In Washington, D.C., press leaks and rumors are practically the local currency. Yet during his second term in office, former President Barack Obama and his administration managed to conduct three major secret negotiations:

• In November 2013, the United States and five other world powers announced a landmark accord to temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program and forge a broader long-term agreement. The accord was largely the result of top-secret talks between American and Iranian officials.
• China and the United States—the world’s two largest polluters—revealed in November 2014 that over the course of the previous nine months, they’d secretly negotiated bilateral commitments aimed at slowing global climate change.
• In December 2014, the Obama administration announced it had reached a deal with Cuba to open negotiations aimed at restoring full diplomatic relations. The deal hinged on the quietly negotiated release of an American contractor held in Cuba for five years.

Three guidelines from these government negotiations might help you secure privacy for your or your organization’s secret negotiations.

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1. Weigh Secrecy against Transparency

Before taking steps to conceal planned secret negotiations, you should consider your motivation and the potential risks. Obviously, concealing negotiations because they are ethically and legally questionable is always a mistake. If you have qualms about how a negotiation could affect outsiders, consult your conscience and, perhaps, your organization’s lawyers.

Keeping interested outsiders apprised of your progress in a sensitive negotiation can be beneficial. For example, to show transparency, a town government might keep community members in the loop as it negotiates with a company over a proposed development project. Though interested observers don’t have to be educated about every twist and turn in the negotiation, a carefully timed tweet, joint press release, or community meeting can tamp down public suspicion and allow the parties to incorporate useful feedback.

On the other hand, a communications blackout may be desirable for legitimate reasons, as when a negotiation could reveal trade secrets or privileged financial information; M&A negotiations are often shrouded in secrecy for these reasons. If your counterpart, marketplace competitors, or other adversaries could benefit from knowledge related to a potential agreement, you have reason to conduct secret negotiations.

Leaders sometimes choose to conduct high-risk government and business negotiations in secret to avoid the possibility of a public failure. Given the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba, for example, revealing Obama’s interest in reaching out to the Castro regime would have set the White House up for harsh criticism if any leaks emerged or the talks collapsed.

“Negotiations are like mushrooms: They grow in the dark,” the Brookings Institute’s then director of foreign policy, Martin S. Indyk, told Mark Landler for a 2014 New York Times article on Obama’s secret negotiations. “That’s especially true of negotiations between longtime adversaries, where the domestic politics on both sides make it impossible to reach a deal if the negotiations are conducted in public.”

2. Negotiate the Terms of Secret Negotiations

Because you’ll never be able to keep a complex negotiation quiet on your own, you may need to convince your counterpart of the benefits of doing so. Before substantive talks begin, negotiate who will be involved, where they will meet, and the type of information they will share. If the other side doesn’t see the need for secrecy, you might offer enticements for their cooperation, or you might make privacy a precondition to negotiation.

A “no leaks” pact could be informal (sealed with a handshake) if trust is strong between parties; alternatively, your lawyers could draft a binding agreement. Companies often negotiate official nondisclosure agreements when one or both will be sharing confidential information with the other, for instance.

3. Implement Control and Discipline

In particularly sensitive environments, simply agreeing to keep negotiations quiet may be insufficient to ensure privacy. If the press, your competitors, or others are actively following your every move, added precautions may be needed.

One strategy Obama used to throw observers off the track in two of his secret negotiations was to use very small teams of unlikely negotiators. An administration official told the Times that assigning nondiplomats to lead sensitive negotiations helps protect secrecy because colleagues are unlikely to suspect their involvement.

After multiparty negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program failed in late 2011, for example, then U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton asked a relatively low-level aide, Jake Sullivan, to initiate secret back-channel contact with Iranian officials. Eventually, Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns joined the skeletal negotiating team.

Similarly, Obama handpicked two young aides to lead talks with Cuba: Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House adviser and speechwriter; and Ricardo Zuniga, a Cuba expert who had served the United States in Havana. The delegation of two sneaked out of Washington on commercial flights to meet with a small Cuban delegation nine times in Canada and at the Vatican, write Landler and Michael R. Gordon in the Times.

The administration’s strategy doesn’t mean you should assign untested negotiators to lead high-level talks simply to engage in secret negotiations. Rather, it suggests the importance of creative strategizing, tight control of negotiations from the top, and discipline when privacy is paramount.

 Do you have any other advice for conducting secret negotiations?

It’s not as uncommon as it once was to have an employment gap on a resume. Even so, the stigma that once came with those gaps is still a concern for many job seekers. We received a question about this issue recently and shared it with Leslie John, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Here’s the question and her answer.

Q: After working at the same company for many years, I was laid off. Although I was devastated, I decided to view this as an opportunity to take a year off and go on a trip around the world, something I’d always wanted to do. Many wonderful adventures later, I’m applying for jobs. When I’m asked for the name of my employer during this time, I simply leave the question blank because I’m worried about making this gap in employment a bigger deal than it already is. Is my intuition right?

