Body Language in Negotiation

Body language in negotiation—including eye contact, gestures, and facial expressions—can go a long way toward forging trust and lasting business partnerships.

PON Staff • January 28, 2026

Nonverbal behavior—such as eye contact, gestures, posture, and facial expressions—can be remarkably effective in breaking down barriers and establishing rapport. Somewhat surprisingly, however, relatively little empirical research has focused specifically on body language in negotiation, write Jeff Thompson, Noam Ebner, and Jeff Giddings in The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.

What research does exist, along with abundant anecdotal evidence, suggests that nonverbal cues can go a long way toward building trust with new counterparts and repairing relationships that have gone off track. Let’s take a closer look at how body language influences negotiation—and where its power clearly has limits.

Eye Contact: A Vanishing Art?

Eye contact is one of the most basic tools for building human connection, yet it’s increasingly underused in negotiation. Ideally, we should maintain eye contact for about 60% to 70% of conversation time, according to research by communications-analytics firm Quantified Communications. In practice, however, most adults hold eye contact only 30% to 60% of the time, based on the company’s analysis of thousands of speakers.

Our compulsive need to glance at smartphones—along with the rise of video-based and hybrid negotiations—likely contributes to this eye-contact deficit, as noted by Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal.

When we avert our gaze, we risk appearing distracted, anxious, or unprepared. By contrast, meeting a counterpart’s eyes signals engagement and confidence. Pairing eye contact with other signs of active listening—such as nodding, responsive facial expressions, appropriate laughter, and leaning forward—encourages counterparts to keep talking and often reveals valuable information about their interests and priorities.

How much eye contact is enough? Holding someone’s gaze for about 7 to 10 seconds at a time works well in one-on-one conversations, communications trainer Ben Decker told the Journal. Longer than that, he cautioned, can feel aggressive—or simply uncomfortable.

Status and Body Language in Negotiation

Nonverbal cues also play a powerful role in signaling and managing status differences. In Face to Face: The Art of Human Connection, film and television producer Brian Grazer recounts chatting with then–U.S. President George W. Bush at a White House reception in 2005.

Rather than facing Grazer directly, Bush repeatedly repositioned himself to stand beside him, maintaining eye contact by turning his head. Grazer interpreted this as an intentional move to create a more egalitarian connection—despite the obvious power imbalance.

When negotiators become physically “in sync,” rapport tends to follow. People who feel engaged and comfortable often unconsciously mirror one another’s behaviors—matching posture, gestures, or even tone of voice. By contrast, deliberately maintaining distance (for example, sitting behind a desk) or avoiding mimicry can reinforce hierarchy and may inhibit connection.

Appearance and demeanor send status signals as well. A vivid example emerged during the Chicago Cubs’ 2019 search for a new team manager. Photos circulated of two leading candidates leaving their interviews days apart, and fans eagerly dissected the body language.

Former MLB player and New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi exited an eight-hour interview in a suit, pulling a roller briefcase and looking visibly exhausted alongside Cubs president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer, who were dressed more casually.

By contrast, former Cubs catcher David Ross—known affectionately as “Grandpa Rossy”—was photographed smiling, wearing a zip-up sweater and Cubs-blue sunglasses, strolling to Starbucks with Epstein and Hoyer during a break in his shorter interview.

Which candidate got the job? Ross did.

The Limits of Body Language in Negotiation

As Face to Face makes clear, body language can open doors—but it cannot manufacture shared interests where none exist. Grazer describes his practice of arranging “curiosity conversations” with people from all walks of life, with no agenda beyond learning and connection.

One such attempt led him, improbably, to the Kremlin office of Russian press secretary Dmitry Peskov, after an intermediary falsely suggested Grazer wanted to make a celebratory film about Vladimir Putin. When Grazer explained that he simply wanted an agenda-free conversation, the meeting ended abruptly.

“Our desires were completely incompatible,” Grazer concludes. No amount of eye contact, warmth, or persuasion could bridge the gap.

The lesson is a crucial one. Body language matters in negotiation—but it cannot substitute for a genuine zone of possible agreement. Without overlapping interests, even flawless nonverbal communication will fall flat.

