Question: I have the sense that silence can sometimes be useful, but it usually just makes me feel uncomfortable. Does silence in negotiation have benefits?

Answer:
In many Western cultures, silence feels uncomfortable. Conversations move quickly. People overlap. Pauses can feel awkward—or even threatening.

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.

Yet in negotiation, silence is often not a weakness. It’s a strategic tool.

Skilled negotiators understand that silence can improve listening, defuse aggressive tactics, reduce bias, and create emotional control. In fact, sometimes the most powerful move in a negotiation is to say nothing at all.

Here are four evidence-based benefits of using silence effectively.

1. Silence Improves Listening and Active Listening Skills

Research consistently shows that most negotiators don’t truly listen. While the other side is speaking, we’re often busy preparing our response.

Delivering a sharp comeback the instant someone finishes talking may feel impressive—but it subtly signals that you weren’t fully listening.

A brief pause changes everything.

An experienced corporate attorney once coached a junior investment banker who had a habit of jumping in immediately after his counterpart finished speaking. The advice was simple: count to three silently before responding. The result was dramatic. The banker’s performance improved, and he was perceived as thoughtful and wise beyond his years.

Silence allows you to:

• Turn off your internal rebuttal voice
• Process what was actually said
• Paraphrase accurately
• Ask better follow-up questions
• Demonstrate acknowledgment

Active listening—paraphrasing, inquiring, and validating—is not instinctive in negotiation. Our instinct is to advocate. Silence creates the space to listen.

Great negotiators may or may not be eloquent speakers. But they are always disciplined listeners.

2. Silence Defuses Anchoring in Negotiation

Anchoring is one of the most powerful cognitive biases in negotiation. When a counterpart names an extreme number—high or low—that figure can shape the entire discussion.

One of the most effective ways to respond to an aggressive anchor?

Silence.

If someone makes an outrageous offer and you respond with immediate protest, you keep the conversation orbiting around their number. But stunned silence can communicate far more forcefully that the offer is outside the zone of possible agreement.

Silence:

• Signals disapproval without escalation
• Creates uncertainty for the other side
• Encourages them to reconsider or adjust
• Avoids legitimizing the anchor through engagement

In phone negotiations, silence can be especially powerful. A long pause after an aggressive offer can create just enough discomfort for the other party to rethink their position.

3. Silence Reduces Psychological Biases

Behavioral economics shows that negotiators are highly susceptible to cognitive biases, including:

• Framing effects
• Loss aversion
• The contrast principle
• Overconfidence
• Reactive devaluation

Awareness of these biases helps—but time helps even more.

Silence buys you time to ask:

• What frame is being used here?
• Am I reacting emotionally?
• Is this offer objectively unreasonable, or just surprising?
• What is my best alternative (BATNA)?

A few seconds of pause can prevent costly impulsive decisions. Silence acts as a buffer between stimulus and response.

4. Silence Helps You “Go to the Balcony”

In Getting Past No, William Ury encourages negotiators to “go to the balcony” when tensions rise. That means mentally stepping back and viewing the situation as a neutral observer would.

Silence gives you the space to do exactly that.

When emotions escalate, our instinct is to react. But reacting often worsens the situation. A pause allows you to:

• Regulate your emotions
• Avoid escalation
• Reframe the conversation
• Choose strategy over impulse

As Ury suggests, effective negotiators develop the ability to “take a distanced view of close things.” Silence is often the bridge to that perspective.

Why Silence Feels So Uncomfortable

If silence is so powerful, why does it feel so awkward?

Because culturally, silence can signal:

• Disagreement
• Disapproval
• Social discomfort
• Loss of control

But in negotiation, silence often signals:

• Thoughtfulness
• Confidence
• Emotional control
• Strategic patience

The difference lies in how you interpret it.

Practical Tips for Using Silence in Negotiation

If silence feels unnatural, start small:

• Count to three before responding.
• Pause after hearing an offer.
• Ask a question—then wait.
• Practice neutral facial expressions during pauses.
• Let the other side fill the silence.

Like any negotiation skill, silence improves with deliberate practice.

Key Takeaway

Silence in negotiation:

• Strengthens listening
• Defuses anchors
• Reduces bias
• Enhances emotional control

Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.

What has been your experience? Has silence helped—or hurt—you in negotiation?

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.

In December 2014, leaked data from the Sony Pictures hack revealed a stark pay gap in the salary negotiations for the film American Hustle. Actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams earned significantly less than their male costars, receiving 7% of the film’s profits, while Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner each received 9%.

Lawrence blamed herself for the disparity. “I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” she wrote in the email newsletter Lenny Letter. “I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly . . . I don’t need.” She continued, “There was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’”

Lawrence noted that her three male costars on American Hustle “all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves” with no apparent concern about seeming “difficult” or “spoiled.” “If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical,” Lawrence wrote. “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable!” she concluded. 

Many women have felt a similar sense of frustration when negotiating salary: They want to negotiate aggressively but fear that they will be perceived as unlikable and penalized if they engage in hard bargaining.

Indeed, women who negotiate on their own behalf do risk a backlash effect, Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock, and Tulane University professor Lei Lai found in their research. In their studies, participants viewed women who negotiated for higher compensation as less nice than women who didn’t ask for more and were less willing to work with the women who negotiated. Male negotiators in the study faced no such backlash for negotiating salary.

The backlash effect contributes to the persistent gender pay gap—the fact that women earned about 84% of what men earned in 2020. The extra dollars that many women pass up when negotiating can make a huge difference when compounded over their lifetimes. 

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.

