Forging close bonds often helps negotiators reach better deals, collaborate more effectively over time, and manage conflict when it arises. Yet negotiators frequently rush through—or overlook—the relationship-building phase of negotiation. Here’s some advice on how to approach this critical aspect of negotiation in a more deliberate and systematic way.

Overcome Partisan Perceptions

An unconscious bias often gets in the way of relationship-building in negotiation: partisan perceptions, or the tendency to see our own side as more intelligent, skilled, reasonable, and moral than the other side. Partisan perceptions can cause us to expect the worst from our counterparts, especially those we don’t know well, write David Lax and James Sebenius in their book 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals.

How can you lay the groundwork for a deep-rooted bond? Consider this anecdote from 3-D Negotiation. Late on a Friday afternoon, a senior partner in a law firm called a talented young associate into his office. The partner asked the associate to represent the plaintiff in upcoming settlement negotiations and, if necessary, a possible trial.

The young lawyer worked all weekend to prepare a compelling plaintiff’s brief. After reviewing the work on Monday morning, the partner praised the associate highly. Then he revealed that the firm would actually be representing the defendant in the case, not the plaintiff. “Now that you completely understand the other side’s viewpoint,” the senior lawyer told the associate, “we need you to prepare our side.” With this “trick,” the senior lawyer prepared his younger colleague to understand the other party and its interests, a critical step in overcoming partisan perceptions and relationship-building in negotiation.

You might try adapting the senior lawyer’s trick to your own negotiation preparation. You or your team could write up a detailed “brief” for both sides in an upcoming negotiation, being careful to explore the nuances of the other side’s perspective as fully as possible.

Getting to Know You

Some people rarely take time for relationship-building in negotiation, whether due to impatience or a sense that they would be wasting the other party’s time, writes Jeswald Salacuse in his book Negotiating Life: Secrets for Everyday Diplomacy and Deal Making. That’s usually a mistake, according to Salacuse. Effective negotiation requires the kind of mutual knowledge that can come only from asking questions and sharing information—and building relationships. There’s value in taking time to explore not only the other party’s interests and motives but also who they are as a person.

Years ago, during tense negotiations with the United States, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir expressed deep sympathy toward one of the U.S. negotiators, whose wife had died. Meir mentioned the pain she had felt upon the death of one of her family members. The brief conversation between the two negotiators established a relationship that dramatically improved the tenor of the negotiation, Salacuse writes. As this example illustrates, asking and telling sends an important message to the other side: You are interesting, important, and valued.

Confronting Conflict

Relationship-building in negotiation doesn’t end when a business transaction has been completed. “Once the contract is signed, we put it in the drawer,” executives have told Salacuse repeatedly. “After that, what matters most is the relationship between us and our partner, and we are negotiating that relationship all the time.”

Inevitably, problems arise in the life of a contract: Parties might realize that they neglected to stipulate a key term, leading to differing perceptions of what’s fair, or one side may come to believe that the other is failing to live up to the agreement. Learning how to navigate conflict becomes critical in leadership and decision-making.

In their book, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen explain that every tough conversation comprises three different overlapping conversations. Keep them in mind the next time you are working to get a relationship back on track:

1. The “What happened?” conversation.

When disagreements arise in a business relationship, each side is likely to blame the other. But doing so prevents us from finding out what actually happened. So probe to learn what the other person’s intention was and then share your own. Instead of choosing which story is “right,” embrace them both.

2. The “feelings” conversation.

It’s tempting to focus exclusively on solving a problem and ignore underlying emotions. But when left unaddressed, negative emotions tend to deepen conflict by blocking our ability to listen. Acknowledging your range of complex feelings can promote mutual understanding.

3. The “identity” conversation.

Conflict can shake our sense of identity, causing us to question our competence and worth. It may help to think about which personal hot buttons the conflict is pushing, such as a fear of rejection or a sense of inadequacy. Consider the nuances of your self-image, recognize that everyone makes mistakes, and acknowledge your contributions to the problem.

What other advice do you have for relationship building in negotiation?

When parties to a negotiation can’t seem to find common ground, it sometimes seems as if the only solution is “winner take all.”

Consider the failed campaign by the backers of the Cape Wind Energy Project to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Sound. Led by Jim Gordon of Energy Management Inc., Cape Wind Associates sought approval for the wind farm from dozens of local, state, and federal agencies and organizations.

The wind farm became controversial, though it would have provided a local source of clean energy for the region, and one poll found that only 14% of Massachusetts residents opposed it. But a vocal group of wealthy area residents complained it would ruin scenic views and would create new environmental problems. Cape Wind received all its needed permits in April 2011 yet still collapsed.