Have you encountered situations where body language made—or failed to make—a difference in negotiation?

Business Negotiations

At the Louvre, a Negotiation Campaign Paints a Fuller Portrait

A negotiation campaign, mounted by curators at the Louvre Museum to bring Leonardo da Vinci paintings to a major 2019 exhibit, proved incredibly complex but, ultimately, rewarding. Here are the key lessons that emerged for negotiators.

PON Staff • March 31, 2025

To launch a multifaceted project or business venture, we often need to conduct a series of linked negotiations with numerous counterparts. Harvard Business School professor James Sebenius refers to this process as a negotiation campaign, in which “a number of individual deals must be put together, often on multiple ‘fronts,’ to realize a larger result, typically an ultimate target agreement with sufficient support to make it sustainable.”

The negotiation campaign that curators at France’s Louvre Museum conducted to secure loans of Leonardo da Vinci paintings and drawings for a major exhibit that opened in October 2019 serves as a case study. Kelly Crow reported on the negotiation campaign for the Wall Street Journal.

At the Louvre, paintings curator Vincent Delieuvin and prints and drawings curator Louis Frank developed the provocative theory that ultimate Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci explored so many fields—from science to math to music—primarily to serve his work as a painter, though no more than about 20 paintings have been attributed to him.

To test their theory, the curators had several of the museum’s five Leonardo paintings fully restored and had all of them analyzed scientifically. They began planning a landmark exhibit for 2019, the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. Gathering as many of the artist’s paintings and related drawings as possible would allow Delieuvin and Frank to test and share their theory. It would also require dozens of complex negotiations with other museums and private collectors to borrow their Leonardos.

Ultimately, 160 works were assembled for the show, only 32 of them owned by the Louvre. “The loans were our biggest nightmare,” Delieuvin told the Journal. The negotiation campaign lasted several years and went down to the wire, concluding just a few days before the four-month exhibit opened.

Painting a Dazzling Picture

Securing loans of prestigious works of art is a complicated process. “People think [the museum] world is so genteel, but it takes a ton of horse-trading and convincing and last-minute panicking to pull off these shows,” University of Oxford art-history professor Martin Kemp told the Journal. Although borrowers typically don’t have to pay a fee for the loaned artwork, they must buy substantial insurance to protect the lender.

Delieuvin and Frank visited at least 20 museums in more than a dozen countries during their negotiation campaign. Competition was fierce, as other museums were planning their own Leonardo retrospectives. The fact that the Louvre already housed about one-third of Leonardo’s paintings helped, as its show would be the largest and most prominent, Delieuvin explained to CNN.

Seeking a religious Leonardo painting from Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, Delieuvin and Frank learned it had already been promised to two Italian museums for earlier in 2019. After repeated requests, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky agreed to allow the painting, Benois Madonna, to make a final stop in France before returning home.

A Faltering Negotiation Campaign

To set up loans of Leonardo paintings from Italy’s Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre generously lent three of its Leonardo paintings to the 2015 Milan Expo. In line with the norm of reciprocity, France’s and Italy’s culture ministers agreed to a swap in 2017: The Louvre could borrow Leonardo works from Italy in exchange for contributing rare Raphael works to shows in Italy planned for 2020.

That deal collapsed when Italy’s centrist government was briefly replaced by populist leadership. After another power shift in Italy, the agreement was reinstated—but then jeopardized once again when an Italian heritage group asked a Venice court to determine whether famous Leonardo drawings were too fragile to travel. A week before the Louvre show, the court ruled the artwork could go to France.

Finishing Touches

Days before the exhibit, Delieuvin held out hope that the owner of Salvator Mundi, a recently discovered Leonardo painting bought anonymously at auction for a record-breaking $450 million in 2017, would loan it at the last minute. The Louvre received no response to its requests to borrow the painting, whose owner was later identified as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Ultimately, understanding the great artist himself was a more difficult undertaking than the multiparty negotiations, Delieuvin told CNN. But the painstaking efforts have paid off. Scientific analysis of Leonardo’s painting Virgin of the Rocks, for example, revealed hidden sketches that support the theory that, as a painter, Leonardo was a perfectionist, “striving to find the best composition and the most beautiful pictorial execution,” according to Delieuvin.

