolution in Context: Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Northen Ireland. Co-edited with Ellen Lutz and published by Syracuse University Press.

Dr. Babbitt holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from MIT.

About the Herbert C. Kelman Seminar Series

The 2009-2010 Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution series is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, as well as Boston area members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The theme for this year’s Kelman Seminar is “Reconciliation: Coming together after the shooting stops”

To read more about the Great Negotiator Award and about the negotiating skills of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, click here.

The event was hosted by journal editor Michael Wheeler and PON executive committee chair Robert Mnookin.

Several guests, including Deborah Kolb, who shared editing duties with Wheeler from 1995 to 2000, shared their memories of the founding of the journal with a particular emphasis on the role of the journal’s founding editor, the late Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Kolb described Rubin as a multi-faceted, prodigiously talented scholar who believed that “anybody could write about almost anything.” It was his adventurous, multi-disciplinary spirit that gave birth to the journal in 1984 and his guided it since, said Kolb and others.

Larry Susskind, another PON founder who helped Rubin give birth to the journal, described its critical function as a forum where theory and practice inform each other, while Mnookin described the journal as integral to PON’s research and teaching missions. Mnookin also paid special tribute to Wheeler, presenting him with a commemorative cover of the journal and citing his creative leadership of the journal for fourteen years.

Special guests at the event included Bill Breslin, who was thanked profusely for his pivotal role as the journal’s managing editor for twenty years, and Carol Rubin, who shared memories of her late husband, Jeff.

Top executive pay attorney Joseph Bachelder was representing a client who’d just been chosen as a company’s next CEO. After a first session with the board’s representative to hammer out a compensation package, Bachelder took his client aside and informed him that he would get everything he wanted from the negotiation, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Why was Bachelder so confident of total victory? Because, he explained, the board had put the firm’s well-regarded general counsel in charge of the negotiations. Why was this a mistake? “When this is over, you’re going to be that guy’s boss,” Bachelder informed his client. “He knows that. He can’t fight you too hard on anything.”
The board picked a faulty agent for this negotiation—one whose underlying incentives conflicted with the board’s best interests. The general counsel’s dominant interest was to lay the groundwork for a good relationship with the future CEO. As its representative in these critical talks, the board should have instead hired an outside specialist with properly aligned interests.

The faulty agent problem often shows up in Pentagon contracting. Procurement officers are charged with representing the public interest when negotiating with defense contractors. Yet some of these officers quietly make plans to leave the civil service and join one of these defense contractors—at a far higher salary. While still representing the
Pentagon, such agents are likely to go much easier on the other side than they should.

While an overriding self-interest in a future relationship with a negotiation counterpart may create a faulty agent, so may the lack of any meaningful future concern. Jerry Kaplan, founder of GO Corporation, an early pen computing firm, criticized the process by which IBM invested in his firm. In his book Startup (reprint ed., Penguin, 1996), Kaplan writes, “Rather than empowering the responsible party to make the deal, IBM assigns a professional negotiator, who usually knows or cares little for the substance of the agreement but has absolute authority….The negotiator begins by assembling a list of interested internal constituents, all of whom are free to add new requirements…or block some minor concession.”

When a faulty agent leads a negotiation, it’s unlikely that the right minds will converge on a productive arrangement. Similarly, while the top management of two companies in a supply chain may speak glowingly of the strength and quality of their partnership, the buyer’s procurement agent may be motivated by monthly targets and penny-pinching while overlooking broader concerns. A fanatical focus on getting the best price may be due in part to how the agent is evaluated by her superior, but also may derive from the organization’s culture.

When suppliers seek advice on dealing with faulty agents, they might be told to listen actively, to improve their body language, and to decide who should make the first offer. Another strategy is to nurture an internal champion on the other side who truly benefits from your added quality and service—and who will pressure the agent on your behalf.

Sometimes negotiators get off on the wrong foot. Maybe you and your partner had different understanding of your meeting time, or one of you makes a statement that the other misinterprets. Such awkward moves at the beginning of an interaction can lead one party to question the other side’s motives.

In their research, Robert Lount, Chen-Bo Zhong, J. Keith Murnighan, and Niro Sivanathan, all of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, examined trust building in negotiation. When talks begin, the researchers found, both sides are likely to be apprehensive about being exploited if they are too cooperative, if they reveal too much information, and so on. Over time, trust serves as a useful social process that helps both sides overcome initial uncertainty. In most new, successful negotiation relationships, positive developments accumulate slowly, creating trust, and the dialogue improves. Essentially, through a set of reciprocal moves, trust evolves naturally during the negotiation process.

When talks get off on the wrong foot, restoring trust becomes essential. Lount and his colleagues distinguished among three stages of interaction: initial, early, and late. During the initial stage, the negotiators don’t necessarily expect cooperation, nor have they yet committed to the relationship. It’s in the early stage, once the negotiators have begun to trust one another, that the relationship becomes vulnerable. During the early stage, violating trust can be especially damaging because the nature of the relationship still is not fully established. Later, the parties may have built enough trust to overcome what appears to be a violation. But if the violation is strong enough, it may do more harm late in the process, due to the sense of betrayal felt by the injured party.

One careless move can have a profound influence on a negotiation. Recognizing this fact and avoiding missteps and dealing with them if they do occur are critical skills for negotiators.

For those who recognize opportunities to grow the pie of value through mutually beneficial tradeoffs among issues, the complexity of such negotiations is an asset. Tradeoffs allow you and your negotiating partner to achieve more than you would if you merely compromised on each issue.