Compensation Negotiation Strategies

Negotiation experts have offered varied salary negotiation tactics to help reduce the gender pay gap. Bowles and Babcock, for example, have encouraged women to use relational accounts—explanations in a salary discussion that show concern for organizational relationships. For example, a woman might try renegotiating salary on the grounds that her supervisor noted that her salary was low for her position. To avoid being perceived as adversarial, women might also frame a salary negotiation as a joint problem-solving task.

In their book, Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015), Simmons College School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and writer Jessica L. Porter emphasize the importance of looking beyond negotiating salary in career negotiations. In a 2021 Vanity Fair interview, Jennifer Lawrence acknowledged that Leonardo DiCaprio, her costar in the film Don’t Look Up, received a larger salary than she did ($30 million as compared to her $25 million). She attributed this to his larger earning power—“Look, Leo brings in bigger box office than I do”—and noted that she had successfully negotiated for her name to come first in the opening credits, an issue that was important to her.  

Teaming Up When Negotiating Salary

In 2015, Bradley Cooper, Lawrence’s and Adams’s costar in American Hustle, told Reuters he had been shocked to learn how relatively little they earned on the film. He also revealed that he had since begun teaming up with his female costars when negotiating salary. Through joint negotiations, he hoped to address the issue of unequal pay, Cooper said. 

Regardless of their gender, negotiators can often enhance their power by forming a coalition. In the early 1990s, for example, actor David Schwimmer was offered a higher salary than the other five leads of the TV show Friends for its first season. Schwimmer convinced his castmates that they should all start off at the same salary and negotiate collectively for the duration of the show. Schwimmer smartly foresaw that the actors could gain significant power by negotiating as a group. The six stuck to their agreement, and by the show’s 10th and last season, they were each earning a record-breaking $1 million per episode.

Increasingly, employees are gaining negotiating leverage by sharing salary information. Fair-pay laws in some states prevent employers from punishing employees who share information about their salaries with colleagues and/or prohibit employers from asking employees about their past salary, a question that tends to perpetuate the gender pay gap. More companies are also setting formal salary ranges based on factors such as industry standards and benchmarking data from independent firms, reports Lauren Weber in the Wall Street Journal. Adding objectivity to the process improves gender equity and makes the organization more appealing to job seekers and employees. 

What other solutions to gender inequity have you encountered when negotiating salary?

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.

Being pressured to do something we don’t want to do is an unfortunate fact of life. Former Congressman Paul Ryan found himself in such a situation in 2015, when his fellow Republican Party members urged him to run for the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We tend to respond to such pressure either with a flat-out refusal that bruises the relationship or a grudging yes that can leave us feeling unappreciated and angry. Often, creative deal structuring can be a better choice. Specifically, by stipulating conditions to negotiating or reaching a deal, as Ryan did, you can make an offer more palatable both to yourself and the other party.

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.

Ryan’s Creative Deal Structuring

Following John Boehner’s announcement that he would retire from the Speaker post by the end of October 2015, Ryan was widely perceived as the only Republican capable of garnering enough votes to unite the party’s fractious caucus.

But Ryan repeatedly said he didn’t want the job. The often-thankless position, he knew, would be made more onerous by tough fiscal deadlines and election-year politics. Yet Ryan’s fellow Republicans courted him relentlessly, appealing to his sense of duty. In his absence, they feared, unelectable candidates would vie for the position and make a spectacle of the party’s turmoil.

Ryan’s resolve began to waver. But rather than caving, he met with other Republican House members to lay out three clear deal conditions that would have to be met for him to agree to run for Speaker:

1. The three major Republican House factions—including the Freedom Caucus, which was tepid about Ryan’s candidacy—would have to unite behind him.
2. To avoid power struggles and threats, Ryan asked for support to overturn a rule allowing a simple majority of the House to remove a sitting Speaker.
3. Ryan insisted on delegating travel and fundraising duties to leave his weekends free for his family. In return, he said, he would spend more time communicating the party’s message.

Republicans readily agreed to meet Ryan’s conditions, and on October 28, he was elected Speaker. “The whole conference is more united,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, according to the Washington Post. “And when we’re united, we can accomplish big things.”

Using Deal Structuring to Change the Game

Ryan used conditions, an often-overlooked deal-structuring technique, to help make the speakership appealing. A condition is an “if” statement—“If you rally behind me, I’ll run for Speaker,” or “I’ll work through the weekend if you can give me two paid days off next month”—that qualifies your entry into a negotiation or acceptance of a deal. Conditions are particularly useful in improving the appeal of another party’s onerous request or demand.

Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian has identified four types of conditions that can serve us well in business negotiations and beyond:

1. Conditions to entering talks. Because your participation in a negotiation often has value, you can use that value to gain leverage by proposing conditions to entry. Imagine a customer invites you to participate in an auction for a coveted contract. You might agree only under certain conditions, such as a limited number of bidders and the ability to negotiate with top bidders.
2. Conditions to the deal. During negotiations, you can use conditions to improve the quality of the deal and stand firm when you’re being asked for too much. Ryan made the support of the main Republican factions a condition for running for Speaker.
3. Conditions built into the deal. A condition built into the deal guarantees agreement whether or not it’s filled, explains Subramanian. For example, Ryan’s condition that he be granted weekends off was built into his deal.
4. Conditions to closing. When a delay exists between agreement and the deal closing, you might use conditions to reduce your exposure to risk. For example, home buyers often condition their purchase on a satisfactory inspection or financing.

Issuing Conditions Successfully

When stipulating a deal condition, you need to be prepared for the possibility that your counterpart will reject it. In Ryan’s case, he was aware that his party had a poor BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement: It had no other strong candidates. Ryan, meanwhile, had an excellent BATNA: He actually preferred not to be Speaker. This power difference meant that Ryan had little to lose; he could issue creative conditions and insist they be met. You should strive to craft conditions that make the deal on the table more appealing than your BATNA. If you can’t, then saying no may be wise.