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

To disclose or not disclose: What to do with an employment gap on a resume

A: Your reluctance to draw attention to your employment gap on a resume is perfectly understandable. In everyday life, horror stories abound of people who have been denied admission to colleges or rejected for jobs because of their voluntary disclosures of information about themselves (many of which are made in the “heat of the moment” on social-networking sites).

But research I conducted with my Harvard Business School colleagues Kate Barasz and Michael Norton suggests that your intuition is wrong. We found that when faced with the choice between drawing attention to a sensitive fact—for example, an awkward employment gap—and hiding it, people often choose the latter, a strategy of omission that rouses suspicion.

In our series of experiments, we have found that withholding information on a given attribute (such as the name of your employer during the last year on a job application) causes people to view us negatively—even more negatively than if we were to disclose that we possessed the worst possible value on that attribute (in your case, that you were unemployed). For example, a candidate who opts out of providing a relevant exam grade on a job application will be judged even more harshly than someone who discloses an F, the lowest possible grade.

Why does this happen? When someone fails to reveal key information, we tend to make inferences about that person’s character—namely, that she is the type of person who hides information and therefore is not to be trusted. In such instances, withholding information can lead to a “double whammy”: The “hider” is assumed to possess the worst possible value on the given attribute and pays an (un)trustworthiness penalty. When faced with decisions about whether to disclose an embarrassing or sensitive piece of information, we need to be aware not only of the risk of disclosure, but of what hiding reveals.

Our findings shed light on the debate surrounding a Supreme Court ruling (Salinas v. Texas, 2013). Genovevo Salinas, accused of murder, had been cooperating in a police interview but suddenly refused to answer when the line of inquiry shifted to the murder weapon. Salinas’s unresponsiveness was subsequently presented as evidence in his 2007 trial for murder, in which he was convicted. Salinas later appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that his Fifth Amendment rights had been violated. The court upheld the conviction, ruling that Salinas’s refusal to answer the officers’ questions was admissible evidence. Salinas may well be guilty of murder, but our research calls this ruling into question by demonstrating that people are prone to drawing unwarrantedly negative conclusions from the absence of disclosure.

Getting back to your situation, I advise you to acknowledge your employment gap on a resume. If you can, include a cover letter in which you explain how you turned your bad luck into a good experience. By doing so, you will head off prospective employers from assuming the very worst about a nonresponse—and encourage them to view your travel as an asset that would bring valuable breadth and perspective to the role.

How do you handle an employment gap on a resume?

One of the more interesting segues to job negotiation advice emerged from the December 2014 leaks of hacked Sony Pictures data and an e-mail revealing a young actress’s efforts to be paid on the same level as her male peers.

In a December 2013 e-mail to Sony Pictures cochair Amy Pascal, Columbia Pictures executive Andrew Gumpert wrote that actress Jennifer Lawrence’s legal representatives had complained that she was being paid only 7% of the profits of the film American Hustle, as compared with the 9% being earned by each of her male co-stars—Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner. The film’s other female lead, Amy Adams, was tied with Lawrence at 7%. Columbia, a Sony subsidiary, had co-financed the film with Annapurna Pictures.

In his email, Gumpert reminded Pascal that Lawrence originally had been given 5% of the film’s take, an amount that Sony had bumped up to 7%. “There is truth here,” Pascal wrote in reply, acknowledging the pay discrepancy. Gumpert suggested that Annapurna should bear the burden of increasing Lawrence’s and Adams’s pay, if warranted.

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

How the negotiation initiated by Lawrence’s representatives unfolded remains unknown, but the anecdote points to some of the challenges that women continue to face in workplace negotiations: subtle, perhaps unwitting discrimination, and confusion about when and how they should ask for more.

More broadly, both women and men are often uncertain about what’s negotiable and what’s not when it comes to their careers, write Simmons College School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and writer Jessica L. Porter in their book, Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015). We may bargain hard on behalf of our organization with clients and customers, yet have difficulty negotiating our pay, benefits, and assignments back at the office. Though aimed particularly at women, the job negotiation advice in Kolb and Porter’s book will help negotiators of both genders gain the information, skills, and confidence they need to improve their success and satisfaction at work.

Job negotiation advice for “small n” negotiations

In Negotiating at Work, Kolb and Porter make a useful distinction between “capital N” negotiations and “small n” negotiations. Capital N-negotiations are the familiar formal exchanges over contracts and deals that we engage in with our clients and customers. In N-negotiations, we act as agents lobbying for the good of our division or organization. N-negotiations follow a somewhat predictable path: They occur at set times (such as at budget time or when a client initiates contact) and require similar skills, such as listening actively, generating options, and making tradeoffs.

By contrast, n-negotiations are the more personal and informal workplace situations in which we negotiate for ourselves. Suppose you are assigned to a new role and realize you don’t have the resources you need to fulfill it adequately. Or imagine you work for a small organization that hasn’t given you a raise in two years. Or consider Lawrence’s case, in which it seems she and her agents did not know she was being paid less than her male colleagues until the profits of American Hustle were already being distributed. In n-negotiations such as these, your counterpart may see no need for negotiation, leaving it up to you to initiate talks. Hollywood stars and others working through agents can assign their representatives to bring up such sensitive matters, but the rest of us are on our own.