In his book Good for You, Great for Me: Finding the Trading Zone and Winning at Win-Win Negotiation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lawrence Susskind explains what went wrong—and how you can do better. Specifically, you don’t have to choose between claiming value or creating value in negotiation. Rather, by using several well-tested negotiation strategies, four discussed here, Susskind explains how you can help the other side benefit from a deal while also claiming substantially more value for yourself.

1. Lead them into the trading zone.
Susskind describes the “trading zone” as that point in a negotiation when parties let down their guard and begin to search for a mutually beneficial agreement. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get there, especially when your aims threaten the status quo.

At such times, organizations often believe the key to win-win negotiation is to enlighten their counterparts about their point of view. Both proponents and opponents of Cape Wind came up with their own evidence to rebut the other side’s claims, for instance.

But one-sided information about a project’s merits comes across as arrogant and oblivious to the other party’s concerns, notes Susskind. A joint fact-finding process provides a better route to value creation and claiming. It begins by engaging negotiators in a collaborative exploration of a project’s feasibility and merits early on, with the help of outside experts, before people take sides. “By agreeing on the information that needs to be gathered, analyzed, and interpreted, the parties can lay the foundation for mutually beneficial negotiation,” writes Susskind.

2. Create more value through trades.
In contrast to how the debate over offshore wind played out in Massachusetts, notes Susskind, the state of Maine took a different tack. It reviewed all potential offshore wind sites before projects were proposed and publicly noted which seemed most promising based on technical, economic, and aesthetic criteria. Perhaps as a result, wind farm proposals in Maine faced far less public opposition than Cape Wind.

Such a process lays a strong foundation for win-win negotiation. First, prepare to present multiple proposals—all of which you value highly—at the same time. Your counterpart’s reactions to these proposals will help you better gauge their preferences. Second, ask lots of questions to directly assess their interests and reveal your own. Third, make hypothetical “What if…” proposals to determine if a trade creates value for both sides, such as “If I offered you a 5% discount on our new product, would that be enough of an incentive for you to switch from our existing product?”

3. Try contingent agreements.
Even parties aiming for win-win negotiation often reach impasse because they have different beliefs about the likelihood of future events. You might be convinced that your firm will deliver a project on time and under budget, for example, but the client may view your proposal as unrealistic.

In such situations, a contingent contract—negotiated “if, then” promises aimed at reducing risk about future uncertainty—allows parties to agree to disagree while moving forward. Contingent commitments often create incentives for compliance or penalties for noncompliance, writes Susskind. You might propose paying specified penalties for turning in your project late or agree to significantly lower your rates if you go over budget, for example.

4. Write Their Victory Speech
You may think you’re striving for a win-win negotiation with one other party, but think again, advises Susskind. Most two-party negotiations are actually multiparty negotiations in disguise because of the “back tables” involved—both your constituents and theirs. These constituents can be a powerful presence, as they must sign off on whatever deal is reached.

Rather than viewing your negotiating partner as an adversary, start looking at them as an important emissary in selling the deal to outsiders. That means supplying them with the arguments they will need to sell an agreement that is best for you. In other words, write your counterpart’s victory speech for them.

The backers of the Cape Wind project failed to write a victory speech that would have allowed their wealthy opponents to demonstrate how the original plan for the wind farm had been modified to ensure lower-priced energy for area residents, avoiding the need for further investments in fossil fuel–powered generating plants and increasing tourism profits.

What other advice do you have for those striving for win-win negotiation in a contentious climate?

Dispute resolution can sometimes take years and lead to costly litigation if opposing sides can’t reach a settlement. The dispute process can become frustrating when you try to be fair and reach efficient settlements, but your counterpart fails to reciprocate. What can you do in a situation where the other party is unreasonable?

Rest assured, you aren’t alone. Most people negotiating in the shadow of the law have this dilemma. Reasonableness on both sides reduces litigation costs and uncertainty, and resolves disputes more efficiently. But when one side is reasonable and the other is not, the reasonable party often suffers. So we need a novel dispute process.

Turning the dispute process in your favor

Reputation is one important part of the puzzle. A party that knows little about your company may think you are being weak rather than reasonable when you make fair proposals. But if you consistently act reasonably, your company’s reputation for fairness will spread, and you will become more convincing.

One underused dispute process that you might turn to is final-offer arbitration (FOA), also known as baseball arbitration. In FOA, each party submits its best and final offer to an arbitrator, who must select either of the two offers and not any other value. Parties cannot appeal the arbitrator’s decision.

