Negotiation advice is often “one size fits all,” yet we approach negotiations with vastly different experiences and traits. How do individual differences in negotiation play out? In one study, Washington University professor Hillary Anger Elfenbein and her colleagues found evidence that individual differences, including personality, accounted for an impressive 49% of the variance in negotiators’ performance and satisfaction.

Negotiators differ in many ways—including their gender, race, and education levels. Here, we look at three other categories of individual differences in negotiation, as described by Elfenbein in a chapter of the Handbook of Research on Negotiation.

1. Personality Differences

Numerous personality traits in negotiation can affect our outcomes. Extroversion, or one’s levels of sociability, assertiveness, and optimism, can be a liability when negotiators are haggling over a single issue such as price, writes Elfenbein. Imagine an outgoing negotiator spilling the beans about their bottom line or enthusing too much about a product they just have to have. By contrast, extroversion is generally an asset in more complex negotiations, where parties can work together to create value—thanks, presumably, to sociable negotiators’ ability to draw out the other side’s interests in conversation.

Negotiators who are in a good mood perform especially well, thanks to their tendency to use cooperative strategies, set higher goals, and exchange information more effectively than others. By contrast, those in a bad mood have difficulty reading their counterparts and are prone to rejecting beneficial offers, though they may be especially focused and vigilant in negotiation—a possible upside.

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Openness, a measure of one’s imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and intellectual curiosity, is associated with higher gains for both parties in multi-issue negotiations. Negotiators who score high in openness are skilled at identifying solutions that benefit both themselves and their counterparts.

Finally, research on personality and negotiation suggests the sense of satisfaction that comes with high self-esteem may lead negotiators to end talks prematurely, believing that they’ve performed as well as they can. Those high in self-esteem also tend to be more pleased with their outcomes than those who are less self-assured.

2. Cognitive, Emotional, and Creativity Differences

Cognitive complexity, or the ability to recognize and integrate multiple perspectives, is a measure of intelligence that is correlated with negotiation success. Individuals who score high in cognitive complexity approach negotiation in a sophisticated manner, seeking out a broad array of information, generating various alternatives, and making accurate predictions. Thus, they are well positioned to reach mutually beneficial agreements in complex negotiations.

Emotional intelligence in negotiation—the ability to appraise, express, regulate, and use emotions at the bargaining table—has received little research attention, but work in other realms suggests that emotionally intelligent negotiators are likely to benefit from this ability. For example, they may be skilled at deciphering their counterparts’ feelings, controlling their own emotions, and defusing tensions, writes Elfenbein.

Creativity, a common individual difference, has been linked to better problem solving in negotiation and “win-win” agreements, though not to better financial outcomes. Finally, negotiators who score high in cultural intelligence, or the capacity to adapt to culturally diverse situations, are particularly skilled at facilitating information sharing and, as a result, reach more integrative agreements than others.

3. Motivational Differences

Our goals and motives affect how we behave at the bargaining table as much as what we see and hear does. Though we approach negotiations with varying goals and motives, overarching drives and needs guide our behavior across situations, according to Elfenbein.

One broad motivational difference among people is the degree to which we are generally concerned for ourselves versus others, a difference with implications for how we negotiate. More specifically, negotiators can be categorized as (1) prosocial, or concerned about both sides’ gains; (2) competitive, or focused on outperforming the other party; or (3) individualistic, or self-focused and indifferent to a counterpart’s outcomes.

Prosocial negotiators have been found to reach better outcomes for both parties than the other groups but only when they set ambitious goals. At the far end of the prosocial spectrum, individuals high in “unmitigated communion” are so concerned about others that they set low goals and ask for little for fear of damaging the relationship.

Can Individual Differences in Negotiation Be Changed?

Clearly, individual differences in negotiation effectiveness do exist. To what degree can you alter aspects of your personality, motives, and other traits to improve your negotiation results? It can be difficult to alter our individual differences in negotiation, but with guidance and practice, it often can be done. For example, highly competitive negotiators frequently reap the benefits of prosocial behavior after learning about the potential upside of working to expand the pie of resources for all. And anxious individuals may be able to calm their fears about negotiation through various practices.

We all can benefit from thinking about how our various traits and quirks could be keeping us from achieving as much as others do. In the end, though, we must carefully analyze what we truly value and pursue it wholeheartedly, even if it seems illogical in the eyes of others.