Conditions are generally an excellent deal-structuring maneuver when you are negotiating from a position of strength. By contrast, when you have less power or when power is more evenly balanced, demanding firm conditions can be riskier. If the other side refuses to meet your conditions, you could end up disappointed.

The lessons are clear. First, demand only those conditions that are truly deal-breakers for you. Second, try to craft conditions in ways that provide benefits or concessions to your counterpart. For example, Ryan’s insistence on party unity offered clear benefits to House Republicans. Your efforts to help your counterparts get what they want will contribute to stronger relationships and more lasting deals.

What other deal-structuring advice would you offer business negotiators?

Do you have regrets about the deals that got away? If so, you might be newly motivated by the deal-making process of famed Hollywood movie and television producer Albert S. Ruddy. For 50 years he pursued two pet film projects—each of which finally led to a negotiated agreement and is coming to fruition.

A Deal-Making Process Sours

In 1972, fresh off his success launching The Godfather, Ruddy set his sights on novelist Ayn Rand’s 1,000-plus-page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Rand laid out her philosophy of objectivism, which promotes capitalism and rational self-interest.

Warned that Rand would be a tough sell, Ruddy told the New York Times in 2015 that he tried to win her over with charm and flattery. According to Ruddy, Rand was at first eager to let him produce Atlas Shrugged. But that changed after she insisted on having veto power over every frame of the film.

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.

“I said, look, Ayn, the language of film is different,” Ruddy told the Los Angeles Times. Noting that the novel’s hero “says good-bye to America for 60 pages,” Ruddy said, “In a book it can be charming, but in film you look foolish.”

With Rand continuing to insist on full creative control, the deal-making process reached a dead end. Ruddy says he told Rand he would wait for her to “drop dead” and then make the film as he saw fit.

Rand retorted, “Then I’ll put it in my will, the one person who can’t get [the film rights] is you,” Ruddy told the New York Times.

A Long and Winding Road

After her talks with Ruddy collapsed, Rand began scripting a TV miniseries adaptation of Atlas Shrugged but didn’t finish before her death in 1982. She left her estate to a longtime student, who in 1992 sold a 15-year option on the film rights to the novel to New Jersey entrepreneur and objectivist John Aglialoro for $1 million.

Aglialoro tried numerous times to produce the film, purchasing extensions on his option. Ruddy got involved in 1999 on an Atlas Shrugged miniseries for TV network TNT, but the project stalled.

A husband-and-wife production team, Howard and Karen Baldwin, optioned the film rights and commissioned a script with actress Angelina Jolie tentatively attached as the female lead. But in 2006, those plans collapsed, too, due to creative differences with Aglialoro, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In March 2010, Aglialoro had just three months to begin filming Atlas Shrugged before his rights expired. Working on a shoestring budget, he had the film shot with a first-time director and cast of unknowns in just a few weeks. The film sank like a stone at the box office.

Determined to do better, Ruddy finally managed to secure the rights to Atlas Shrugged from Aglialoro, the New York Times reported in 2015. More than 40 years after his failed negotiation with Rand, Ruddy planned a version of the novel that he hoped to sell to a streaming service such as Netflix.

Another Long Deal-Making Process

There the trail of Atlas Shrugged adaptations runs cold—at least for now. But as he entered his nineties, Ruddy wasn’t resting on his laurels. As it turns out, during the many decades he was pursuing Atlas Shrugged, the producer was chasing another elusive project: a script called Cry Macho, the story of a former rodeo star who goes on a mission to save another man’s son.

In an article for Deadline, Michael Cieply writes that Ruddy had been trying to get the film made for at least 46 years. Big Hollywood names—from Roy Scheider to Burt Lancaster to Pierce Brosnan to Arnold Schwarzenegger—were attached at various points, but it always fell through.

And then, somehow, a miracle: Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the film, which was released by Warner Bros. and HBO Max on September 17, 2021.

Five Tips from a Great Negotiator

If you think Ruddy’s own life sounds like a Hollywood saga, you’re not the only one: A 10-episode miniseries about him called The Offer was in production in August 2021. But in a plot twist that might have been predicted, production was shut down, with rumors swirling that the actor playing Ruddy, Miles Teller, had contracted Covid-19. While we wait for the show to air, we can glean these principles of deal design from Ruddy’s negotiations:

1. Charm isn’t everything. Though smooth talk and flattery may carry you far in the deal-making process, you’ll have to meet your partner’s substantive needs to reach a truly valuable deal.

2. Know your limits. Ruddy understood that giving veto power over a film version of Atlas Shrugged could be a catastrophe. Wise negotiators search for value-creating tradeoffs but also recognize a deal breaker when they see one.

3. Be willing to find a new partner. Ruddy pursued his goal not only by working with Rand but also by negotiating years later with another producer. We can all benefit from identifying various paths to our goals.

4. Pursue multiple deals. Great producers don’t put all their eggs in one basket; they juggle numerous potential projects. Negotiators in all realms would be wise to adopt their strategy of diversifying—pursuing several deals rather than just one.

5. Play the long game. Ruddy’s dogged tenacity over the course of many decades can inspire us all to not give up on a deal-making process that might just fulfill our dreams.

What elements of the deal-making process do you think often go overlooked?

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.

Question:

I have the sense that silence can sometimes be useful, but it usually just makes me feel uncomfortable. Does silence have benefits in negotiation?

A: In Western cultures, many people are uncomfortable with silence. We tend to talk on top of one another, with little pause between point and counterpoint. Any silence that occurs often feels awkward, as you’ve experienced. But effective negotiators know that silence can be a useful tool. Here are four advantages of silence:

1. Silence helps you absorb what you’re hearing. Research shows that people have a difficult time truly listening to the other side in a negotiation. While our counterpart is talking, our tendency is to prepare our response rather than listen. You may think your delivery of a “zinger” line right on the heels of someone’s comment is an effective move, but doing so implicitly signals that you were too busy thinking to listen closely.