5 Elements of a Successful Negotiation Campaign

The Louvre curators’ moves suggest the following lessons for managing a negotiation campaign:

Plan ahead. By networking and making generous loan offers, the curators encouraged their future counterparts to enter negotiations with a spirit of reciprocity.
Stir up excitement. Inspire counterparts by painting a compelling portrait of your ultimate goal.
Go the distance. Show your commitment by traveling to meet face-to-face.
Get the sequence right. Seek early agreements with influential parties in your field whose buy-in could compel others to get on board.
Ride out the winds of change. If you start negotiating early enough, you may be able to survive political and organizational turmoil.

What experience have you had running a negotiation campaign, and how did it go?

Dispute Resolution

Dear Negotiation Coach: Determining the Right Compensation Offer After a Disaster

In multiparty negotiations, questions of fairness often loom large. At a 2019 Program on Negotiation panel, administrators of victim-compensation funds discussed how they work to ensure survivors and their loved ones are treated fairly.

PON Staff • March 24, 2025

In the aftermath of a large-scale catastrophe or disaster in the United States—such as 9/11, the opioid epidemic, and mass shootings—the courts can be ill-equipped to take on the complex task of engaging in multiparty negotiations with large numbers of claimants over compensation. Instead, “special masters” are often assigned to create and administer victim-compensation programs, a job that typically requires thousands of negotiations on emotionally wrenching issues.

At a Program on Negotiation (PON) panel discussion on October 22, 2019, PON chair Guhan Subramanian spoke with three special masters who have overseen many mass-disaster programs: Kenneth Feinberg (9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Boston Marathon bombings, Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis); Resolutions, LLC cofounder Eric Green (Enron securities, Takata airbags); and Duke University professor Francis McGovern (BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, opioid epidemic), who passed away in 2020. Their remarks, overviewed here, offer insights to those facing complex multiparty negotiations.

Guhan Subramanian: In your work, is it useful to use a scoring system to quantify harm?

Francis McGovern: You can use numbers as surrogates for intangibles, such as psychological harm. It can be really difficult to put a number on psychological harm, so [for the 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire, in which 100 people were killed and 230 were injured] we used medical expenses: If you went to your psychiatrist and you had medical expenses, then that would be counted in the metric. It ends up, at the end of the day, being acceptable, because the people [harmed] will accept it. . . . If everybody agrees to a particular approach, I don’t really care what the approach is, as long as you have that buy-in.

Eric Green: At some point, all these cases come down to who gets compensation for grievous injuries, and no amount of money is really sufficient to compensate, but it’s all we have. And most of the time we have a limited fund. . . . So one must come up with a model to allocate within that limited fund among the range of injuries. And if it’s an alternative system and not being litigated, it has to be a model that has logic to it, that is transparent, where the people affected have a say in it. It has to be done with integrity, fairness, and openness. All of those things demand a lot of innovation at every stage of the way.

Guhan Subramanian: I was struck when you said that the victims should have some say in the process.

Francis McGovern: We’re special masters. How are we legitimate? . . . We don’t have the imprimatur of a jury verdict. And so the way we achieve legitimacy . . . is getting people to participate in the decision-making process.

Guhan Subramanian: In addition to the quantitative models you use, do you make qualitative judgment calls?

Eric Green: Almost every model that I can think of that I’ve been involved in has provisions for extraordinary cases, so there is an element of discretion. And, of course, we know from the outset that we’re never going to make everybody happy. There are going to be people who are not going to accept any compensation offer, who feel they weren’t treated the way they should have been, and are going to let you know it.

Guhan Subramanian: We talk in negotiations about expressing empathy. Ken [Feinberg], I think, if the public reports are accurate, you and your team agreed to hear from 9/11 victims. Anyone who wanted to speak to you or your team could do so. Obviously, that’s incredibly powerful, but is it a useful approach in general?