Which of your own individual differences in negotiation might be helping or harming you?

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Some people learn negotiation skills on the job, in a classroom, or even in a therapist’s office. In the case of Nelson Mandela, however, prison became the ultimate training ground.

“Prison taught him to be a master negotiator,” wrote Bill Keller in his obituary of the legendary activist-turned-president in The New York Times following Mandela’s death on December 5, 2013.

Soon after arriving at South Africa’s brutal Robben Island prison to begin a life sentence, Mandela “assumed a kind of command,” Keller observed. He befriended many of his white captors, introducing them to visitors as “my guard of honor.” He urged younger political inmates to analyze their opponents’ strengths rather than rush into confrontation. And over 27 years of imprisonment, he internalized the strategic value of patience, discipline, and empathy.

Mandela may have refined his negotiation strategy in prison, but he also possessed a rare instinct for leadership. Those of us operating in far less dangerous contexts can still draw powerful lessons from his approach to conflict resolution, coalition management, and moral decision-making in negotiation.

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What Made Nelson Mandela an Effective Negotiator?

Short answer: Mandela combined emotional intelligence, long-term strategic thinking, disciplined patience, and pragmatic flexibility—allowing him to negotiate even in deeply polarized, high-stakes conflicts.

His approach offers practical lessons for:

• Business negotiation
• Political negotiation
• Prolonged conflict resolution
• Leadership in divided organizations

Let’s examine how.

A Hard-Line Position—and the Risks of Rigidity

In the late 1940s, Mandela became active in the African National Congress (ANC), a political organization committed to securing full citizenship rights for Black South Africans under apartheid. As his influence grew, he began questioning the ANC’s reliance on peaceful protest. Without first building internal consensus, he publicly endorsed armed resistance and was censured for breaking with party policy.

Years later, Mandela faced a far more consequential internal divide.

By 1985—23 years into his imprisonment—signs suggested the apartheid regime was weakening. International pressure was mounting. Economic sanctions and trade boycotts were biting. Violence between protestors and police was escalating.

The ANC maintained that it would not negotiate with the government. Mandela himself had previously declared, “Only free men can negotiate.” The government, in turn, insisted it would not negotiate with what it labeled a terrorist organization.

This created what Robert Mnookin describes in Bargaining with the Devil as a classic stalemate: when each side demands major concessions before talks even begin, negotiations freeze and conflict calcifies.

This pattern is common in high-conflict negotiations today—whether in geopolitics, labor disputes, or corporate litigation.

Moving Ahead of the Flock: Leadership in Negotiation

Against this entrenched backdrop, Mandela made a remarkable decision.

Though he had no formal authority to negotiate on behalf of the collectively led ANC, he secretly sent a letter to South Africa’s minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, proposing exploratory talks. Coetsee agreed. These clandestine conversations eventually laid groundwork for a democratic, post-apartheid South Africa.

Mandela later reflected in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, that:

“There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock and go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading people the right way.”

For most business negotiators, bypassing superiors or stakeholders would be reckless. Organizational buy-in is typically essential. Yet Mandela’s metaphor offers a broader lesson about negotiation leadership.

Drawing from childhood memories of tribal council meetings, he wrote that a chief:

“Stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing they are being led from behind.”

In modern negotiation terms, this resembles what David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius call “mapping backward” in 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals—identifying who must say yes and designing a strategy to build support step by step.

Leadership lesson:
Sometimes you lead from the front.
Sometimes you lead from behind.
In either case, coalition-building is strategic, not accidental.

“Hating Clouds the Mind”: Emotional Intelligence in Negotiation

Mandela’s ability to negotiate calmly with adversaries who had imprisoned him remains one of the most studied examples of emotional regulation in leadership.

Asked in 2007 how he kept hatred in check, Mandela replied:

“Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.”

This insight aligns closely with modern research on emotional intelligence in negotiation. Effective negotiators must:

• Regulate their own emotions
• Avoid reactive decision-making
• Read their counterparts’ emotional drivers
• Address underlying identity and status concerns

After his election as South Africa’s first Black president in 1994, Mandela faced violent conflict between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Rather than marginalize Buthelezi, Mandela brought him into the government.

