Advanced Negotiation Strategies and Concepts: Hostage Negotiation Tips for Business Negotiators

These advanced negotiation strategies can bring about peaceful conflict resolution

By — on / Conflict Resolution

negotiation strategies

Upset by a delay in the delivery of one of your products, a longtime buyer threatens to turn to the media unless you meet his extreme demands. Not only is the relationship in jeopardy, but your company’s reputation seems to be as well. What should you do? Turn to some tried and true hostage negotiation strategies.

Before you dismiss such life-and-death situations as irrelevant to your professional career, consider the lessons that hostage negotiators have derived from their experiences: crisis negotiation techniques they believe can help us settle less violent, but still vexing, negotiation crises.

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In our FREE special report from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School - The New Conflict Management: Effective Conflict Resolution Strategies to Avoid Litigation – renowned negotiation experts uncover unconventional approaches to conflict management that can turn adversaries into partners.


The same factors that influence your professional and personal negotiations−high stakes, heightened emotions, multiple parties, no time to prepare and outside interference−are the same that characterize hostage negotiations. Negotiation Briefings newsletter has described five hostage negotiation techniques to help diffuse your situation:

  • Gain control of the situation by insisting on one-on-one talks.
  • Explore the feelings underlying the other side’s demands.
  • Allow heated emotions to defuse through the passage of time.
  • Collaborate on solving the other party’s short-term problems.
  • Help your counterpart save face when you come out ahead.

With any luck, you’ll never be required to negotiate for 50 hours straight, as some hostage negotiators have done. But you can learn from their patience and perseverance. Dealmakers and disputants are likely to feel their anger and frustrations subside over time. For this reason, working slowly through a heated situation is usually a better idea than trying to wrap up the matter quickly.

Do you rely on any of these advanced negotiation strategies at the bargaining table? Leave a comment.

The New Conflict Management

Claim your FREE copy: The New Conflict Management

In our FREE special report from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School - The New Conflict Management: Effective Conflict Resolution Strategies to Avoid Litigation – renowned negotiation experts uncover unconventional approaches to conflict management that can turn adversaries into partners.


Related Articles:

How to DEAL with Threats – Here is a four-step process for dealing with threats from your counterpart at the negotiation table. While all negotiators will face difficult people in their careers, few have honed their ability to deal with uncooperative counterparts and may risk having their negotiations derailed if they respond to threats and belligerence ineffectively. Learn how threats impact the negotiation process and what integrative negotiators can do to head off the threat, neutralize it, and get negotiations back on track.

Think Like a Hostage Negotiator – Crisis negotiations, unlike many negotiation scenarios you will face, are high-pressure, intense situations sometimes involving life or death. As different as these scenarios may sound from a commercial or sales negotiation situation, there are many negotiation skills and negotiation tactics that hostage negotiators use that have real applicability for negotiators of all backgrounds.
Negotiation Skills: Threat Response at the Bargaining Table – Responding to threats in an effective manner is an essential skill for crisis negotiators but also has use for business negotiators and diplomats as well. Learn negotiating skills and negotiation tactics for dealing with threats at the negotiation table in an effective manner.
Police Negotiation Techniques and Negotiation Skills from the New York City Police Department Hostage Negotiations Team – Few teams of hostage negotiators have more experience in the field than the NYPD. In this article, we explore the negotiation strategies and negotiating tactics employed by the New York City Hostage Negotiations Unit, a part of the New York City Police Department.
With No Good BATNA, Police Negotiators Accept Texts – Text messaging and communication through electronic devices changes the dynamics of negotiation quite fundamentally. In this article we explore how police forces around the United States are embracing new technologies in order to talk with their counterparts in crisis negotiations.
Top 10 Business Negotiations of 2013 – Here is a list of the Program on Negotiation’s top ten business negotiations for 2013. From sales negotiations to international negotiations, these are the top negotiation case studies, news, and negotiation research for the year 2012.

The New Conflict Management

Claim your FREE copy: The New Conflict Management

In our FREE special report from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School - The New Conflict Management: Effective Conflict Resolution Strategies to Avoid Litigation – renowned negotiation experts uncover unconventional approaches to conflict management that can turn adversaries into partners.


Originally published in 2009.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Advanced Negotiation Strategies and Concepts: Hostage Negotiation Tips for Business Negotiators”

  • Rafael G.

    Great text and comment.

    I would add the good practice in hostage negotiations of trying to make your counterpart focus on the desired outcome and then negotiate step by step on whichever action or agreement will help us get closer to it.

    Another option, in case the other is at least a little open to dialogue, is to make a mutual agreement to leave out any action that will difficult a good outcome.

    That would sound like this: we will do everything on our hands to find a good way to get through this difficulty, but we both have to agree on some principles to look from now on: we will not use threats, manipulation, hostility or power display as means for getting a result, not only because the outcome might damage one or both of us, but also because it would lead us apart from the main objective for which we are in this situation.

    Reply
  • negotiation t.

    I never considered that hostage negotiation could be used in real life. But now after reading this post I can see it is exactly the same type of situation. Very nice and informative post.

    Reply
  • Penny P.

    I also found Thomas Strentz’s book, The Psychological Aspects of Crisis Negotiation, to be very useful in identifying the key team roles that should be filled in a crisis negotiation. Several of these roles may be filled by the same person or multiple persons, but all should be identified & covered in a crisis. When a complex, fast moving crisis negotation in a commercial setting unfolds I found these FBI-oriented team roles to have useful analogues in the business world:

    1. Lead negotiator
    2. Secondary negotiator
    3. Information officer (to coordinate the collection of key information needed by the negotiating team)
    4. Think tank (to help process information & demands coming in; to brainstorm & offer ideas to the lead negotiator & team for how best to respond to the latest developments)
    5. tactical liaison (to keep other parts of the company informed and integrated into the latest thinking & developments in the negotiations)
    6. Chronographer (to establish an up to date information recording system that enables all relevant stakeholders in the company to know what the latest status, developments, demands and deadlines are)
    7. behavioral science expert/interpreter (someone who is familiar with the counter party’s language and culture, who can help interpret the demands and views coming in from the other side)
    8. Messenger (someone to coordinate the efficient transmission of messages to other parts of the company and/or to the appropriate representatives of the counter party)
    9. guard (someone to tactfully deal with interlopers; to help keep the crisis room clear from disruptions and interested onlookers who would like to know what is happening but whose interruptions threaten to undermine the negotiation team’s ability to focus & deal with the crisis)
    10. Technician (someone standing by with the appropriate technical skills who can help with any IT systems that break down during the negotiations)

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