Allowing a few moments of silence before you respond will help you turn off your internal voice and listen more effectively. An experienced corporate attorney recently told me about a junior investment banker he was coaching. He observed that the banker would jump in with a response as soon as the other side finished speaking. The attorney suggested a slight pause—“Count to three in your head”—before responding. The result, according to the attorney, was like night and day. The banker performed substantively better and was perceived as wise beyond his years.

Silence also allows you to deploy active-listening skills: paraphrasing, inquiring, and acknowledgment. Experience shows that active listening is not an instinctive skill in negotiation; instead, our tendency is to advocate for our point of view. When you are truly listening, and the other party feels listened to, the active-listening tool kit becomes far more natural. Silence gives you the few seconds you need to broaden your repertoire in this important way. In general, great negotiators may or may not be good talkers, but they are always good listeners. Silence gives you the ability to dampen your instincts for self-advocacy and amplify your instinct to listen.

2. Silence can allow you to defuse anchors. Silence can also be a very powerful tool for defusing anchors clearly and forcefully in a negotiation. When your counterpart names an outrageous figure, your stunned silence will far more effectively defuse the anchor than heaps of protesting would. Defusing anchors through silence is particularly effective in over-the-phone negotiations, where the other side may wonder (and worry) for a moment if you hung up in response to her aggressive offer.
3. Silence can allow you to minimize or avoid psychological biases. A long stream of research in behavioral economics and social psychology indicates that negotiators are susceptible to cognitive biases, including framing effects, the contrast principle, and loss aversion. Research further shows that, in addition to being aware of these phenomena, having time to think during a negotiation allows you to mitigate or avoid these biases. Silence buys you time to diagnose: “What’s going on here?”
4. Silence can allow you to “go to the balcony.” In his seminal book Getting Past No (Bantam, revised edition, 1993), William Ury urges negotiators to “go to the balcony” in difficult situations. How would a third party view the situation? Silence gives you the few seconds that are essential to “take a distanced view of close things,” according to Ury.

As these guidelines suggest, sometimes the best thing to say in a negotiation is nothing at all.

Guhan Subramanian

Joseph Flom Professor of Law & Business, Harvard Law School

Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, Harvard Business School

Academic Editor, Negotiation Briefings

In negotiations with longtime counterparts, it can be difficult to overcome entrenched bad habits and past resentments. That certainly has been the case for negotiations between the U.S. Congress and the White House in recent years, which have been marked by name-calling, missed deadlines, and public ridicule. But thanks to a variety of pressures and new strategies, the parties managed to quietly and relatively peacefully negotiate a budget deal this past fall.

A window opens in the House

With the U.S. Treasury Department predicting that the government would run out of cash in early November 2015, Republican leaders were eager to reach a deal with Democrats to raise the federal debt limit and avoid the chaos and blame of a government shutdown. During a September 17 phone call with President Barack Obama, John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the idea of launching negotiations on the issue, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The GOP leaders also expressed interest in negotiating a broader budget deal.

Eight days later, when Boehner surprised the nation by announcing that he would resign from the House in late October, the White House recognized that a “critical window” had opened up for negotiation with Republicans, former Senator Tom Daschle told the Journal. Given that Boehner had publicly pledged there would be no new shutdowns or debt defaults on his watch, he appeared to be motivated to do a deal. Obama was also driven to avoid a shutdown that could keep him from pursuing his goals during his last year in office.

All business, no drama

The leaders agreed to delegate the negotiations to their staffs. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of past debt-ceiling and budget talks, senior aides to Boehner, McConnell, Obama, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid set clear ground rules for their negotiations, which began on September 30, according to the Journal: “No leaks, no drama.”

Given their hectic schedules and the talks’ tight deadlines, Obama and the congressional leaders never met in person during the negotiations. When they did talk by phone, they were all business. “Small talk—forget it,” Pelosi told the Journal, referring to her phone calls with Obama. “I’m busy. He’s busy. . . . Subject, problem, timing, action required, end of conversation. Decision.”

The negotiations briefly lost steam after Representative Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for Speaker, leaving Republicans feeling panicked. But after Paul Ryan was convinced to take on the role (see our cover story), talks picked up again.

A race to the finish

At first, the parties stayed focused on the narrow but challenging issue of negotiating to increase the debt limit before the Treasury Department’s November 3 deadline. That didn’t give them enough time to also tackle a multiyear budget negotiation, they thought.

Yet on October 22, Boehner and McConnell reported to Obama that they might not have enough support in Congress to pass a stand-alone debt-ceiling increase, according to the Journal. And as each party brought other interests to the table, the negotiations inevitably broadened. Boehner said he was eager to “clean the barn” for the next Speaker, for example.

Boehner tasked the staff negotiators with reaching a two-year budget deal before Ryan was to be sworn in as speaker on October 28. The race was on, but fortunately for the parties, much of the advance work had been done for them; they pulled in changes to Social Security Disability Insurance that Ryan had worked out while chairing the Ways and Means Committee, for example. After a long weekend of talks, the negotiators were able to post a budget bill to the House Rules website during Ryan’s swearing-in ceremony.

The final two-year budget deal, which passed the House and Senate easily despite some conservative opposition, incorporated compromises from both Democrats and Republicans. Achieving a net reduction in the deficit, the budget raised federal spending by $80 billion over two years and added $32 billion to an emergency war fund, offset by cuts to Medicare and Social Security disability benefits and revenue from other programs. Finally, the debt limit was raised until March 2017, freeing Obama from future battles over the issue.