Kenneth Feinberg: It’s the key! All of these models that I’ve been involved in substantively can vary, but there’s one common denominator, and that is the emotionalism of victims or their surviving family members. And empathy and providing those who voluntarily want an opportunity to be heard in private are essential.

I’m now dealing with . . . Catholic Church clergy sexual-abuse cases in five states, and the one common denominator is the victim who was abused as a minor, and is now 30, 40, 50 years old, and comes in private to see me—not to complain about the compensation offer. They want validation. They want acknowledgment of what was done. They want somebody independent to say to them, “I believe you. You were wronged. It’s awful.” The number of people who were afforded that opportunity to be heard and leave feeling better, knowing that somebody said, “Yes, you were accurate, truthful, credible,” is critical to the success of all of these programs—from Agent Orange or 9/11 right up to the present time.

How have you addressed fairness concerns when participating in multiparty negotiations?

Negotiation Briefings Articles

Dear Negotiation Coach: Determining the Right Compensation Offer After a Disaster

After a large-scale disaster, reaching an agreement for a compensation offer requires one important personal skill.

PON Staff • November 30, 2019

In the aftermath of a large-scale catastrophe or disaster in the United States—such as 9/11, the opioid epidemic, and mass shootings—the courts can be ill-equipped to take on the complex task of negotiating a compensation offer for large numbers of claimants. Instead, “special masters” are often assigned to create and administer victim-compensation programs, a job that typically requires thousands of negotiations on emotionally wrenching issues.

Program on Negotiation chair Guhan Subramanian spoke with with special masters who have overseen many mass-disaster programs: Kenneth Feinberg (9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, Catholic Church sexual-abuse crisis); Resolutions, LLC cofounder Eric Green (Enron securities, Takata airbags); and Duke University professor Francis McGovern (BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, opioid epidemic). Their remarks offer insights to those facing complex multiparty conflicts.

Reaching an acceptable compensation offer is complicated, but there is almost always a common denominator.

Guhan Subramanian: In your work, is it useful to use a scoring system to quantify harm?

Francis McGovern: You can use numbers as surrogates for intangibles, such as psychological harm. It can be really difficult to put a number on psychological harm, so [for the 2003 Rhode Island nightclub fire] we used medical expenses: If you went to your psychiatrist and you had medical expenses, then that would be counted in the metric. It ends up, at the end of the day, being acceptable, because the people [harmed] will accept it. . . . If everybody agrees to a particular approach, I don’t really care what the approach is, as long as you have that buy-in.

Eric Green: At some point, all these cases come down to who gets compensation for grievous injuries, and no amount of money is really sufficient to compensate, but it’s all we have. And most of the time we have a limited fund. . . . So one must come up with a model to allocate within that limited fund among the range of injuries. And if it’s an alternative system and not being litigated, it has to be a model that has logic to it, that is transparent, where the people affected have a say in it. It has to be done with integrity, fairness, and openness. All of those things demand a lot of innovation at every stage of the way.

GS: I was struck when you said that the victims should have some say in the process.

FM: We’re special masters. How are we legitimate? . . . We don’t have the imprimatur of a jury verdict. And so the way we achieve legitimacy . . . is getting people to participate in the decision- making process.

GS: In addition to the quantitative models you use, do you make qualitative judgment calls?

EG: Almost every model that I can think of that I’ve been involved in has provisions for extraordinary cases, so there is an element of discretion. And, of course, we know from the outset that we’re never going to make everybody happy. There are going to be people who are not going to accept any compensation offer, who feel they weren’t treated the way they should have been, and are going to let you know it.

GS: We talk in negotiations about expressing empathy. Ken [Feinberg], I think, if the public reports are accurate, you and your team agreed to hear from 9/11 victims. Anyone who wanted to speak to you or your team could do so. Obviously, that’s incredibly powerful, but is it a useful approach in general?

Kenneth Feinberg: It’s the key! All of these models that I’ve been involved in substantively can vary, but there’s one common denominator, and that is the emotionalism of victims or their surviving family members. And empathy and providing those who voluntarily want it an opportunity to be heard in private are essential.