An interesting thing happens when parties agree to use FOA: Their offers become reasonable, as they have a strong incentive to deliver the offer that the arbitrator will view as most acceptable. The logic and power of FOA is that the uncertainty it creates leads parties to reach agreement, avoiding arbitration and litigation. In Major League Baseball, for example, teams’ and players’ uncertainty about what an arbitrator might decide typically drives them to reach agreement on contract disputes.

Generally, some institution or prior contract stipulates when and how parties should use FOA, but that doesn’t have to be the case. In most situations, offering FOA to the other side may drive them to behave as reasonably as you do.

Let’s imagine that you are involved in a patent dispute in which the other side has a reasonable claim against your company. Independent experts think that the other company has a 90% chance of prevailing if the case goes to court and that the verdict would likely fall between $750,000 and $1.25 million. Best estimates are that a court case would take three years and that each party would spend about $300,000 to $400,000 in litigation costs. The other side has refused to lower its demand for $5 million. Your firm is prepared to offer $900,000 to settle immediately, but you are concerned that the other side will see this reasonable offer as a sign of weakness.

Consider the following plan. Offer $900,000. When they counter at $5 million or any other unrealistically high offer, ask whether they truly believe that their demand is fair. When they say it is, tell them that you are willing to take your $900,000 offer and their $5 million offer to FOA and have the dispute resolved within the month using expedited procedures.

If they are bluffing, this challenge creates a dilemma for them. They won’t want to go to FOA, as they know your offer is far more reasonable. As a result, they are likely to respond with a much more reasonable offer.

If they take you up on your challenge to use FOA, you should be delighted by the prospect of using a third-party strategy that favors the more reasonable party.

If, however, they refuse FOA and also make no further concession, you have a very good hint that serious negotiation is unlikely in the foreseeable future, and, despite your best efforts at a reasonable dispute process, you are quite likely to end up in court.

Have you had negotiation experiences where your counterpart would not make a reasonable offer?

Q: I often negotiate patent disputes for my company. Resolution of a dispute can take years, and if no settlement is reached, we end up in very costly litigation. I want to be fair to the other side and reach efficient settlements, but I am frustrated when they fail to reciprocate. How can I be fair and effective when the other party is unreasonable?

A: Rest assured, you aren’t alone. Most people negotiating in the shadow of the law have this dilemma. Reasonableness on both sides reduces litigation costs and uncertainty, and resolves disputes more efficiently. But as you’ve found, when one side is reasonable and the other is not, the reasonable party often suffers. So we need a novel approach.

Reputation is one important part of the puzzle. A party that knows little about your company may think you are being weak rather than reasonable when you make fair proposals. But if you consistently act reasonably, your company’s reputation for fairness will spread, and you will become more convincing.

One underused tool that you might turn to is final-offer arbitration (FOA), also known as baseball arbitration. In FOA, each party submits its best and final offer to an arbitrator, who must select either of the two offers and not any other value. Parties cannot appeal the arbitrator’s decision.

An interesting thing happens when parties agree to use FOA: Their offers become reasonable, as they have a strong incentive to deliver the offer that the arbitrator will view as most reasonable. The logic and power of FOA is that the uncertainty it creates leads parties to reach agreement, avoiding arbitration and litigation. In Major League Baseball, for example, teams’ and players’ uncertainty about what an arbitrator might decide typically drives them to reach agreement on contract disputes.

Generally, some institution or prior contract stipulates when and how parties should use FOA, but that doesn’t have to be the case. In your situation, offering FOA to the other side may drive them to behave as reasonably as you do.

Let’s imagine that you are involved in a patent dispute in which the other side has a reasonable claim against your company. Independent experts think that the other company has a 90% chance of prevailing if the case goes to court and that the verdict would likely fall between $750,000 and $1.25 million. Best estimates are that a court case would take three years and that each party would spend about $300,000 to $400,000 in litigation costs. The other side has refused to lower its demand for $5 million. Your firm is prepared to offer $900,000 to settle immediately, but you are concerned that the other side will see this reasonable offer as a sign of weakness.

Consider the following plan. Offer $900,000. When they counter at $5 million or any other unrealistically high offer, ask whether they truly believe that their demand is fair. When they say it is, tell them that you are willing to take your $900,000 offer and their $5 million offer to FOA and have the dispute resolved within the month using expedited procedures.

If they are bluffing, this challenge creates a dilemma for them. They won’t want to go to FOA, as they know your offer is far more reasonable. As a result, they are likely to respond with a much more reasonable offer.

If they take you up on your challenge to use FOA, you should be delighted by the prospect of using a third-party strategy that favors the more reasonable party.