Guidelines for a fresh start

Several characteristics of the budget deal could help you shed self-destructive patterns with perennial partners:

• Recognize changed incentives. The White House made a commitment to negotiation after realizing that Boehner’s resignation gave him a strong motivation to do a deal. When situational factors could make a counterpart more flexible than usual, try to negotiate before critical windows close again.
• Negotiate the terms of engagement. Explicitly agreeing up front that leaks and drama were forbidden allowed the government negotiators to set clear parameters for acceptable behavior. By negotiating ground rules, parties can address and overcome their destructive tendencies.

Show a dedication to delegation. The leaders wisely handed off responsibility to their staffs and stepped in only to make key decisions. When they did talk, the leaders’ long familiarity with one another allowed them to skip the small talk and stay on task.

In negotiations with longtime counterparts, it can be difficult to overcome entrenched bad habits and past resentments. That certainly has been the case for negotiations between the U.S. Congress and the White House in recent years, which have been marked by name-calling, missed deadlines, and public ridicule. But thanks to a variety of pressures and new strategies, the parties managed to quietly and relatively peacefully negotiate a budget deal this past fall.

A window opens in the House

With the U.S. Treasury Department predicting that the government would run out of cash in early November 2015, Republican leaders were eager to reach a deal with Democrats to raise the federal debt limit and avoid the chaos and blame of a government shutdown. During a September 17 phone call with President Barack Obama, John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised the idea of launching negotiations on the issue, according to a Wall Street Journal article. The GOP leaders also expressed interest in negotiating a broader budget deal.

Eight days later, when Boehner surprised the nation by announcing that he would resign from the House in late October, the White House recognized that a “critical window” had opened up for negotiation with Republicans, former Senator Tom Daschle told the Journal. Given that Boehner had publicly pledged there would be no new shutdowns or debt defaults on his watch, he appeared to be motivated to do a deal. Obama was also driven to avoid a shutdown that could keep him from pursuing his goals during his last year in office.

All business, no drama

The leaders agreed to delegate the negotiations to their staffs. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of past debt-ceiling and budget talks, senior aides to Boehner, McConnell, Obama, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid set clear ground rules for their negotiations, which began on September 30, according to the Journal: “No leaks, no drama.”

Given their hectic schedules and the talks’ tight deadlines, Obama and the congressional leaders never met in person during the negotiations. When they did talk by phone, they were all business. “Small talk—forget it,” Pelosi told the Journal, referring to her phone calls with Obama. “I’m busy. He’s busy. . . . Subject, problem, timing, action required, end of conversation. Decision.”

The negotiations briefly lost steam after Representative Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for Speaker, leaving Republicans feeling panicked. But after Paul Ryan was convinced to take on the role (see our cover story), talks picked up again.

A race to the finish

At first, the parties stayed focused on the narrow but challenging issue of negotiating to increase the debt limit before the Treasury Department’s November 3 deadline. That didn’t give them enough time to also tackle a multiyear budget negotiation, they thought.

Yet on October 22, Boehner and McConnell reported to Obama that they might not have enough support in Congress to pass a stand-alone debt-ceiling increase, according to the Journal. And as each party brought other interests to the table, the negotiations inevitably broadened. Boehner said he was eager to “clean the barn” for the next Speaker, for example.

Boehner tasked the staff negotiators with reaching a two-year budget deal before Ryan was to be sworn in as speaker on October 28. The race was on, but fortunately for the parties, much of the advance work had been done for them; they pulled in changes to Social Security Disability Insurance that Ryan had worked out while chairing the Ways and Means Committee, for example. After a long weekend of talks, the negotiators were able to post a budget bill to the House Rules website during Ryan’s swearing-in ceremony.

The final two-year budget deal, which passed the House and Senate easily despite some conservative opposition, incorporated compromises from both Democrats and Republicans. Achieving a net reduction in the deficit, the budget raised federal spending by $80 billion over two years and added $32 billion to an emergency war fund, offset by cuts to Medicare and Social Security disability benefits and revenue from other programs. Finally, the debt limit was raised until March 2017, freeing Obama from future battles over the issue.

Guidelines for a fresh start

Several characteristics of the budget deal could help you shed self-destructive patterns with perennial partners:

• Recognize changed incentives. The White House made a commitment to negotiation after realizing that Boehner’s resignation gave him a strong motivation to do a deal. When situational factors could make a counterpart more flexible than usual, try to negotiate before critical windows close again.
• Negotiate the terms of engagement. Explicitly agreeing up front that leaks and drama were forbidden allowed the government negotiators to set clear parameters for acceptable behavior. By negotiating ground rules, parties can address and overcome their destructive tendencies.

Show a dedication to delegation. The leaders wisely handed off responsibility to their staffs and stepped in only to make key decisions. When they did talk, the leaders’ long familiarity with one another allowed them to skip the small talk and stay on task.

Do you have regrets about a deal you couldn’t quite bring to the finish line? If so, you might gain hope from this tale of a negotiator who nabbed a fresh chance to meet his goals more than 40 years after his initial negotiations collapsed.

A brief courtship

In 1972, the intrepid movie and television producer Albert S. Ruddy, fresh off his success launching The Godfather, set his sights on novelist Ayn Rand’s 1,000-plus-page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, Rand laid out her philosophy of Objectivism, which promotes capitalism and rational self-interest.

Warned that Rand would be a tough sell, Ruddy told the New York Times that he tried to win her over with his charm, flattery, and wit. According to Ruddy, Rand was at first eager to let him produce Atlas Shrugged. But the tenor of their dialogue changed after Rand told Ruddy that she would require veto power over every frame of the film. The author had publicly disparaged the 1949 film adaptation of her novel The Fountainhead after Warner Brothers refused to present a lengthy monologue in its entirety.