I’m now dealing with . . . Catholic Church clergy sexual-abuse cases in five states, and the one common denominator is the victim who was abused as a minor, and is now 30, 40, 50 years old, and comes in private to see me—not to complain about the compensation offer. They want validation. They want acknowledgment of what was done. They want somebody independent to say to them, “I believe you. You were wronged. It’s awful.” The number of people who were afforded that opportunity to be heard and leave feeling better, knowing that somebody said, “Yes, you were accurate, truthful, credible,” is critical to the success all of these programs—from Agent Orange or 9/11 right up to the present time.

Have you had to negotiate a compensation offer for victims of a large-scale disaster? How did you find an acceptable agreement?

Negotiation Briefings Articles

Negotiation research you can use: Too guilty to compete?

PON Staff • November 30, 2019

Our emotions—including anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust—influence our negotiation behavior in systematic ways, research shows. In a new study, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researcher Uriel Haran is the first to examine whether feeling guilty affects our competitive drive.

Guilt is often triggered by behavior we’re ashamed of, and it doesn’t feel very good. On the plus side, guilt prompts us to address problems, increases our empathy, and makes us particularly valuable employees, as it motivates us to avoid disappointing others. This desire to please—whether we’re guilt-prone by nature or feeling guilty in the moment—can also inhibit our competitive drive, even when our guilt is unrelated to the competition, Haran found.

In one experiment, participants read scenarios that induced them to feel either guilty, ashamed, or neutral. Next, they engaged in a competitive task on a computer. When participants were told they would be competing with another player for the chance to win a prize, those in a guilty frame of mind were less motivated to win than those feeling ashamed or neutral—though their guilt was unrelated to the competition. However, when participants were told their performance would not harm others’ outcomes, those feeling guilty were just as competitive as other participants. Another experiment found that people who are generally guilt-prone exerted less effort on a competitive task than people less prone to guilt.

Haran’s results imply that feeling guilty could lead us to make unnecessary concessions in negotiation. That’s all the more reason to try to relieve the uncomfortable experience of guilt.

Source: “May the Best Man Lose: Guilt Inhibits Competitive Motivation,” by Uriel Haran. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019.

Negotiation Training

Negotiation research you can use: Too guilty to compete?

PON Staff • November 30, 2019

Our emotions—including anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust—influence our negotiation behavior in systematic ways, research shows. In a new study, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev researcher Uriel Haran is the first to examine whether feeling guilty affects our competitive drive.

Guilt is often triggered by behavior we’re ashamed of, and it doesn’t feel very good. On the plus side, guilt prompts us to address problems, increases our empathy, and makes us particularly valuable employees, as it motivates us to avoid disappointing others. This desire to please—whether we’re guilt-prone by nature or feeling guilty in the moment—can also inhibit our competitive drive, even when our guilt is unrelated to the competition, Haran found.

In one experiment, participants read scenarios that induced them to feel either guilty, ashamed, or neutral. Next, they engaged in a competitive task on a computer. When participants were told they would be competing with another player for the chance to win a prize, those in a guilty frame of mind were less motivated to win than those feeling ashamed or neutral—though their guilt was unrelated to the competition. However, when participants were told their performance would not harm others’ outcomes, those feeling guilty were just as competitive as other participants. Another experiment found that people who are generally guilt-prone exerted less effort on a competitive task than people less prone to guilt.

Haran’s results imply that feeling guilty could lead us to make unnecessary concessions in negotiation. That’s all the more reason to try to relieve the uncomfortable experience of guilt.

Source: “May the Best Man Lose: Guilt Inhibits Competitive Motivation,” by Uriel Haran. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2019.

Negotiation Briefings Articles

Successes & Messes: Masterful negotiations at the Louvre

Curators at the venerable Paris art museum carefully planned every move to secure borrowing rights to major works by Leonardo da Vinci for a momentous exhibition.