If, however, they refuse FOA and also make no further concession, you have a very good hint that serious negotiation is unlikely in the foreseeable future, and, despite your best efforts to be reasonable, you are quite likely to end up in court.

Max H. Bazerman
Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School
Author of The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See
(Simon & Schuster, forthcoming) 

You’ve probably grown accustomed to seeing people not-so-discreetly checking messages on their smartphones or laptops during meetings. Maybe you’ve even been guilty of this yourself.

Paying more attention to a phone than to the person in front us is clearly rude in most situations. Could it also affect how well we negotiate? Researchers Aparna Krishnan and Terri R. Kurtzberg of Rutgers University and Charles E. Naquin of DePaul University examined this question in a recent study.

The team assigned pairs of graduate business school students to engage in a negotiation simulation between a theater venue and the production company of a touring show. The simulation gave the negotiators opportunities to both claim value for themselves and work with the other side to create additional value. They were told to try to maximize their individual payoffs over the course of the negotiation.

In some of the pairs, one of the negotiators was told to bring his or her cell phone to the negotiation to read confidential e-mails from the instructor about the case. These negotiators received three e-mail messages during the experiment, but the messages repeated only information the participants already had. These negotiators, referred to as “message receivers,” were paired with “onlookers”—people who did not check their phones.

The onlookers performed much better than the message receivers, earning $316,000 on average as compared to the average $236,000 earned by the message receivers. In addition, and perhaps not surprisingly, onlookers judged message receivers to be relatively unprofessional, while message receivers rated their onlooker partners as highly professional. Despite their much better results, onlookers were significantly less satisfied with the outcome of the negotiation than message receivers were, and they also viewed their counterparts as untrustworthy.

The results attest to the extreme difficulty of multitasking in situations such as negotiation that require keen attention and quick thinking. The message is clear: Checking your smartphone during a face-to-face negotiation may cause you to leave money on the table and squander goodwill.

Resource: “The Curse of the Smartphone: Electronic Multitasking in Negotiations,” by Aparna Krishnan, Terri R. Kurtzberg, and Charles E. Naquin. Negotiation Journal, April 2014.

You’ve probably grown accustomed to seeing people not-so-discreetly checking messages on their smartphones or laptops during meetings. Maybe you’ve even been guilty of this yourself.

Paying more attention to a phone than to the person in front us is clearly rude in most situations. Could it also affect how well we negotiate? Researchers Aparna Krishnan and Terri R. Kurtzberg of Rutgers University and Charles E. Naquin of DePaul University examined this question in a recent study.

The team assigned pairs of graduate business school students to engage in a negotiation simulation between a theater venue and the production company of a touring show. The simulation gave the negotiators opportunities to both claim value for themselves and work with the other side to create additional value. They were told to try to maximize their individual payoffs over the course of the negotiation.

In some of the pairs, one of the negotiators was told to bring his or her cell phone to the negotiation to read confidential e-mails from the instructor about the case. These negotiators received three e-mail messages during the experiment, but the messages repeated only information the participants already had. These negotiators, referred to as “message receivers,” were paired with “onlookers”—people who did not check their phones.

The onlookers performed much better than the message receivers, earning $316,000 on average as compared to the average $236,000 earned by the message receivers. In addition, and perhaps not surprisingly, onlookers judged message receivers to be relatively unprofessional, while message receivers rated their onlooker partners as highly professional. Despite their much better results, onlookers were significantly less satisfied with the outcome of the negotiation than message receivers were, and they also viewed their counterparts as untrustworthy.

The results attest to the extreme difficulty of multitasking in situations such as negotiation that require keen attention and quick thinking. The message is clear: Checking your smartphone during a face-to-face negotiation may cause you to leave money on the table and squander goodwill.

Resource: “The Curse of the Smartphone: Electronic Multitasking in Negotiations,” by Aparna Krishnan, Terri R. Kurtzberg, and Charles E. Naquin. Negotiation Journal, April 2014.

Should you make the first offer in a negotiation? In most cases, yes, abundant research suggests. In single-issue negotiations centered on price or another figure, the party who moves first typically benefits by anchoring the discussion on her offer.

A new study by professor David D. Loschelder of Saarland University in Germany and his colleagues identifies an exception to this rule. When parties are negotiating multiple issues, a negotiator who identifies a so-called compatible issue when making the first offer loses the advantage of moving first. A compatible issue is one on which parties have the same preference, such as a recruiter and job candidate who both want the candidate to work in Chicago, not New York.

In one experiment, pairs of participants played CFOs negotiating the sale of a pharmaceutical plant from one company to the other. The participant who made the first offer came out ahead when the offer mentioned only a sale price for the plant.