“I said, look, Ayn, the language of film is different,” Ruddy recalled to Rebecca Keegan of the Los Angeles Times. Noting that the novel’s hero “says good-bye to America for 60 pages,” Ruddy said, “In a book it can be charming, but in film you look foolish.”

But with Rand continuing to insist on full creative control, and Ruddy just as adamantly refusing to grant it, the budding courtship soured. Ruddy says he told Rand he would wait for her to “drop dead” and then make the film as he saw fit.

“Then I’ll put it in my will, the one person who can’t get [the film rights] is you,” Rand retorted, Ruddy told the New York Times.

Abandoned plans

After her talks with Ruddy collapsed, Rand began scripting a TV miniseries adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, envisioning Farrah Fawcett and Clint Eastwood in the lead roles, but she didn’t finish before her death in 1982. She left her estate to a longtime student, Leonard Peikoff, who in 1992 sold a 15-year option on the film rights to the novel to New Jersey entrepreneur and Objectivist John Aglialoro for $1 million.

Aglialoro tried numerous times to produce the film, ultimately purchasing extensions on his option. Ruddy got involved in 1999 on an Atlas Shrugged miniseries for TV network TNT, but outside forces, including the AOL–Time Warner merger, thwarted the project.

A husband-and-wife production team, Howard and Karen Baldwin, optioned the film rights from Aglialoro and commissioned a two-hour film script of Atlas Shrugged with actress Angelina Jolie tentatively attached to play the lead female role. But in 2006, those plans collapsed, too, when Aglialoro resisted the producers’ efforts to make the story more cinematic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

A loose adaptation

In March 2010, Aglialoro had just three months to begin principal photography on a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged before his rights expired. Working on a shoestring budget, he had the film shot with a first-time director and cast of unknowns in just a few weeks. Conservative political groups supported the film, hoping to spread its pro-capitalist message, but it sank like a stone at the box office.

Criticizing the film for being too faithful to the book, Ruddy persuaded Aglialoro to give him another crack at producing Atlas Shrugged, the New York Times reported in November 2015. More than 40 years after his failed negotiation with Rand, Ruddy is now planning a version of the novel that he hopes will be picked up by a streaming service such as Netflix. With Rand and her exacting demands long out of the picture, Ruddy says he plans to hire a writer to loosely adapt the film to the Internet era, with high-tech gurus in the mold of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos standing in for the book’s industrial-era titans.

3 negotiation tips from a long-running saga

1. Charm isn’t everything. Though smooth talk and flattery may carry you far, you’ll need to meet your partner’s substantive needs to reach a truly valuable deal.
2. Know your limits. Ruddy understood that Rand’s insistence on veto power over the film could be a catastrophe. Wise negotiators search for value-creating tradeoffs but also recognize a deal breaker when they see one.

Patience is a virtue. Ruddy ultimately was able to reach his goal by working not with Rand but with another producer. Sometimes your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) in a negotiation is to wait for the same deal in a different environment.

Jennifer Lawrence was angry. The December 2014 leaks of data hacked from Sony Pictures revealed that the young actress had negotiated a significantly lower salary than her male costars for her role in the film American Hustle, despite being part of an ensemble cast. Lawrence (like the film’s other female lead, Amy Adams) was paid 7% of the film’s profits; Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jeremy Renner each were paid 9%.

But Lawrence wasn’t angry at Sony. “I got mad at myself,” she revealed in an October 2015 essay in Lenny Letter, an email newsletter edited by actress Lena Dunham and producer Jenni Konner. “I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” Lawrence wrote. “I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly . . . I don’t need.” She continued, “But if I’m honest with myself, there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’

“I don’t think I’m the only woman with this issue,” Lawrence went on. “Are we socially conditioned to behave this way?” She noted that her three male costars on American Hustle “all fought and succeeded in negotiating powerful deals for themselves” with no apparent concern about seeming “difficult” or “spoiled.” “If anything, I’m sure they were commended for being fierce and tactical,” Lawrence writes, “while I was busy worrying about coming across as a brat and not getting my fair share.”

“I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable!” Lawrence concluded.

The anger and frustration that Lawrence expressed in her essay reflect a dilemma that many women have experienced: They want to negotiate as aggressively as men, but they are aware that when doing so, they risk being perceived as unlikable and could be penalized accordingly.

Indeed, women who negotiate on their own behalf risk a backlash effect, Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock, and Tulane University professor Lei Lai have found in their research. In a series of studies, participants viewed women who negotiated for higher compensation as less nice than women who didn’t ask for more. The participants also were less willing to work with the women who negotiated. Male negotiators in the study faced no such backlash.

In part due to their awareness of the backlash effect, women negotiate less often for themselves in the workplace than men do. This tendency contributes to the persistent gender pay gap—the fact that women earn about 81% of what men earn, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Few of us have the opportunity to haggle over millions of dollars in a single negotiation, as Lawrence and her costars do. But the extra dollars that many women pass up when negotiating could make a huge difference for them, particularly when compounded over their lifetimes. Here we review advice on how to overcome the backlash effect and also offer a novel strategy from an unlikely source—Lawrence’s frequent costar, Bradley Cooper.

Relationships and requests

As a powerful and, indeed, well-liked woman, Lawrence may have taken a step toward leveling the playing field simply by spreading awareness of the gender pay gap. Her public stance could motivate young women, in particular, to take the risk of asking for more. Lawrence’s statements also could remind employers of the stereotypes and inequities they may be perpetuating in workplace negotiations.

Negotiation experts have offered varied strategies to help women and the managers who employ them reduce the gender pay gap. One line of advice may help women overcome the backlash effect by reducing the odds that they will be perceived as violating traditional gender stereotypes of women as communal and relationship oriented—and thus as unlikable.