Understanding Buthelezi’s personal insecurities about royal succession within the Zulu nation, Mandela chose what Keller described as a strategy of “loving him into acquiescence”—addressing identity needs rather than escalating political rivalry.

Negotiation insight:
Behind many hard positions lie unmet psychological needs—status, recognition, dignity. Address those, and positions may soften.

Action Over Ideology: When to Negotiate with an Adversary

Mandela was not rigidly ideological. He was pragmatic.

As his colleague Joe Matthews once said, Mandela “was not a theoretician, but he was a doer.”

At times, this meant revising prior positions. After a police massacre of peaceful demonstrators in 1961, Mandela supported armed resistance. Later, he initiated negotiations with the same regime.

He explained that nonviolence had been “not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

This echoes a central dilemma in negotiation ethics:
When should you negotiate with someone you consider morally wrong?

In  Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, Mnookin argues that refusing negotiation on moral grounds can be legitimate—but only after careful cost-benefit analysis. Moral outrage, if unexamined, can cloud strategic judgment.

Mandela’s example suggests that wise negotiators:

• Separate long-term goals from short-term emotions
• Analyze consequences rationally
• Reassess strategy when conditions change
• Remain willing to talk—even when it feels uncomfortable

Key Negotiation Lessons from Nelson Mandela

Mandela’s legacy offers enduring lessons for business leaders, diplomats, and anyone managing high-conflict situations:

• Patience is strategic, not passive.
• Empathy enhances leverage.
• Coalitions require careful internal navigation.
• Emotional discipline strengthens outcomes.
• Negotiation is a tool—not a betrayal of principle.

Which of Mandela’s negotiation skills—patience, empathy, coalition-building, or pragmatic flexibility—would most transform your own negotiations?

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One challenge many negotiators face is the anxiety that surfaces as a deal moves toward closure. Will the process feel fair? Will you get what you need? Or will you risk straining a relationship by coming across as too aggressive—or not confident enough? In these moments, you may notice your palms growing sweaty, your heart rate picking up, and the entire negotiation starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable.

Are there steps you can take to help you feel less anxious when you’re making a deal? We asked Alison Wood Brooks, O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Negotiation, Harvard Business School, to answer the question.

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Making a deal? Discover 4 ways to handle the anxiety and achieve better outcomes

First, it may help to know that you are not alone. Most of us frequently feel anxious in the course of our daily lives. Believe it or not, mundane, low-stakes activities such as making a to-do list, driving to work, or talking to others can make even smart, healthy adults feel nervous. Since even such small triggers can spur anxiety, it makes sense that most people are nervous in high-pressure, interpersonal performance situations such as negotiation and making a deal. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that anxiety is the most commonly experienced emotion before a negotiation, more so than excitement, sadness, calmness, or anger.

Feeling anxious immediately before making a deal or during a negotiation is not ideal. In an effort to alleviate their anxiety, negotiators tend to make decisions that inadvertently harm their performance, such as making low first offers, responding quickly to counteroffers, making steep concessions, and exiting negotiations prematurely.

Not to mention that a case of nerves simply takes the enjoyment out of the negotiation process.

Here are four strategies you can use to help manage your negotiation anxiety and ultimately achieve better outcomes when making a deal:

1. Reframe anxiety as excitement. Many people believe that the best way to cope with anxiety when making a deal is to calm down. But that’s easier said than done, as physiological arousal—your racing heart and sweaty palms—is automatic and very difficult to suppress.

A better strategy when making a deal is to reframe the high arousal associated with anxiety as excitement. In my research, I have identified subtle ways to do so. For example, if someone asks you, “How do you feel about the upcoming negotiation?” you can simply say, “I am excited.” This subtle reframing tactic increases authentic feelings of excitement, which improves subsequent performance on high-pressure tasks such as public speaking and negotiating.

2. Focus on opportunities. Negotiators often focus on the potential threats and negative outcomes of a negotiation, ruminating about all the ways they might fail. This “threat mind-set” leads them to feel anxious, which makes failure more likely. As with most aspects of life, there is a chance that things will go badly in a negotiation, but there is also a chance that things will go quite well. Focus on the opportunities of the negotiation, reflecting on all the ways you can succeed, and you will develop ideas and make decisions that increase the likelihood things will go well.