However, when participants mentioned a compatible issue, namely the date on which the plant would be transferred, the first-offer advantage turned into a disadvantage. Why? Because those who learned that their preferences were compatible on this key issue sometimes took advantage of this information; they pretended they were actually at odds on the issue and used it to extract concessions. This was especially true for negotiators who naturally brought a “proself” (self-focused and competitive) rather than “prosocial” (cooperative and altruistic) attitude to the negotiation.

The results attest to the importance of gathering information prior to negotiating. Try to identify high-priority issues on which you and the other party share the same preferences and then exclude these issues from your first offer—and anchor with confidence.

Resource: “The First-Mover Disadvantage: The Folly of Revealing Compatible Preferences,” by David D. Loschelder, Roderick I. Swaab, Roman Trötschel, and Adam D. Galinsky. Psychological Science, 2014.

It started with Steve Jobs. That’s the story told by the flood of e-mail messages subpoenaed in a class-action lawsuit filed against Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe by 64,613 Silicon Valley software engineers who claim that the companies conspired to keep them from switching employers.

In a February 2005 internal e-mail, Google cofounder Sergey Brin wrote that Jobs (then Apple’s CEO, now deceased) had repeatedly warned him that if he hired particular employees away from Apple, it would mean “war.” A month later, the two companies allegedly reached an informal agreement not to recruit from each other, according to court documents obtained by technology publication PandoDaily. E-mail messages show that after Google made a job offer to a Paris- based Apple employee, for example, it ran the offer by Jobs. After Jobs objected, Google rescinded the offer.

The antipoaching pact eventually expanded to almost 30 firms, including Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm, and spread beyond Silicon Valley to the Ogilvy advertising agency and British media giant NTL, according to the news website AppleInsider.

Under-the-table agreements
Reciprocal hiring bans are illegal in the United States because they artificially suppress wages, competition, and innovation. In 2010, following a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, several Silicon Valley firms agreed to refrain from collusion in their hiring practices.

Some executives say they resisted threats and pressure from Jobs and others. Soon after Sheryl Sandberg left Google to become Facebook’s chief operating officer, for instance, Google executive Jonathan Rosenberg asked her to promise that she would “substantially lower the rate at which you hire people from us,” Reuters reports. Sandberg refused.

At least some executives seem to have believed that the alleged pact was illegal but proceeded with it anyway. In one e-mail, for example, Google CEO Eric Schmidt instructed a colleague to communicate about the policy “verbally since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later,” according to the New York Times.

The employees in the class-action suit maintained that a pact among the four companies being sued resulted in their losing up to $3 billion in wages. The companies, for their part, argued that any hiring bans were never formal and thus did not amount to a conspiracy. The two sides engaged in mediation in the hopes of staying out of court. On April 24, they reportedly settled for about $300 million, widely viewed as a bargain deal for the tech companies.

When ethics fade
The pact, if it did exist, undermines the ethical aspirations of many Silicon Valley firms, as epitomized by Google’s unofficial “Don’t be evil” motto.

Our ethical breaches in negotiation and other business tasks are often unintentional, write Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel in their book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2011). Through the process of ethical fading, we often scrub the moral dimensions of our decisions from our minds. It is not hard to imagine, for example, how Brin and other Google executives may have framed an antipoaching pact first and foremost as a personnel issue rather than an ethical one, especially in light of a significant threat from Jobs.

How can we ensure that we adhere to our moral values during negotiations? Bazerman and Tenbrunsel have several suggestions:
1. Take your time. Research shows that we behave more ethically when we deliberate carefully rather than deciding under pressure.

2. Focus on abstract principles. Look beyond short-term payoffs to consider the values and principles you’d like to guide your decisions— and reconsider them throughout your negotiations.

3. Cultivate alternatives. We’re less susceptible to threats that would compromise our ethics when we have the power to walk away from a negotiation. Improve your likelihood of standing by your values by developing strong alternatives to the current deal.

While a student at Stanford University in the mid-2000s, Kevin Systrom met Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at gatherings on campus. Though Systrom declined Zuckerberg’s proposal that he drop out of school and take a job with Facebook, the two men kept in touch by phone in the years following. After Systrom launched photo-sharing app Instagram in October 2010, Zuckerberg had him over for dinner at his Palo Alto, California, home a few times to discuss “philosophy,” according to Vanity Fair. Zuckerberg wanted to keep an eye on the potential competitor, and, at some point, he says, “it occurred to me we could be one company.”