How gender complicates n-negotiations

Historically, women have been at a disadvantage in workplace negotiations, a trend that continues today. Though women comprise almost 50% of the U.S. labor force and are more likely than men to be college graduates, they continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions and are paid less than men. To take another example from the Sony Pictures leak, an internal spreadsheet revealed that only one of Sony Pictures’ 17 employees earning more than $1 million annually was a woman, and the male co-president of Columbia Pictures earned almost $1 million more than the woman who shared his job.

As this example and the broader employment data show, women generally have more job-related issues to negotiate than men do. In Lawrence’s case, she and her agents needed to negotiate for pay parity, but Kolb and Porter offer job negotiation advice around a range of other issues that women have to negotiate that their male colleagues may not. Given that senior leaders (most often men), for example, tend to hire in their own image, women are more likely to have to put themselves forward for jobs. When leaders assume that family responsibilities will preclude women from taking on overseas roles or traveling for work, women have to make the case for themselves.

In addition, people tend to ask women more than men to help out with low-visibility, thankless tasks, such as support roles and mentoring, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Vicki Hesli Claypool of the University of Iowa found in their research. It’s up to women to make those roles pay off by enhancing the work’s profile, ensuring they’re adequately compensated, and getting the support they need. Similarly, assumptions about who can legitimately negotiate for flexibility can inhibit men from initiating certain n-negotiations. Given the traditional gender role of men as breadwinners who put in long hours for high salaries, for example, men may be reluctant to negotiate for family leave or flexible work arrangements, such as a part-time schedule or the ability to work from home.

One of the major challenges of n-negotiations is that because you are raising issues that might be uncomfortable for others, you are likely to meet resistance. For this reason, it’s crucial to get yourself into a good position to negotiate and come prepared with creative proposals to resolve the issues you raise.

Gather information from your network

One reason we hold back from negotiating is that we don’t know what’s possible for us to achieve. By gathering information, we educate ourselves about the parameters of a negotiation and set higher goals, which often become self-fulfilling prophesies. One of the best sources of information and job negotiation advice is your network—the contacts, near and far, you’ve accumulated throughout your career.

Consider the story of Claudia, a successful Chicago-based managing director in sales for a large international bank, as described by Kolb and Porter. Claudia’s husband had taken a job in London, and they were eager to be together again. Thanks to a recommendation from her boss, Claudia was contacted by Giles, a sales VP at the bank’s London branch, about a job there that would be a lateral move for her. She wanted to negotiate the terms of the position but was hesitant because Giles didn’t seem enthusiastic about hiring her.

Claudia reached out to two of her contacts in the London office for more information. The first, in human resources, told her about a relocation package for expatriates that Claudia resolved to ask Giles about. Her second contact revealed that Giles was under some pressure to consider Claudia for the job; she encouraged Claudia to take a collaborative approach in her negotiations with him—to connect what she needed (package and support) to what was good for Giles’s division (serving the clients). The inside information gave Claudia confidence by making her feel that the issues she needed to negotiate with Giles were legitimate.

Job negotiation advice for bringing a reluctant party to the table 

Once you feel legitimate about asking for more, thanks to thorough preparation, you’re ready to negotiate.

First, you need to position yourself to motivate someone to negotiate with you by making your value visible in a currency that matters to them, write Kolb and Porter. With forethought, you’ve done some of this work in advance—for example, by letting leaders in your organization know about your and your team’s achievements as they happen. But at the outset of the negotiation, making your value visible can be even more important. Lisa, an executive in business development, wanted to negotiate an expanded role for herself, something she thought her boss might resist. After she reminded her boss of her group’s performance in the last quarter, he seemed a bit more open to her ideas.

It’s also important to generate creative options and to consider the “good reasons” the other party might have for saying no to them. Take the case of Cheryl, who relocated to her firm’s corporate headquarters in Texas after being promoted to CFO. Two years in, her family was unhappy and wanted to move back to Pennsylvania. Cheryl wanted to negotiate to work long distance, but she knew her boss would be concerned about her performance and the fact that she’d be violating precedent. So Cheryl proposed what she called a “tri-office”—splitting time between the corporate office in Texas, the field, and an office in the Northeast. The arrangement could be on a trial basis, she said, with her performance evaluated according to clear metrics. Her boss agreed, and the tri-office worked so well that it became permanent. Interestingly, Cheryl not only negotiated an advantageous solution for her and her family but also changed her company’s precedent that senior leaders needed to be located at the corporate office—the type of organizational change that Kolb and Porter refer to as a “small win.”

If a potential partner remains reluctant to negotiate, you need to find ways to increase your leverage by raising the costs of the status quo. That might mean making each party’s BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement, more obvious. Armed with a strong BATNA, you may actually have more power in a potential negotiation than someone who is higher than you in the organizational hierarchy.