3. Prepare. Feeling anxious immediately before making a deal or during a negotiation harms performance. By contrast, feeling anxious a week or a month ahead of a negotiation can motivate you to prepare, thanks to a phenomenon called defensive pessimism. Harness your anxious rumination by preparing thoroughly in advance.

4. Build your confidence through practice. In our research, my colleagues and I have found that anxiety temporarily lowers confidence in one’s negotiating ability. If you practice negotiating regularly, your familiarity with and confidence in negotiating will improve, and you will be less susceptible to the harmful effects of anxiety when making a deal.

What other questions do you have about making a deal while struggling with anxiety? Leave a comment below.

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Q: Negotiations make me anxious. In the past year, I negotiated for a car at a dealership, a higher salary at work, a lower price on a piece of furniture at an antiques market, and an important business contract as part of a team. Each time, my palms got sweaty, my heart started to race, and I found the whole process to be unpleasant. I worried that I wouldn’t get what I wanted, I worried about damaging my relationship with the other party, and I worried about appearing incompetent to my peers. What can I do to feel less anxious when I negotiate?

A: First, it may help to know that you are not alone. Most of us frequently feel anxious in the course of our daily lives. Believe it or not, mundane, low-stakes activities such as making a to-do list, driving to work, or talking to others can make even smart, healthy adults feel nervous. Since even such small triggers can spur anxiety, it makes sense that most people are nervous in high-pressure, interpersonal performance situations such as negotiation. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that anxiety is the most commonly experienced emotion before a negotiation, more so than excitement, sadness, calmness, or anger.

As you mentioned, feeling anxious immediately before or during a negotiation is not ideal. In an effort to alleviate their anxiety, negotiators tend to make decisions that inadvertently harm their performance, such as making low first offers, responding quickly to counteroffers, making steep concessions, and exiting negotiations prematurely.

Not to mention that a case of nerves simply takes the enjoyment out of the negotiation process.

Here are four strategies you can use to help manage your negotiation anxiety and ultimately achieve better outcomes:

1. Reframe anxiety as excitement. Many people believe that the best way to cope with anxiety is to calm down. But that’s easier said than done, as physiological arousal—your racing heart and sweaty palms—is automatic and very difficult to suppress.

A better strategy is to reframe the high arousal associated with anxiety as excitement. In my research, I have identified subtle ways to do so. For example, if someone asks you, “How do you feel about the upcoming negotiation?” you can simply say, “I am excited.” This subtle reframing tactic increases authentic feelings of excitement, which improves subsequent performance on high-pressure tasks such as public speaking and negotiating.

2. Focus on opportunities. Negotiators often focus on the potential threats and negative outcomes of a negotiation, ruminating about all the ways they might fail. This “threat mind-set” leads them to feel anxious, which makes failure more likely. As with most aspects of life, there is a chance that things will go badly in a negotiation, but there is also a chance that things will go quite well. Focus on the opportunities of the negotiation, reflecting on all the ways you can succeed, and you will develop ideas and make decisions that increase the likelihood things will go well.

3. Prepare. Feeling anxious immediately before or during a negotiation harms performance. By contrast, feeling anxious a week or a month ahead of a negotiation can motivate you to prepare, thanks to a phenomenon called defensive pessimism. Harness your anxious rumination by preparing thoroughly in advance.

4. Build your confidence through practice. In our research, my colleagues and I have found that anxiety temporarily lowers confidence in one’s negotiating ability. If you practice negotiating regularly, your familiarity with and confidence in negotiating will improve, and you will be less susceptible to the harmful effects of anxiety.

Alison Wood Brooks
Assistant Professor
Harvard Business School

People who believe that they are free of racial bias are often dismayed by their results on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), an online task developed by Anthony G. Greenwald (University of Washington), Brian Nosek (University of Virginia), and Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard University). When required to quickly match African American and white faces with various personal attributes, for instance, many people easily match images of African American faces with negative words (mean, awful) but struggle to match them with positive words (good, peace), a tendency that reverses for white faces. The test purports to reveal the underlying stereotypes that infect our decisions, even without our knowledge. (To take a version of the IAT yourself, visit https://implicit.harvard.edu.)