In April 2012, after Systrom turned down a $500 million offer from Twitter, Zuckerberg invited Systrom over to his home for a long conversation about how Facebook could help take tiny Instagram, which then had only 13 employees, to the next level.

“This never had the feeling of negotiation, because we kind of wanted to work together,” Zuckerberg told Vanity Fair. The discussions quickly led to a $1 billion offer from Facebook and a promise from Zuckerberg to allow Instagram to maintain its independence.

Systrom met with his business partner, Mike Krieger, to review the offer. “I really like Mark, and I really like his company,” Systrom told Krieger. “And I really like what Facebook is trying to achieve.” The pair decided to sell. The entire negotiation had lasted three days.

Forming relationships with the leaders of companies he might want to target is a pattern for Zuckerberg. In 2012, the Facebook chief cultivated a friendship with WhatsApp founder Jan Koum over the course of hikes and dinners. Like Systrom, Koum overcame his initial skepticism about a Facebook acquisition after finding that he and Zuckerberg shared similar views on a host of technology- and business-related issues. In February 2014, Koum agreed to sell his company to Facebook for a staggering $19 billion.

It may not be difficult to form trusting relationships in negotiations where one party is offering the other a huge pile of cash. But Zuckerberg’s strategy of patient relationship building still serves as a model worth emulating for business negotiators.

Forging close bonds typically helps negotiators reach better deals, work together effectively over time, and manage conflict. As the anecdotes about Zuckerberg show, time and patience are critical to forming strong relationships. Here we present some of the challenges to relationship building in negotiation and offer advice to help you address them.

Overcome partisan perceptions
When meeting a new counterpart, we may consciously seek a lasting relationship with him or her, but an unconscious bias may get in the way: partisan perceptions, or the tendency to see our own side as more intelligent, skilled, reasonable, and moral than the other side. Our partisan perceptions can cause us to expect the worst from our counterparts, especially those we don’t know well. They also can become self-fulfilling prophecies, leading us to act in ways that trigger and exacerbate the same behaviors we’ve condemned, write David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius in their book 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). Obviously, that’s not a recipe for a strong relationship.

How can you lay the groundwork for a deep-rooted bond? Consider this anecdote from 3-D Negotiation. Late on a Friday afternoon, a senior partner in a law firm called a talented young associate into his office. The partner asked the associate to represent the plaintiff in upcoming settlement negotiations and, if necessary, a possible trial.

The young lawyer worked all weekend to prepare a compelling plaintiff’s brief. After reviewing the work on Monday morning, the partner praised the associate highly. Then he revealed that the firm would actually be representing the defendant in the case, not the plaintiff. “Now that you completely understand the other side’s viewpoint,” the senior lawyer told the associate, “we need you to prepare our side.” With this “trick,” the senior lawyer prepared his younger colleague to understand the other party and its interests, a critical step in overcoming partisan perceptions.

You might try adapting the senior lawyer’s trick to your own negotiation preparation. That is, consider writing up (or having your team write up) a detailed “brief” for both (or all) sides in an upcoming negotiation. You may find that the brief prepared for your counterpart is underdeveloped and simplistic compared with the brief written for your own side. If so, go back to the drawing board until you feel you have explored the nuances of the other side’s perspective as fully as possible. You might also enlist disinterested third parties to assist you in sorting out your counterpart’s point of view.

Do ask, do tell
Doing deals and forming relationships are not mutually exclusive goals, writes Jeswald W. Salacuse in his book Negotiating Life: Secrets for Everyday Diplomacy and Deal Making (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Negotiators must be keenly aware that the way in which they negotiate will affect their relationship with their counterpart. For example, if you are looking to take time off from work, how you negotiate that leave will affect your relationship with your boss, for better or worse.

Notably, some people are more concerned about the relationship dimensions of negotiations than others. In a survey of negotiators in 12 different countries, Salacuse found that people were more or less evenly split between whether they viewed the primary goal of negotiating to be a contract or a relationship. However, cultural and career differences played a role: Negotiators from India were far more relationship-oriented than those from Spain, for example, and lawyers (perhaps not surprisingly) were more contract- focused than managers and marketers. Such differences hint at the importance of trying to assess the degree to which an individual counterpart is focused on building a strong relationship.

Some negotiators rarely take time to get to know their counterparts, whether due to impatience or a sense that they would be wasting the other party’s time. That’s usually a mistake, writes Salacuse in Negotiating Life. Relationship building— and effective negotiation—require the kind of mutual knowledge that can come only from asking questions and sharing information. That means taking time to explore not only the other party’s interests and motives through questioning but also who she is as a person.