Specifically, Bowles and her colleagues encourage women to use relational accounts—explanations for their requests that not only seem legitimate but also show concern for organizational relationships. For example, a woman might ask for a raise on the grounds that her supervisor noted that her salary was low for her position. To avoid being perceived as adversarial, women might also frame salary negotiations as joint problem-solving tasks.

Similarly, in her best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg writes that she advises women to explain that they are negotiating for a higher salary to help promote equality between men and women. This strategy works, according to Sandberg, because it shows concern for other women and not just for oneself.

In their book Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015), Simmons College School of Management professor emerita Deborah M. Kolb and writer Jessica L. Porter look beyond the framing of salary requests to identify strategies that both women and men (but especially women) can use to negotiate successfully on their own behalf at work. Kolb and Porter advise us not to overlook the importance of informal opportunities for negotiations, such as asking for the resources we need (administrative support, a travel budget, etc.) to succeed in a new role.

Because superiors might not see the need to negotiate such issues, you may have to find ways to invest them in such discussions, note the authors. You can do so by keeping superiors informed about your and your team’s achievements, presenting your bosses with multiple options that you find equally appealing, and enhancing your power by making your alternatives to the status quo more salient in your superiors’ eyes. For example, if you are tired of being asked to take on extra assignments from another department for no extra pay, you could turn the next project down, citing your already full workload. Your decision could inspire your boss to initiate a conversation about how you might be compensated for taking on the extra work.

Teaming up for higher pay

In the wake of Lawrence’s essay, Bradley Cooper, her costar in American Hustle and two other films, told Reuters he thought it was “fantastic” that she had addressed Hollywood’s gender pay gap publicly. Cooper said he had been shocked to learn how relatively little Amy Adams, in particular, had earned on American Hustle, calling her cut of the profits relative to the size of her role in the film “really horrible” and “almost embarrassing.”

Interestingly, Cooper also revealed that he had begun teaming up with his female costars to negotiate salary. Saying that he had identified joint negotiations as “something that I could do” to address the issue of unequal pay, Cooper suggested it was time to break the silence on salary negotiations and take a more collaborative approach.

Some might bristle at the notion of a man swooping in to help his female coworker negotiate a better deal. Yet consider that both genders can benefit from this type of team approach. Weaker parties in a negotiation, whether men or women, can often enhance their power when facing off with a stronger partner (such as a film studio) by forming a coalition.

To take another example from the entertainment industry, in the early 1990s, actor David Schwimmer was offered a higher salary than the other five leads of the new TV show Friends for its first season. Willingly sacrificing a bit of money for himself, Schwimmer convinced his castmates that they should all start off at the same salary and negotiate collectively for the duration of the show. Schwimmer smartly foresaw that the actors would gain significant power by negotiating as a group if the show succeeded. The actors stuck to their agreement, and by the show’s 10th season, they were each earning a record-breaking $1 million per episode.

Just as employees gain leverage by joining forces in a union, you may be able to increase your strength and confidence by negotiating with coworkers for raises and opportunities. To do so, you might need to share salary information with colleagues or research pay data for your organization or industry online. (In many cases, organizations that forbid their employees from talking about their pay are violating long-standing U.S. law.) Such discussions can be uncomfortable, but they could pave the way to great rewards.

Your boss asks you to disrupt some family plans to work through the weekend. The PTA president at your children’s school wants you to chair an important benefit that no one else will lead. A customer asks you to participate in an auction rather than negotiating one-on-one for his contract.

Being asked to do something we don’t want to do is an unfortunate fact of life. Congressman Paul Ryan found himself in such a pressure-filled situation this past fall, when his fellow Republican Party members urged him to run for the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives.

We tend to respond to such pressure either with a flat-out refusal that bruises the relationship or a grudging yes that can leave us feeling unappreciated and angry. Often, there is a better choice: By stipulating conditions to negotiating or reaching a deal, as Ryan did, we can make our response to a request more palatable both to ourselves and the other party, whether it ends in a yes or a no.

From “no” to “maybe” to “yes”

With House Republicans facing a leadership crisis following John Boehner’s announcement that he would retire from the Speaker of the House post by the end of October 2015, Ryan was widely perceived as the only candidate capable of garnering enough votes to lead and unite the party’s fractious caucus.

But there was a problem: Having just assumed a long-coveted position as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee in January 2015, Ryan repeatedly said he did not want the job. The often-thankless position, he knew, would be made more onerous by tough fiscal deadlines and election-year politics. Yet Ryan’s fellow Republicans courted him relentlessly, appealing to his sense of duty. In his absence, they feared, a slew of unelectable candidates would vie for the position and make a public spectacle of the party’s turmoil.

Ryan’s resolve began to waver. But rather than simply caving, he arranged a meeting with other Republican House members on October 20. He said he had concluded that the party was facing a “dire moment,” according to the Atlantic. He feared that if he didn’t run, his children might one day ask him, “Why didn’t you do all you could?”

“I hope this doesn’t sound conditional—but it is,” Ryan told party members at the meeting, according to the Washington Post. He laid out three clear conditions that would have to be met for him to agree to run for Speaker:

1. The three major Republican House factions—including the Freedom Caucus, which was tepid about Ryan’s candidacy—would have to unite behind him by the end of the week.
2. To avoid the power struggles and threats that Boehner had anticipated facing if he’d remained Speaker, Ryan asked for support to overturn a rule allowing a simple majority of the House to remove a sitting Speaker.
3. Ryan would insist on delegating the traditional travel and fund-raising duties of the House Speaker to leave his weekends free for his family. “I cannot and will not give up my family time,” he said. (For more on this condition, see the sidebar on the next page, “Paul Ryan Takes on the ‘Flexibility Stigma.’”) In return, he said, he would spend more time communicating the party’s message.