Could unconscious racial bias affect our decisions in negotiation, and could it cost us real money? To find out, researcher Jennifer T. Kubota of New York University and her colleagues had study participants play the “ultimatum game,” a classic game in which one party, the proposer, is given a sum of money and allowed to decide how much of it to offer to another party, the responder. If the responder accepts the proposer’s offer, each player collects her portion of that offer. If the responder rejects the offer, both walk away empty-handed.

From a rational perspective, responders should accept any offer above $0, as rejection will leave them with nothing. Yet past research shows that responders often irrationally reject low offers out of a desire to punish proposers for unfair treatment.

Quick decisions
The participants in Kubota and colleagues’ study, most of whom were white, played numerous rounds of the ultimatum game in the role of responder. They were told that they were facing a different proposer each round and were shown a photograph of their alleged proposer prior to each trial. The individuals in the photos were all men but of different races. The participants were told that each proposer had $10 to allocate. The proposers (actually, the experimenters) made low offers, ranging from $0 to $3.80, which the responders had to accept or reject within four seconds. After playing the game, participants completed an IAT to determine whether they had an underlying bias against African Americans.

The results showed that, against their own financial interest, participants accepted more offers and lower offers from white proposers than from African American proposers. That is, whether they were aware of it or not, participants sacrificed their own gains in order to discriminate against African Americans. This was true for participants of different races and was most pronounced for those whose IAT results revealed higher implicit racial bias. Interestingly, the overall racial bias of the participants was lower than that of the general population, suggesting that this type of discrimination may be greater in the real world.

Taking it slowly
Fortunately, in negotiation, we rarely need to make decisions as quickly as the participants did in this study. Because speed increases our reliance on intuition, which is often faulty, the findings suggest the importance of taking time to audit our decision making for racial bias. In doing so, we may be able to avoid both discriminating against others and incurring the financial cost that can result.

Resource: “The Price of Racial Bias: Intergroup Negotiations in the Ultimatum Game,” by Jennifer T. Kubota, Jian Li, Eyal Bar-David, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. Psychological Science, 2013

People who believe that they are free of racial bias are often dismayed by their results on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), an online task developed by Anthony G. Greenwald (University of Washington), Brian Nosek (University of Virginia), and Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard University). When required to quickly match African American and white faces with various personal attributes, for instance, many people easily match images of African American faces with negative words (mean, awful) but struggle to match them with positive words (good, peace), a tendency that reverses for white faces. The test purports to reveal the underlying stereotypes that infect our decisions, even without our knowledge. (To take a version of the IAT yourself, visit https://implicit.harvard.edu.)

Could unconscious racial bias affect our decisions in negotiation, and could it cost us real money? To find out, researcher Jennifer T. Kubota of New York University and her colleagues had study participants play the “ultimatum game,” a classic game in which one party, the proposer, is given a sum of money and allowed to decide how much of it to offer to another party, the responder. If the responder accepts the proposer’s offer, each player collects her portion of that offer. If the responder rejects the offer, both walk away empty-handed.

From a rational perspective, responders should accept any offer above $0, as rejection will leave them with nothing. Yet past research shows that responders often irrationally reject low offers out of a desire to punish proposers for unfair treatment.

Quick decisions
The participants in Kubota and colleagues’ study, most of whom were white, played numerous rounds of the ultimatum game in the role of responder. They were told that they were facing a different proposer each round and were shown a photograph of their alleged proposer prior to each trial. The individuals in the photos were all men but of different races. The participants were told that each proposer had $10 to allocate. The proposers (actually, the experimenters) made low offers, ranging from $0 to $3.80, which the responders had to accept or reject within four seconds. After playing the game, participants completed an IAT to determine whether they had an underlying bias against African Americans.

The results showed that, against their own financial interest, participants accepted more offers and lower offers from white proposers than from African American proposers. That is, whether they were aware of it or not, participants sacrificed their own gains in order to discriminate against African Americans. This was true for participants of different races and was most pronounced for those whose IAT results revealed higher implicit racial bias. Interestingly, the overall racial bias of the participants was lower than that of the general population, suggesting that this type of discrimination may be greater in the real world.

Taking it slowly
Fortunately, in negotiation, we rarely need to make decisions as quickly as the participants did in this study. Because speed increases our reliance on intuition, which is often faulty, the findings suggest the importance of taking time to audit our decision making for racial bias. In doing so, we may be able to avoid both discriminating against others and incurring the financial cost that can result.