Take the case of Isobel, a communications manager described by Kolb and Porter, who had been taking on crisis-management work for another department’s clients in addition to her own job. Her boss would have liked for this arrangement to continue, but Isobel wanted to negotiate a promotion and restructuring to make this crisis-management work part of her portfolio. Following the advice of her mentor, Isobel forced herself to turn down the next crisis request, saying she just didn’t have the time. The client approached her boss and told him they needed Isobel’s help. Suddenly, her boss was ready to negotiate with her. As this example shows, allies can be crucial in helping you make your case.

Q: I’ve heard a lot about the benefits of nonverbal behavior in negotiation. Shaking hands seems like such a natural way to begin a negotiation, but does it signal too much eagerness to reach agreement?

After working at the same company for many years, I was laid off. Although I was devastated, I decided to view this as an opportunity to take a year off and go on a trip around the world, something I’d always wanted to do. Many wonderful adventures later, I’m applying for jobs. When I’m asked for the name of my employer during 2014, I simply leave the question blank because I’m worried about making this gap in employment a bigger deal than it already is. Is my intuition right?

A: Your reluctance to draw attention to the gap in your employment is perfectly understandable. In everyday life, horror stories abound of people who have been denied admission to colleges or rejected for jobs because of their voluntary disclosures of information about themselves (many of which are made in the “heat of the moment” on social-networking sites).

But recent research I conducted with my Harvard Business School colleagues Kate Barasz and Michael Norton suggests that your intuition is wrong. We found that when faced with the choice between drawing attention to a sensitive fact—for example, an awkward employment gap—and hiding it, people often choose the latter, a strategy of omission that rouses suspicion.

In our series of experiments, we have found that withholding information on a given attribute (such as the name of your employer during the last year on a job application) causes people to view us negatively—even more negatively than if we were to disclose that we possessed the worst possible value on that attribute (in your case, that you were unemployed). For example, a candidate who opts out of providing a relevant exam grade on a job application will be judged even more harshly than someone who discloses an F, the lowest possible grade.

Why does this happen? When someone fails to reveal key information, we tend to make inferences about that person’s character—namely, that she is the type of person who hides information and therefore is not to be trusted. In such instances, withholding information can lead to a “double whammy”: The “hider” is assumed to possess the worst possible value on the given attribute and pays an (un)trustworthiness penalty. When faced with decisions about whether to disclose an embarrassing or sensitive piece of information, we need to be aware not only of the risk of disclosure, but of what hiding reveals.

Our findings shed light on the current debate surrounding a recent Supreme Court ruling (Salinas v. Texas, 2013). Genovevo Salinas, accused of murder, had been cooperating in a police interview but suddenly refused to answer when the line of inquiry shifted to the murder weapon. Salinas’s unresponsiveness was subsequently presented as evidence in his 2007 trial for murder, in which he was convicted. Salinas later appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that his Fifth Amendment rights had been violated. The court upheld the conviction, ruling that Salinas’s refusal to answer the officers’ questions was admissible evidence. Salinas may well be guilty of murder, but our research calls this ruling into question by demonstrating that people are prone to drawing unwarrantedly negative conclusions from the absence of disclosure.

Getting back to your situation, I advise you to acknowledge your employment gap. If you can, include a cover letter in which you explain how you turned your bad luck into a good experience. By doing so, you will head off prospective employers from assuming the very worst about a nonresponse—and encourage them to view your travel as an asset that would bring valuable breadth and perspective to the role.

Leslie John

Assistant Professor of Business Administration

Harvard Business School

After renegotiating his contract with the New England Patriots, star quarterback Tom Brady attracted almost as much admiration for his seemingly selfless concessions as he has for his stellar performance on the field. But a closer look at the restructured deal suggests that Brady, once again, looked for an advantageous opening and came out a winner.

A confusing play

In 2010, Brady, who has played with the Patriots since 2000, agreed to a four-year, $72 million contract extension that made him the highest-paid player in the National Football League (NFL). Brady’s contract was extended further in 2013, when he signed on with the Patriots through 2017. By accepting “only” $27 million in new money for the 2015, 2016, and 2017 seasons, Brady gave the team a hometown discount and freed up cash for Patriots owner Robert Kraft to invest in building a strong roster.

This past December, during the break between the regular NFL season and the Super Bowl victory he led his team to, Brady quietly restructured that renegotiated contract. To the surprise of many, he gave up the $24 million “skill guarantee” built into his 2015, 2016, and 2017 base salaries—money he would have been paid only if his performance deteriorated and the Patriots decided to release him. This left Brady with only an “injury guarantee” (money he would be paid if terminated because of injury) for the remaining years of his contract, reports former sports agent Joel Corry for CBS Sports. In other words, Brady was allowing the Patriots to cut him, even if he’s healthy, during the current off-season without having to pay him future base salaries. In exchange for this apparent concession, the Patriots added what many viewed to be a paltry $1 million to each of the remaining years of his contract.