PON Staff • November 30, 2019

To launch a complex project or business venture, we often need to conduct a whole series of negotiations with numerous counterparts. Juggling multiple deals requires a unique set of negotiation strategies. There’s much to learn from the linked negotiations that curators at France’s Louvre Museum conducted to secure loans of Leonardo da Vinci paintings and drawings for a major exhibit that opened in October, as Kelly Crow reports in the Wall Street Journal.

Testing a hypothesis

After being hired by the Louvre as a paintings curator in 2006, Vincent Delieuvin and his new colleague, drawings and prints curator Louis Frank, developed the provocative theory that ultimate Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci explored so many fields—from science to math to music—primarily to serve his work as a painter, though no more than about 20 paintings have been attributed to him.

To test their theory, the curators had several of the museum’s five Leonardo paintings fully restored and had all of them analyzed scientifically. Frank undertook a French retranslation of a 16th-century biography of the great master. And they began planning a landmark exhibit for 2019, the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death. Gathering together as many of the artist’s paintings and related drawings as possible would allow Delieuvin and Frank to test and share their theory. It would also require them and their colleagues to conduct dozens of negotiations with other museums and private collectors for the right to bring their Leonardos to Paris.

Ultimately, 160 works were assembled for the show, only 32 of which were owned by the Louvre. “The loans were our biggest nightmare,” Delieuvin told the Journal. Negotiations with museums and other entities lasted several years and went down to the wire, concluding just a few days before the four-month exhibit was set to open on October 24.

Painting a dazzling picture

Securing loans of prestigious works of art is a complex process. “People think [the museum] world is so genteel, but it takes a ton of horse-trading and convincing and last-minute panicking to pull off these shows,” University of Oxford art-history professor Martin Kemp told the Journal. Typically, the lender does not charge the borrower a fee for the loaned artwork, but the borrower must buy substantial insurance to protect the lender.

In their quest for loaned Leonardos, Delieuvin and Frank visited at least 20 museums in more than a dozen countries to make their case and stir up excitement for the exhibition. Competition was fierce, as many other museums were planning their own Leonardo retrospectives for the 500th anniversary. But the fact that the Louvre already housed about one-third of Leonardo’s paintings helped, Delieuvin explained to CNN: Many museums were interested in contributing to what was expected to be the largest-ever exhibit

of his paintings. Despite planning its own Leonardo shows, for example, Britain’s Royal Collection Trust agreed to loan 24 drawings of his masterpiece The Last Supper.

Seeking a religious Leonardo painting from Russia’s State Hermitage Museum, Delieuvin and Frank learned it had already been promised to two Italian museums for earlier in 2019. After repeated requests, however, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky agreed to allow the painting, Benois Madonna, to make a final stop in France before returning home.

Franco-Italian diplomacy

The Louvre planned well ahead to set up successful negotiations for loans of Leonardo paintings from Italy’s Uffizi Gallery. To encourage reciprocity, the Paris museum generously lent three of its Leonardo paintings to the 2015 Milan Expo, a major Leonardo show. And when Italy’s cultural ministry established an international committee to evaluate loan proposals in advance of the 500th anniversary, Delieuvin joined it for the “networking opportunities and insider clues,” Crow writes in the Journal.

This early work teed up negotiations between France’s and Italy’s culture ministers. In 2017, they agreed to a swap: The Louvre could borrow Leonardo works from Italy in exchange for contributing rare Raphael works to shows planned in Italy for 2020.

That deal collapsed, however, when Italy’s centrist government was briefly replaced by populist leadership that objected to sending the Italian master’s work off to France for the landmark anniversary. After another power shift in Italy, the agreement was reinstated—but then jeopardized once again when an Italian heritage group asked a Venice court to weigh in on whether famous Leonardo drawings, including Vitruvian Man, were too fragile to travel. Just a week before the Louvre show, the court ruled that the artwork could go to France.

Finishing touches

Days before the exhibit, Delieuvin was holding out hope that the owner of Salvator Mundi, a recently discovered Leonardo painting bought anonymously at auction for a record-breaking $450 million in 2017, would loan it at the last minute. The painting is believed to be owned by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, but its location is unknown, and the Louvre received no response to its requests to borrow the painting.