Once negotiators have broken the assumption of a mythical fixed pie, the search for value can begin. To create value, you need to learn about the other party’s interests and preferences. Here are three proven strategies that will increase your likelihood of uncovering value in the negotiation process:

1. Build trust and share information. The most direct way for parties to create value is to share information in an open, truthful manner. The value created by sharing information with your most trusted customers will often outweigh the risk of having that information misused. “On-time delivery is critical to us,” you might tell a representative of a technology consulting firm in a negotiation over new business. “Our old contractor did good work, but couldn’t meet deadlines. Now tell me some of your key concerns.”

2. Ask questions. Your goal is to understand the other party’s interests as well as possible, yet both parties may be unwilling to fully disclose confidential information. What should you do next? Ask lots of questions! Many executives, especially those trained in sales persuasion tactics, view negotiating primarily as an opportunity to influence the other party. As a result, we do more talking than listening. And when the other side is talking, we tend to concentrate more on what we’ll say next than on the information being conveyed—a tendency that only assists the other party in collecting information from you. Listening and asking questions are the keys to collecting important new information. “What mechanisms does your firm have in place to make sure you meet our deadlines?” you might ask the consulting rep.

3. Give away a bit more information. What do you do when trust between parties is low? Give away some information that focuses on the trades you are willing to make. Doing so can enable you and the other party to expand the pie of outcomes. Plus, behaviors in negotiation are often reciprocated. When you share useful information, he may return some of his own. The key is to give away information that will inspire wise tradeoffs, rather than simply slice up the pie. In your negotiation over the technology consulting contract, this might mean saying, “Let’s talk about how referral incentives might benefit us both.”

When negotiators get along well, creative problem solving is easy. When they become upset, however, they seem to forget everything they know about finding joint gain, to the point of giving up tangible wins simply to inflict losses on the other party. This is especially true in high-profile negotiations that turn nasty. Confronted with negative publicity, executives become so focused on controlling public relations and managing the crisis that they lose sight of the fact that they are even in a negotiation.

Many public relations experts would argue that negotiations have no place in a crisis. Reveal as little as possible, they say, deny liability, and avoid all forums that could legitimize your adversaries’ views. This advice ignores the fact that what an angry public wants most is to be heard.

Experts in conflict management point out that if the only communication that does occur consists of both sides asserting their positions and demanding that the other side take certain actions, little progress will be made. Instead, try construing exchanges with angry parties as negotiations in which the primary goal is to search for tradeoffs that will lead to a mutually beneficial agreement. Even when agreement seems impossible, parties often can work together to create value.

Acknowledging the other side’s concerns can be difficult, especially when lawyers worried about liability are involved. But organizations that take the time to acknowledge the concerns of others will often be able to avoid making large concessions. For instance, a company that wants to build a controversial factory might meet with angry residents to acknowledge their concerns about possible adverse impacts. The company might also commit to ensuring that all relevant federal, state, and local regulations will be met if the factory is built.

Those who have been hurt by a corporation in the past (by an oil spill, for example) might begin their public campaign by demanding an apology. In many parts of the world, indigenous people involved in current disputes about the use of their land have opened negotiations by demanding apologies for generations of hardship. Typically, corporate executives and governmental officials react by denying personal responsibility for past events. A better strategy might be to express empathy for the group’s past struggles via a public statement that stops short of an apology. It is often possible to acknowledge the public’s concerns without accepting responsibility and generating exposure to liability.

Negotiators who overlook the value of similarity in influencing decision making can rely on the wrong individuals to deliver important messages. One common mistake is to take sole responsibility for communicating the wisdom of a particular policy or the need for change. By taking on the sole burden of persuasion, negotiators give too much credit to their position in the organizational hierarchy or their own powers of influence.

The most effective communicators recognize when they are not the most effective communicators. Specifically, they know that the best route to influence can be from the side rather than from above. For influence practitioners, this means allowing individuals who haven’t yet changed in the desired direction to hear from those who have. Even one exposure to the favorable positions of peers on a topic can have more impact than multiple exposures to the same position from a negotiation opponent or a supervisor. Both inside and outside the organizational envelope, then, the same principle applies: persuading one individual by providing evidence that some very different others have done so can be a big waste of time.

A related point: when working to ensure that the voices of supportive individuals will be heard, leaders should give greatest priority to those who are most similar in circumstances to the still-unconvinced. Imagine that resistance to a beneficial change is strongest among the longest-employed members of a department. This group is most likely to be influenced by a fellow old-timer who has genuinely embraced the rationale for change. Therefore, leaders would be well advised to resist the temptation to encourage a newer (although more articulate) member of the group to speak up instead. Canny sales managers teach a version of this lesson to their troops by coaching them to use testimonials from satisfied customers who share a similar business background with new prospects.

Threats often have a negative connotation-understandably so, as they’ve often been associated with offers that can’t be refused or, in some cases, warnings of annihilation. But sometimes threats are justified. If your vendors are pricing themselves out of the market, you need to tell them that you’ll take your business elsewhere. Likewise, when someone is being hostile or condescending, he needs to know that he had better change his behavior or you’ll walk away from the bargaining table.

Making a threat, then, can actually work to everyone’s advantage. A threat not only protects the speaker from being bullied, but it also alerts one’s counterpart of the risk of overplaying her hand. Not all threats are equally effective, however. First and foremost, they have to be credible. A recent study by Stanford University researchers Marwan Sinaceur and Margaret A. Neale indicates that threats also have to be properly timed and framed.

Explicit threats (”Pay me what you owe, or I’m going to court”) may be more effective late in the process, when the parties reach a moment of truth. If uttered too soon, they are more likely to be read merely as aggressive or as positional bargaining. In the early stages of negotiation, subtle warnings may have a greater impact than threats. As the researchers note, leaving the consequences of noncompliance uncertain may prompt the listener “to speculate about (the worst) possible consequences.” If you’re deft, you may leave the listener in doubt about whether he’s actually been threatened.