For the Patriots, the move frees up $24 million in cash that the team otherwise would have had to put in escrow in case they needed to pay it to Brady. Brady is left with $8 million for 2015, $9 million for 2016, and $10 million for 2017. That may sound like a lot, but it’s a “comically low” salary structure relative to other players of his caliber, writes Doug Kyed of the New England Sports Network. Brady’s 2015 salary of $8 million places him 14th among active NFL quarterbacks, despite the fact that his performance is regularly ranked in the top five in most categories and he continues to lead the Patriots to winning seasons. However, given that Brady is a wealthy man whose wife, model Gisele Bündchen, earns more than $40 million annually, it wouldn’t be surprising if he placed other issues above salary in his negotiations.

A hidden strategy  

Brady’s renegotiation was widely viewed as motivated by the desire to free up cash for the Patriots to spend on recruiting talented players. But this argument doesn’t hold water, given the team’s and owner Robert Kraft’s healthy coffers, writes Bill Barnwell for ESPN-affiliated blog Grantland.

Instead, Barnwell theorizes, Brady became concerned about his future with the Patriots in the fall of 2014. His season got off to a rough start, beginning with his first opening-day loss since 2003. He could foresee that the Patriots likely would not have released him if they decided to replace him with a younger quarterback, as this would have required them to pay Brady his $24 million skill guarantee. The team could have avoided paying the guarantee only if Brady voluntarily retired or if they traded him to a team of their choosing—neither of which were appealing prospects for the 37-year-old quarterback, who has said he plans to play into his 40s and wouldn’t have liked the risk of playing for a subpar team.

By negotiating away the skill guarantee, Brady ensured that he would become an unrestricted free agent who could choose his next team in the event that the Patriots cut him. Though there’s a good chance Brady will play out the rest of his career in New England, both parties may have seen the value of building greater flexibility into his contract. “The Patriots want to be able to move on from Brady if he’s not up to snuff,” writes Barnwell. “And Brady surely wants to be able to choose where and when he goes out of football.” The renegotiation secures both of those goals—and looks more and more like a win-win deal on close inspection.

3 tips for bigger negotiation wins: 

1. Periodically reexamine the terms of your existing deals against your shifting objectives.

2. Recognize when long-term, intangible goals trump more obvious financial concerns.

3. Seize on opportunities for yourself that also meet the other party’s interests.

After renegotiating his contract with the New England Patriots, star quarterback Tom Brady attracted almost as much admiration for his seemingly selfless concessions as he has for his stellar performance on the field. But a closer look at the restructured deal suggests that Brady, once again, looked for an advantageous opening and came out a winner.

A confusing play

In 2010, Brady, who has played with the Patriots since 2000, agreed to a four-year, $72 million contract extension that made him the highest-paid player in the National Football League (NFL). Brady’s contract was extended further in 2013, when he signed on with the Patriots through 2017. By accepting “only” $27 million in new money for the 2015, 2016, and 2017 seasons, Brady gave the team a hometown discount and freed up cash for Patriots owner Robert Kraft to invest in building a strong roster.

This past December, during the break between the regular NFL season and the Super Bowl victory he led his team to, Brady quietly restructured that renegotiated contract. To the surprise of many, he gave up the $24 million “skill guarantee” built into his 2015, 2016, and 2017 base salaries—money he would have been paid only if his performance deteriorated and the Patriots decided to release him. This left Brady with only an “injury guarantee” (money he would be paid if terminated because of injury) for the remaining years of his contract, reports former sports agent Joel Corry for CBS Sports. In other words, Brady was allowing the Patriots to cut him, even if he’s healthy, during the current off-season without having to pay him future base salaries. In exchange for this apparent concession, the Patriots added what many viewed to be a paltry $1 million to each of the remaining years of his contract.

For the Patriots, the move frees up $24 million in cash that the team otherwise would have had to put in escrow in case they needed to pay it to Brady. Brady is left with $8 million for 2015, $9 million for 2016, and $10 million for 2017. That may sound like a lot, but it’s a “comically low” salary structure relative to other players of his caliber, writes Doug Kyed of the New England Sports Network. Brady’s 2015 salary of $8 million places him 14th among active NFL quarterbacks, despite the fact that his performance is regularly ranked in the top five in most categories and he continues to lead the Patriots to winning seasons. However, given that Brady is a wealthy man whose wife, model Gisele Bündchen, earns more than $40 million annually, it wouldn’t be surprising if he placed other issues above salary in his negotiations.

A hidden strategy  

Brady’s renegotiation was widely viewed as motivated by the desire to free up cash for the Patriots to spend on recruiting talented players. But this argument doesn’t hold water, given the team’s and owner Robert Kraft’s healthy coffers, writes Bill Barnwell for ESPN-affiliated blog Grantland.

Instead, Barnwell theorizes, Brady became concerned about his future with the Patriots in the fall of 2014. His season got off to a rough start, beginning with his first opening-day loss since 2003. He could foresee that the Patriots likely would not have released him if they decided to replace him with a younger quarterback, as this would have required them to pay Brady his $24 million skill guarantee. The team could have avoided paying the guarantee only if Brady voluntarily retired or if they traded him to a team of their choosing—neither of which were appealing prospects for the 37-year-old quarterback, who has said he plans to play into his 40s and wouldn’t have liked the risk of playing for a subpar team.