Ryan also said he would be willing to consider changes to House rules proposed by the Freedom Caucus that would weaken the Speaker’s power; however, he said he would not treat these requests as conditions to running.

Republicans readily agreed to meet Ryan’s condition about not working on weekends and to back his desired rule change in the House. The day after the meeting, a solid majority of the Freedom Caucus voted to support Ryan, effectively ensuring Ryan’s condition of party unity, given that the backing of the other two factions was already guaranteed. On October 28, all but nine of Ryan’s Republican colleagues voted to elect him Speaker, and he easily defeated the Democrats’ candidate, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“The future looks brighter,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who had led a failed campaign to become Speaker himself), according to the Washington Post, reflecting the relief felt by many Republicans. “The whole conference is more united,” McCarthy continued. “And when we’re united, we can accomplish big things.”

Using conditions to change the game

Rather craftily, Ryan used conditions, an often-overlooked deal-structuring technique, to help make the speakership tolerable to him. A condition is an “if” statement—“If you rally behind me, I’ll run for Speaker,” or “I’ll work through the weekend if you can give me two paid days off next month”—that qualifies your entry into a negotiation or acceptance of a deal. Though conditions can be used in most negotiations, they can be a particularly useful tool when it comes to improving the appeal of another party’s onerous request or demand.

Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School professor Guhan Subramanian has identified four types of conditions that can serve us well in negotiations:

1. Conditions to entering talks. Because your participation in a negotiation often has value, you can use that value to gain leverage by proposing conditions to entry. Imagine, for example, that a customer invites you to participate in an auction for a coveted contract. You might agree only if the customer meets certain conditions, such as limiting the number of participants and agreeing to negotiate terms other than price with the top bidders.
2. Conditions to the deal. During negotiations, you can use conditions to improve the quality of the deal and stand firm when you’re being asked for too much. Ryan made the support of the main Republican factions a condition for agreeing to run for Speaker.
3. Conditions built into the deal. Unlike a condition to the deal, a condition built into the deal guarantees agreement whether or not the condition is filled, explains Subramanian. For example, Ryan’s condition that he be granted weekends off with his family was a condition built into his deal with his fellow Republicans, as was his request that they support a rule change regarding removal of the Speaker.
4. Conditions to closing. When a delay exists between agreement and the official closing of a deal, you might want to use conditions to reduce your exposure to risk. For example, home buyers often condition their purchase of a house on a satisfactory inspection or on their ability to secure financing and sell their current home, or both. Conditions to closing are common in mergers and acquisitions as well.

A condition often shifts the balance of power in a negotiation, turning your problem into a joint problem, notes Subramanian. Rather than putting himself in the vulnerable position of lobbying for votes, for example, Ryan “more or less dared members not to give” their support, the New York Times said. His move also put responsibility on the Freedom Caucus to approve his candidacy, lest it be blamed for prolonging the Republicans’ leadership woes in the House.

Issuing conditions successfully

When making a bold condition, you need to be prepared for the possibility that your counterpart will reject it. In Ryan’s case, he was aware that his party had a poor BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement: It had no other strong candidates for the Speaker position. Ryan, meanwhile, had an excellent BATNA: He actually preferred not to be Speaker. This power difference meant that Ryan had little to lose; he could issue creative conditions and insist they be met. You should strive to craft conditions that make the deal the other side is striving for more appealing than your BATNA. If you can’t, then saying no may be the best choice for you.

As this example suggests, conditions are generally an excellent dealmaking maneuver when you are negotiating from a position of strength. By contrast, when you are the less-powerful party or when power is more evenly balanced, demanding firm conditions can be riskier. For example, after the Minnesota Orchestra locked out its musicians during a 2012 dispute over wages, the musicians said they would negotiate only if management ended the lockout, resumed the season, and began paying them again. The orchestra’s management refused to meet this condition for fear of losing negotiating leverage. The dispute persisted for more than a year, in part because of the musicians’ firm conditions to negotiating.

Two key lessons emerge from these stories. First, just as you would only make a threat that you are ready to follow through on, you should only demand conditions that are truly deal breakers for you.

Second, try to craft conditions in ways that provide benefits or concessions to your counterpart, if possible. For example, Paul Ryan’s insistence on party unity offered clear benefits not only to him but also to House Republicans as a group. And in exchange for accepting the job only on the condition that he have weekends off to be with his family, he promised to spend more time communicating the party’s message, a valuable concession to his counterparts. Even when you have the power to get what you want from a negotiation, your efforts to help your counterparts get what they want will pay off in the form of stronger relationships and more lasting deals.

Sidebar

Paul Ryan takes on the “flexibility stigma”

Though many observers praised Representative Paul Ryan for negotiating to protect his time with his family, some called his stance hypocritical given that he had voted against federal policies on family leave during his time in the House. But Ryan’s condition regarding family time could contribute to positive shifts in the way that men manage their work-life balance.

Both men and women recognize that they face a “flexibility stigma” for negotiating or taking advantage of unconventional work arrangements, says Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California. Interestingly, men may face even greater penalties for negotiating for flexible hours and assignments than women do because their behavior violates traditional expectations of men working long hours at the office while their wives take care of the children.

That may explain why men typically don’t ask for or advertise extra time with their families, instead choosing to slip away from work for a school function or answer emails at home, according to Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin. Women, by contrast, are more likely to make use of official flexibility policies or negotiate for time away from the office.

By negotiating explicitly to make his family time sacred, Ryan may have helped reduce some of the stigma men face for asking for flexible work arrangements and opened up new negotiation possibilities in the workplace.