We might assume that the crown jewel of the Leonardo show would be the Louvre’s own Mona Lisa. But Delieuvin and Frank didn’t even ask to include the revered painting in the exhibit. To accommodate its 30,000 daily visitors, the Mona Lisa will remain one floor away from the temporary exhibition.

Ultimately, understanding the great artist himself was a far more difficult undertaking than the loan negotiations, Delieuvin told CNN. But the painstaking efforts have already paid off. Scientific analysis of Leonardo’s painting Virgin of the Rocks, for example, revealed sketches, hidden for 500 years, that help confirm the theory that, as a painter, Leonardo was a perfectionist, “striving to find the best composition and the most beautiful pictorial execution,” according to Delieuvin.

A complex composition

The Louvre curators’ moves suggest the following lessons to those managing linked negotiations:

1. Plan ahead. By networking and making generous loan offers, the Louvre curators encouraged their future counterparts to enter negotiations with a spirit of reciprocity.

2. Stir up excitement. Paint a compelling picture of your ultimate goal to inspire negotiators to want to be part of it.

3. Go the distance. Because of the benefits of negotiating face-to-face, be willing to travel near and far in pursuit of your goals.

4. Get the sequence right. Seek early agreements with influential parties in your field whose buy-in could compel others to get on board.

5. Ride out the winds of change. If you start negotiating early enough, you may be able to survive political and organizational turmoil.

Negotiation Briefings Articles

Macron tries to strong-arm a peace deal

PON Staff • November 30, 2019

If you’ve ever tried to play peacemaker between sworn enemies and failed, you might sympathize with the difficulties French president Emmanuel Macron had trying to engineer a face-to-face meeting between U.S. president Donald Trump and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City this past September.

After Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, Iran resumed its nuclear activities, behavior that prompted punishing sanctions from the U.S. government. Tensions only grew after Iran was suspected of attacking Saudi oil facilities. In his September speech at the U.N., Macron, eager to deescalate the situation, called on world leaders to engage in a plan that would include opening up new talks on Iran’s denuclearization and lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In his own U.N. speech that day, Trump condemned what he called Iran’s “bloodlust”—yet also said the United States “has never believed in permanent enemies.” In fact, Trump reportedly was keen to meet with Rouhani. It had been 40 years since an American and Iranian president had met in person, and Trump, facing an impeachment inquiry, was eager for some positive PR.

But Rouhani, directed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he wouldn’t meet Trump until all U.S. sanctions had been lifted. With Trump refusing to meet that precondition, Macron proposed offering Iran a $16 billion European credit line to help prop up its slumping economy, the Journal reports. Iran would just need to promise to halt its nuclear program, and Trump would have to agree not to impose further sanctions.

Amid a swarm of reporters and diplomats at the U.N., Macron, with British prime minister Boris Johnson at his side, tried to persuade Rouhani to meet with Trump. It would be a “lost opportunity” if the two didn’t meet because “President Trump will not go to Tehran,” Macron said through a translator. Rouhani “threw his head back and laughed,” the New Yorker reported. Then Johnson said that Rouhani and Trump “need to be on the side of the swimming pool and jump at the same time.” The metaphor—and perhaps the mental image it conjured— made Rouhani laugh even harder.

That evening, Macron “blindsided” Rouhani by showing up at the New York hotel where he was staying, accompanied by aides and a team of technicians who set up a secure phone line in a meeting room, according to the Times. Trump got on the line at 9:30 p.m. But Rouhani refused to take the call or even emerge from his bedroom, according to the New Yorker.

The next day, Rouhani spoke to Trump through his U.N. speech: “Stop the sanctions so as to open the way for the start of negotiations.” Later, Rouhani told reporters that he had been assured by European leaders that Trump had been ready to lift the sanctions and negotiate. Trump responded in a tweet: “Iran wanted me to lift sanctions . . .I said, of course, NO!”

Macron’s peacemaking efforts may not have paid off this time, but his persistence and creativity suggest he will keep trying—and perhaps eventually succeed.

Dealing with Difficult People