By negotiating away the skill guarantee, Brady ensured that he would become an unrestricted free agent who could choose his next team in the event that the Patriots cut him. Though there’s a good chance Brady will play out the rest of his career in New England, both parties may have seen the value of building greater flexibility into his contract. “The Patriots want to be able to move on from Brady if he’s not up to snuff,” writes Barnwell. “And Brady surely wants to be able to choose where and when he goes out of football.” The renegotiation secures both of those goals—and looks more and more like a win-win deal on close inspection.

3 tips for bigger negotiation wins: 

1. Periodically reexamine the terms of your existing deals against your shifting objectives.

2. Recognize when long-term, intangible goals trump more obvious financial concerns.

3. Seize on opportunities for yourself that also meet the other party’s interests.

President Obama recently surprised the world with the outcomes of three high-profile negotiations. We look at the pros and cons of a clandestine approach.

In Washington, D.C., press leaks and rumors are practically the local currency. Secrets frequently explode into the public eye, and key negotiations sometimes seem to unfold on parallel tracks—in the media and behind closed doors.

All the more surprising, then, that during his second term in office, President Barack Obama and his administration managed to keep three major negotiations under wraps until the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed on the final agreements:

– In November 2013, the United States and five other world powers announced a landmark accord to temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program and forge a broader long-term agreement. The accord was largely the result of top-secret talks between American and Iranian officials.

– China and the United States—the world’s two largest polluters—revealed in November 2014 that over the course of the previous nine months, they’d secretly negotiated bilateral commitments aimed at slowing global climate change.

– In December 2014, the Obama administration announced that it had reached a deal with Cuba to open negotiations aimed at restoring full diplomatic relations. The deal hinged on the quietly negotiated release of an American contractor held in Cuba for five years.

Negotiations aren’t always interesting or relevant enough to outsiders to warrant the type of cloak-and-dagger precautions taken by the White House. But when they are, an understanding of how the Obama administration maneuvered in this delicate terrain may help your organization secure privacy for its most sensitive talks. We offer three guidelines: (1) weigh the benefits of secrecy against those of transparency, (2) negotiate the terms of secrecy agreements, and (3) implement control and discipline.

1. Weigh secrecy against transparency. 

Before taking steps to conceal a planned negotiation, you should consider your motivation and the potential risks. Obviously, concealing negotiations because they are ethically and legally questionable is always a mistake. If you have qualms about how a negotiation could affect outsiders, consult your conscience and, perhaps, your organization’s lawyers.

Keeping interested outsiders apprised of your progress in a sensitive negotiation can be beneficial. For example, to show transparency, a town government might be wise to keep community members in the loop as it negotiates with a company over a proposed development project. Though interested observers don’t have to be educated about every twist and turn in the negotiation process, a carefully timed tweet, joint press release, or community meeting can tamp down public suspicion of negotiators’ motives and allow the parties to incorporate useful feedback before it’s too late.

“Negotiations are like mushrooms: They grow in the dark.

On the other hand, a communications blackout may be desirable for legitimate reasons, as when a negotiation could reveal trade secrets or privileged financial information; merger discussions are often shrouded in secrecy for these reasons. If your counterpart, marketplace competitors, or other adversaries could benefit from knowledge related to a potential agreement, you have reason to keep talks under wraps.

Political and business leaders alike sometimes choose to conduct high-risk negotiations in secret to avoid the possibility of a public failure. Given the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba, for example, revealing Obama’s interest in reaching out to the Castro regime would have set the White House up for harsh criticism if any leaks emerged or the talks collapsed in the public eye. Similarly, observers might look askance at a company that suffers a humiliating negotiation defeat or impasse.

“Negotiations are like mushrooms: They grow in the dark,” the Brookings Institute’s director of foreign policy, Martin S. Indyk, told Mark Landler for a December New York Times article on Obama’s secret deals. “That’s especially true of negotiations between longtime adversaries, where the domestic politics on both sides make it impossible to reach a deal if the negotiations are conducted in public.” Indyk would know: On behalf of the Obama administration, he led highly scrutinized Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that failed in 2014.

2. Negotiate the terms of secrecy.

Because you’ll never be able to keep a complex negotiation quiet on your own, you will need to convince your counterpart of the benefits of doing so, if she doesn’t see them already. Include the topic on your list of issues for prenegotiation discussion. Before substantive talks begin, negotiate who will be involved, where they will meet, and the type of information they will share. If the other side doesn’t see the need for secrecy, you might offer enticements for their cooperation, or you might convey the value you place on the issue by making privacy a precondition to negotiation. If the other party doesn’t seem to be taking your concerns seriously, you may want to find another negotiating partner.

A “no leaks” pact could be informal (sealed with a handshake) if trust is strong between parties; alternatively, your lawyers could draft a binding agreement. Companies often negotiate official nondisclosure agreements when one or both will be sharing confidential information with the other, for instance.

3. Implement control and discipline.

In particularly sensitive environments, simply agreeing to keep negotiations quiet may be insufficient to ensure privacy. If the press, your competitors, or others are actively following your every move, added precautions may be needed.