Years ago, during tense negotiations with the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir expressed deep sympathy toward one of the U.S. negotiators, whose wife had recently died. Meir mentioned the pain she had felt upon the death of one of her family members. The brief conversation between the two negotiators established a relationship that dramatically improved the tenor of the negotiation, according to Salacuse. As this example illustrates, asking and telling sends an important message to the other side: You are interesting, important, and valued.

Confronting conflict
Relationships typically become all the more important after a business transaction has been completed. “Once the contract is signed, we put it in the drawer,” executives have told Salacuse repeatedly. “After that, what matters most is the relationship between us and our partner, and we are negotiating that relationship all the time.”

A significant aspect of negotiating ongoing relationships is negotiating conflict. Inevitably, problems arise in the life of a contract: Parties might realize that they neglected to stipulate a key term, leading to differing perceptions of what’s fair, or one side may come to believe that the other is failing to live up to the agreement, for example.

As described in the cover story of this issue, negotiating dispute-prevention clauses in advance can go a long way toward helping you manage conflict productively when it arises. Learning how to discuss areas of conflict, rather than simply sweeping them under the rug, can be just as important. In their book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin, 2010), Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen explain that every tough conversation is made up of three different conversations: the “What happened?” conversation, the “feelings” conversation, and the “identity” conversation.

Keep these three overlapping conversations in mind the next time you are working to get a relationship back on track:

When disagreements arise between parties in a business relationship, each side is likely to blame the other. But arguing about who’s to blame prevents us from finding out what actually happened. So probe to learn what the other person’s intention was, then share your own version of the story. Instead of choosing which story is “right,” embrace them both.

It’s tempting to focus exclusively on solving a problem and ignore the underlying emotions. But when left unaddressed, negative emotions tend to deepen conflict by blocking our ability to listen. Acknowledging your range of complex feelings can promote mutual understanding.

Conflict can shake our sense of identity to the core, causing us to question our competence and worth. It may help to think about which personal hot buttons the conflict is pushing, such as a fear of rejection or a sense of inadequacy. Looking beyond black-and-white identities (“I’m such a pushover”), consider the nuances of your self-image, recognize that everyone makes mistakes, and acknowledge your contributions to the problem.

When parties to a negotiation can’t seem to find common ground, it sometimes seems as if the only solution is “winner take all.”

Consider the decade-long campaign by the backers of the Cape Wind project to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Sound. Led by Jim Gordon of Energy Management Inc., Cape Wind Associates sought approval for the wind farm from dozens of local, state, and federal agencies and organizations.

On its long road to approval, the wind farm became a polarizing source of controversy, though one poll found that only 14% of Massachusetts residents opposed it. Project supporters argue that Cape Wind’s 130 turbines will provide a local source of clean energy for the region. Opponents, mostly a vocal group of wealthy area residents, have complained that the wind farm would ruin scenic views and create environmental problems. Cape Wind finally received all its needed permits in April 2011, but the project still faces legal challenges.

Is there a better way to get what you want out of a negotiation? Of course, writes Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lawrence Susskind in his new book, Good for You, Great for Me: Finding the Trading Zone and Winning at Win-Win Negotiation (PublicAffairs, 2014). Contrary to what negotiators often assume, you don’t have to lean toward either creating value or claiming value. Rather, by using a number of well-tested negotiation moves, five of which we discuss here, Susskind explains how you can help the other side benefit from a deal while also claiming substantially more value for yourself.

1. Lead them into the trading zone.
Susskind describes the “trading zone” as that point in a negotiation when parties let down their guard and begin to search for a mutually advantageous deal. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get there, especially when you or your organization is pursuing a goal that threatens the status quo. In such cases, opposition is typically fierce.

At such times, organizations often believe that the key to winning is to try to enlighten their counterparts about how the proposed goal will further the common good, writes Susskind. For example, both proponents and opponents of Cape Wind came up with their own evidence to rebut the other side’s claims. One spokesperson for the project told National Public Radio that the key to winning approval was to “get in there earlier and educate people” about the value of the project.

This view is flat-out wrong, writes Susskind. When you communicate one- sided information about a project’s merits, you’ll come across as arrogant and oblivious to the other party’s concerns. “By the time the formal regulatory reviews took place, it was impossible to get all the parties in the same room for a civil conversation,” Susskind says of the Cape Wind project.

A joint fact-finding process, described in the sidebar on page 3, provides a better route to value creation and claiming. It begins by engaging negotiators in a collaborative exploration of a project’s feasibility and merits during its earliest stages, with the help of outside experts, before everyone begins taking sides. “By agreeing on the information that needs to be gathered, analyzed, and interpreted, the parties can lay the foundation for mutually beneficial negotiation,” writes Susskind.