Resource: “The Price of Racial Bias: Intergroup Negotiations in the Ultimatum Game,” by Jennifer T. Kubota, Jian Li, Eyal Bar-David, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. Psychological Science, 2013

Some people learn to negotiate on the job, in a classroom, or in a therapist’s office. In Nelson Mandela’s case, “prison taught him to be a master negotiator,” writes Bill Keller in his New York Times obituary of the legendary activist-turned-president, who died on December 5 of last year.

Soon after his arrival at South Africa’s brutal Robben Island prison for a life sentence, Mandela “assumed a kind of command,” Keller writes. He befriended many of his white captors, whom he introduced to visitors as “my guard of honor.” He tried to persuade younger political inmates to analyze their opponents’ strengths rather than plunging headlong into conflict. And during his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela deeply absorbed the value of patience, discipline, and empathy.

Mandela may have honed many of his negotiation skills in prison, but he was a natural-born dealmaker. Those of us in less-challenging realms than apartheid-era South Africa can learn from his beliefs, decisions, and actions.

A hard-line position
In the late 1940s, Mandela became active in the African National Congress (ANC), a well-established South African political organization dedicated to securing full citizenship for blacks. As he rose through the ranks and gained influence, Mandela began to question the ANC’s reliance on peaceful protest to make headway. Without vetting his views with ANC leadership, he publicly spoke out in favor of armed resistance, only to be censured for diverging with the organization’s policy.

Decades later, Mandela took a similar approach when making a much more fateful break with the ANC’s party line. In 1985, 23 years into his imprisonment, numerous signs—including international pressure, a devastating trade boycott, and growing violence between protestors and the police—indicated that the apartheid regime was weakening.

The ANC held the stance that it would not negotiate with the South African government. Mandela himself had personally rejected the possibility of negotiation in numerous public statements, once saying, “Only free men can negotiate.” Meanwhile, the government also took a hard line against negotiation with the ANC, believing that to do so would signal weakness.

Both sides insisted they would not negotiate unless each made significant concessions, a “classic problem in prolonged conflicts,” writes Program on Negotiation chair Robert Mnookin in his book Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight (Simon & Schuster, 2010). When each side demands that the other relinquish significant bargaining power before talks even begin, negotiation is unlikely, and conflict calcifies.

Moving ahead of the flock
Given the entrenched stalemate, it was remarkable that Mandela decided to try to launch negotiations between the ANC and the government. Even more strikingly, he had no authority to speak on behalf of the ANC, which was run as a collective.

Believing that his fellow ANC leaders would disagree with his decision, Mandela covertly sent a letter to South Africa’s minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, in which he offered to meet secretly to discuss the possibility of negotiations. Coetsee eventually agreed, and the two men launched clandestine talks that laid the groundwork for a democratic, post-apartheid South Africa.

“There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock,” Mandela wrote of his bold decision in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (Little, Brown, 1994), and “go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading people the right way.”

For most of us, secretly moving forward with a negotiation against the wishes of our superiors and colleagues would be a risky, even foolish move. Business negotiators typically must secure buy-in from others in their organization before breaking from past practice. For such contexts, Mandela, who was raised by a prominent tribal chief, offers another useful shepherding metaphor. As a result of the long hours he spent in childhood listening to the consensus-building conversations of the tribal council, Mandela observed that the chief “stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing they are being led from behind.”

The quote suggests the value of lobbying others in support of your cause, then letting them make your argument to reluctant parties. This is the type of “mapping backward” strategy that David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius elaborate on in their book 3-D Negotiation: Powerful Tools to Change the Game in Your Most Important Deals (Harvard Business School Press, 2006). More broadly, Mandela’s stealth overtures remind us that those who see clearly what others cannot may have a responsibility to use their powers of persuasion to win over naysayers—and to act without them when necessary.

“Hating clouds the mind”
One noteworthy quality of Mandela’s was his ability to negotiate calmly with his enemies at the same time that he was absorbed in a passionate, all-consuming struggle against them.

Asked by Keller in 2007 to explain how he kept his hatred of the regime that had oppressed him and his people in check, Mandela replied, “Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.”