One strategy that Obama used to throw observers off the track in two of his recent top-secret negotiations was to use very small teams of unlikely negotiators. An administration official told Landler of
the Times that assigning nondiplomats to lead sensitive negotiators helps protect secrecy because colleagues are unlikely to suspect their involvement.

After multiparty talks over Iran’s nuclear program failed in late 2011, for example, then U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton asked a relatively low-level aide, Jake Sullivan, to initiate secret back-channel contact with Iranian officials. Sullivan traveled to Oman, where he and a colleague “crashed on a couch” in an American embassy–owned house between meetings with Iranian representatives and an Omani sultan playing the role of middleman, recounts Landler. Eventually, Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns helped to fill out the skeletal negotiating team.

Similarly, Obama handpicked two young aides to lead talks with Cuba: Benjamin J. Rhodes, a White House adviser and speechwriter; and Ricardo Zuniga, a Cuba expert who had served the United States in Havana. Encouraged by Obama and Pope Francis, the delegation of two sneaked out of Washington on commercial flights to meet with “an only slightly larger” Cuban delegation nine times in Canada and at the Vatican, write Landler and Michael R. Gordon in the Times.

U.S. climate-change negotiations with China were more straightforward, with Secretary of State John Kerry leading a team of heavy-hitting climate advisers. Although less subterfuge may have seemed necessary because of the slightly lower profile of the talks relative to those with Cuba and Iran, the Obama administration still kept them quiet—likely due to fear of being criticized if they failed—until the agreement was ready to be unveiled.

The administration’s strategy doesn’t mean you should assign untested negotiators to lead high-level talks simply for the sake of preserving secrecy. Rather, it suggests the importance of creative strategizing, tight control of negotiations from the top, and discipline when privacy is paramount.

Despite all your precautions, you can never be sure that your negotiations will remain under wraps. WikiLeaks’ ongoing declassification of government documents and last year’s hacking of Sony Pictures illustrate this point well. Remind your negotiating team members that all their communications during talks should reflect their noblest values and those of your organization.

You may be adept at negotiating for your organization, but are you passing up career opportunities back at the office?

One of the more interesting tidbits to emerge from the December 2014 leaks of hacked Sony Pictures data was an e-mail revealing a young actress’s efforts to be paid on the same level as her male peers.

In a December 2013 e-mail to Sony Pictures cochair Amy Pascal, Columbia Pictures executive Andrew Gumpert wrote that actress Jennifer Lawrence’s legal representatives had complained that she was being paid only 7% of the profits of the film American Hustle, as compared with the 9% being earned by each of her male co-stars—Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner. The film’s other female lead, Amy Adams, was tied with Lawrence at 7%. Columbia, a Sony subsidiary, had cofinanced the film with Annapurna Pictures.

In his email, Gumpert reminded Pascal that Lawrence originally had been given 5% of the film’s take, an amount that Sony had bumped up to 7%. “There is truth here,” Pascal wrote in reply, acknowledging the pay discrepancy. Gumpert suggested that Annapurna should bear the burden of increasing Lawrence’s and Adams’s pay, if warranted.

How the negotiation initiated by Lawrence’s representatives unfolded remains unknown, but the anecdote points to some of the challenges that women continue to face in workplace negotiations: subtle, perhaps unwitting discrimination, and confusion about when and how they should ask for more.

More broadly, both women and men are often uncertain about what’s negotiable and what’s not when it comes to their careers, write Simmons College School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and writer Jessica L. Porter in their new book, Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015). We may bargain hard on behalf of our organization with clients and customers, yet have difficulty negotiating our pay, benefits, and assignments back at the office. Though aimed particularly at women, the advice in Kolb and Porter’s book will help negotiators of both genders gain the information, skills, and confidence they need to improve their success and satisfaction at work.

The challenges of “small n” negotiations

In Negotiating at Work, Kolb and Porter make a useful distinction between “capital N” negotiations and “small n” negotiations. Capital N-negotiations are the familiar formal exchanges over contracts and deals that we engage in with our clients and customers. In N-negotiations, we act as agents lobbying for the good of our division or organization. N-negotiations follow a somewhat predictable path: They occur at set times (such as at budget time or when a client initiates contact) and require similar skills, such as listening actively, generating options, and making tradeoffs.

By contrast, n-negotiations are the more personal and informal workplace situations in which we negotiate for ourselves. Suppose you are assigned to a new role and realize you don’t have the resources you need to fulfill it adequately. Or imagine you work for a small organization that hasn’t given you a raise in two years. Or consider Lawrence’s case, in which it seems she and her agents did not know she was being paid less than her male colleagues until the profits of American Hustle were already being distributed. In n-negotiations such as these, your counterpart may see no need for negotiation, leaving it up to you to initiate talks. Hollywood stars and others working through agents can assign their representatives to bring up such sensitive matters, but the rest of us are on our own.