Most two-party negotiations are actually multiparty negotiations in disguise because of the “back tables” involved— that is, both your constituents and theirs.

Corporations often use joint fact-finding in negotiations with the public, but the process can be just as useful in private negotiations between companies or even within them. Whenever parties are likely to disagree about the fundamental issues at stake, enlisting outside help for an unbiased view of the facts can be a crucial first step.

2. Create more value through trades.
In contrast to how the debate over offshore wind played out in Massachusetts, notes Susskind, the state of Maine took a different tack. It reviewed all potential offshore wind sites before any projects had been proposed and publicly noted which sites seemed most promising based on technical, economic, and aesthetic criteria. Perhaps as a result, wind farm proposals in Maine have faced far less public opposition than Cape Wind.

As this example suggests, a process that encourages collaboration, such as joint fact-finding, also lays the foundation you need to help you claim more value. Negotiators can draw on several strategies to both create and claim more value, writes Susskind in Good for You, Great for Me. First, prepare to present multiple proposals—all of which you value highly—at the same time. Your counterpart’s reactions to these proposals will help you better gauge his preferences across issues. Second, ask lots of questions to directly assess his interests and reveal your own. Third, make hypothetical “What if…” proposals to determine if a trade genuinely creates value for both sides, such as “If I offered you a 5% discount on our new product, would that be enough of an incentive for you to switch from our existing product?”

3. Try contingent agreements.
In negotiation, it’s common for parties to reach impasse because they have different beliefs about the likelihood of future events. You might be convinced that your firm will deliver a project on time and under budget, for example, but the client may view your proposal as unrealistic.

In such situations, a contingent agreement—negotiated “if, then” promises aimed at reducing risk about future uncertainty—offers a way for parties to agree to disagree while still moving forward. Contingent commitments often create incentives for compliance or penalties for noncompliance, writes Susskind. You might propose paying specified penalties for turning your project in late or agree to significantly lower your rates if you go over budget, for example.

To add a contingent agreement to your contract, begin by having both sides write out their own scenarios of how they expect the future to unfold. Then negotiate expectations and requirements that seem appropriate to each scenario. Finally, include both the scenarios and the negotiated repercussions and rewards in your contract. Now breathe a sigh of relief that, no matter what happens, you should be satisfied with whatever remedies are in place.

4. Write their victory speech.
You may think you’re involved in a negotiation with one other party, but think again, advises Susskind. Most two-party negotiations are actually multiparty negotiations in disguise because of the “back tables” involved— that is, both your constituents and theirs. Though often unseen and unheard, these constituents can nonetheless be a powerful presence in a negotiation, as they must sign off on whatever deal shows up on their desks.

The knowledge that you are making your case not only to the person (or people) in front of you but also to their back table offers a clue to negotiating more effectively. Rather than viewing your negotiating partner as an adversary, start looking at her as an important emissary to her back table. That means supplying her with the arguments she will need to sell an agreement that is best for you to her back table. In other words, write your counterpart’s victory speech for her.

The backers of the Cape Wind project failed in this regard. They never wrote the victory speech that would have allowed their wealthy opponents to show the world how the original plan for the wind farm had been modified to ensure lower-priced energy for area residents, avoiding the need for further investments in fossil fuel–powered generating plants and increasing the profits of the local tourism industry.

5. To prevent disputes, prepare for them.
Just as joint fact-finding can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, a negotiation tool known as dispute prevention could help business partners deal with their differences more productively.

Though dispute prevention is not commonly used in business contracts, the construction industry has relied on it for decades, writes Susskind. Companies entering into construction contracts are eager to avoid delays that could kill a complex multiyear building project. So before work gets under way, the project’s developer, financers, architects, and any other interested parties sign an agreement in which they vow to meet and communicate regularly, monitor progress jointly, and consult with mediators to quickly resolve minor disagreements. Such carefully designed dispute-prevention systems have proven highly effective at warding off serious conflicts and delays.

These days, business negotiators often include clauses mandating the use of dispute-resolution procedures such as mediation or arbitration in their contracts. Yet few put in place the types of detailed safeguards that have been so effective in the construction industry. Why? Perhaps because the lawyers who draft business contracts have little incentive to promote processes that would help parties avoid litigation.

Combining dispute prevention with a contingent agreement can be an effective remedy. For example, you might negotiate a provision to your contract that promises a financial bonus to the other side if they avoid litigation for the life of the contract. Such a clause could give both sides the incentives they need to stay in touch throughout the implementation stage and involve a mediator at the first sign of trouble.