How gender complicates n-negotiations

Historically, women have been at a disadvantage in workplace negotiations, a trend that continues today. Though women comprise almost 50% of the U.S. labor force and are more likely than men to be college graduates, they continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions and are paid less than men. To take another example from the Sony Pictures leak, an internal spreadsheet revealed that only one of Sony Pictures’ 17 employees earning more than $1 million annually was a woman, and the male co-president of Columbia Pictures earned almost $1 million more than the woman who shared his job.

As this example and the broader employment data show, women generally have more job-related issues to negotiate than men do. In Lawrence’s case, she and her agents needed to negotiate for pay parity, but Kolb and Porter identify a range of other issues that women have to negotiate that their male colleagues may not. Given that senior leaders (most often men), for example, tend to hire in their own image, women are more likely to have to put themselves forward for jobs. When leaders assume that family responsibilities will preclude women from taking on overseas roles or traveling for work, women have to make the case for themselves.

In addition, people tend to ask women more than men to help out with low-visibility, thankless tasks, such as support roles and mentoring, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Vicki L. Hesli of the University of Iowa found in their research. It’s up to women to make those roles pay off by enhancing the work’s profile, ensuring they’re adequately compensated, and getting the support they need. Similarly, assumptions about who can legitimately negotiate for flexibility can inhibit men from initiating certain n-negotiations. Given the traditional gender role of men as breadwinners who put in long hours for high salaries, for example, men may be reluctant to negotiate for family leave or flexible work arrangements, such as a part-time schedule or the ability to work from home.

One of the major challenges of n-negotiations is that because you are raising issues that might be uncomfortable for others, you are likely to meet resistance. For this reason, it’s crucial to get yourself into a good position to negotiate and come prepared with creative proposals to resolve the issues you raise.

Gather information from your network

One reason we hold back from negotiating is that we don’t know what’s possible for us to achieve. By gathering information, we educate ourselves about the parameters of a negotiation and set higher goals, which often become self-fulfilling prophesies. One of the best sources of information is your network—the contacts, near and far, you’ve accumulated throughout your career.

Consider the story of Claudia, a successful Chicago-based managing director in sales for a large international bank, as described by Kolb and Porter. Claudia’s husband had taken a job in London, and they were eager to be together again. Thanks to a recommendation from her boss, Claudia was contacted by Giles, a sales VP at the bank’s London branch, about a job there that would be a lateral move for her. She wanted to negotiate the terms of the position but was hesitant because Giles didn’t seem enthusiastic about hiring her.

Claudia reached out to two of her contacts in the London office for more information. The first, in human resources, told her about a relocation package for expatriates that Claudia resolved to ask Giles about. Her second contact revealed that Giles was under some pressure to consider Claudia for the job; she encouraged Claudia to take a collaborative approach in her negotiations with him—to connect what she needed (package and support) to what was good for Giles’s division (serving the clients). The inside information gave Claudia confidence by making her feel that the issues she needed to negotiate with Giles were legitimate.

Bringing a reluctant party to the table 

Once you feel legitimate about asking for more, thanks to thorough preparation, you’re ready to negotiate.

First, you need to position yourself to motivate someone to negotiate with you by making your value visible in a currency that matters to them, write Kolb and Porter. With forethought, you’ve done some of this work in advance—for example, by letting leaders in your organization know about your and your team’s achievements as they happen. But at the outset of the negotiation, making your value visible can be even more important. Lisa, an executive in business development, wanted to negotiate an expanded role for herself, something she thought her boss might resist. After she reminded her boss of her group’s performance in the last quarter, he seemed a bit more open to her ideas.

It’s also important to generate creative options and to consider the “good reasons” the other party might have for saying no to them. Take the case of Cheryl, who relocated to her firm’s corporate headquarters in Texas after being promoted to CFO. Two years in, her family was unhappy and wanted to move back to Pennsylvania. Cheryl wanted to negotiate to work long distance, but she knew her boss would be concerned about her performance and the fact that she’d be violating precedent. So Cheryl proposed what she called a “tri-office”—splitting time between the corporate office in Texas, the field, and an office in the Northeast. The arrangement could be on a trial basis, she said, with her performance evaluated according to clear metrics. Her boss agreed, and the tri-office worked so well that it became permanent. Interestingly, Cheryl not only negotiated an advantageous solution for her and her family but also changed her company’s precedent that senior leaders needed to be located at the corporate office—the type of organizational change that Kolb and Porter refer to as a “small win.”

If a potential partner remains reluctant to negotiate, you need to find ways to increase your leverage by raising the costs of the status quo. That might mean making each party’s BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement, more obvious. Armed with a strong BATNA, you may actually have more power in a potential negotiation than someone who is higher than you in the organizational hierarchy.

Take the case of Isobel, a communications manager described by Kolb and Porter, who had been taking on crisis-management work for another department’s clients in addition to her own job. Her boss would have liked for this arrangement to continue, but Isobel wanted to negotiate a promotion and restructuring to make this crisis-management work part of her portfolio. Following the advice of her mentor, Isobel forced herself to turn down the next crisis request, saying she just didn’t have the time. The client approached her boss and told him they needed Isobel’s help. Suddenly, her boss was ready to negotiate with her. As this example shows, allies can be crucial in helping you make your case.