Even as Mandela largely succeeded in regulating his own emotions, his keen sense of empathy enabled him to identify ways to capitalize on the emotions of his counterparts and adversaries.

To take one example, after being elected president of South Africa in 1994, Mandela faced the task of ending violent conflict in the country’s large Zulu nation between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Unlike other ANC members, who demonized Buthelezi, Mandela welcomed him into his new government, a decision that helped to end the violence, writes Keller in the Times.

In an interview, Mandela explained that his peace-building efforts in the Zulu nation were based on a simple insight: Buthelezi, though raised as a member of the Zulu family, was tortured by the fact that he was a nephew rather than a direct successor to the king. By choosing “to love him into acquiescence,” writes Keller, Mandela assuaged Buthelezi’s deep-seated insecurities and won his trust and cooperation in the process.

As described in this issue’s cover story, emotional intelligence is likely to be a valuable skill for negotiators, allowing us to accurately read our counterparts’ emotions, manage our own feelings, and successfully mediate conflict. To cultivate these skills, spend time listening to and observing your fellow negotiators, making note of their insecurities and grievances. Doing so should enable you to address their core concerns, which could have the effect of softening their position on the issues that matter most to you.

Action over ideology
As illustrated by his eventual willingness to negotiate with the apartheid government, Mandela was at heart a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.

“He was not a theoretician, but he was a doer,” a longtime colleague of Mandela’s, Joe Matthews, said of him in an interview with the television show Frontline. “He was a man who did things, and he was always ready to volunteer to be the first to do any dangerous or difficult thing.”

This tendency toward action led Mandela to contradict himself at times, as when he steered the ANC away from nonviolence in favor of armed insurrection in the wake of a police massacre of peaceful demonstrators in 1961. He explained later that his nonviolence rhetoric had been “not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

Mandela’s decision to initiate negotiations with the South African government from prison may serve as the most prominent example of his willingness to change his positions in the service of his greater goals. As Mnookin explains in Bargaining with the Devil, negotiators sometimes face the difficult decision of whether to engage with a person or organization they consider to be morally repugnant. Typically, we choose not to negotiate in such situations, or we allow a dispute to escalate into litigation. Demonizing the other side, we believe we will be tainted by association or that the other party will inevitably take advantage of us.

Not negotiating with an enemy on moral grounds can be a legitimate decision. But because our moral judgments tend to be based on intuition, not reason, they can be dangerous traps. When we take a hard-line stance without thoroughly analyzing the likely costs and benefits of negotiating, we risk allowing our principles to get in the way of the greater good. Wise negotiators follow Mandela’s example and rationally consider whether or not to negotiate.

In July 2012, Google executive Marissa Mayer, a top contender for the position of CEO of Yahoo, had a dazzling interview with the struggling Internet company’s board of directors. Mayer presented a detailed, impressive plan to lead each sector of Yahoo’s business, and she skillfully reassured board members about her perceived weaknesses, reports Bethany McLean in a Vanity Fair profile of Mayer.

The job was Mayer’s for the taking. The board offered her a hefty annual salary of $1 million with a potential bonus of up to $2 million, plus $56 million in restricted stock and options. Interestingly, Mayer reportedly could have purchased more Yahoo stock in exchange for a lower salary, an opportunity that would have “increased her upside dramatically,” according to McLean. But Mayer declined to do so, according to one insider. Why? Because she allegedly wanted to ensure that filings regarding her hiring would show that she would be earning more at Yahoo than she had at Google. A stock purchase might have jeopardized that perception.

“Some CEOs care about money, some care about metrics, some care about toys,” said McLean’s source. “[Mayer] cares about public perception.” Mayer, who had been demoted and marginalized at Google in recent years, may have had a strong desire to convey that she was moving to greener pastures.

Mayer’s calculations illustrate two important truisms about negotiation. First, negotiators are often motivated by more than just objective financial outcomes; factors such as status and fairness concerns can be powerful drivers. (The sidebar on page 2 describes the various factors that affect our satisfaction in negotiation.) Second, as the anonymous source suggested about CEOs, individual negotiators care about very different things, from salary to staffing to prestige. Complicating matters, we bring not only different motivations to the bargaining table but also different abilities and backgrounds.

How do our differences affect our outcomes and satisfaction in negotiation, if at all? To what extent should we try to “correct” our natural tendencies, if that’s even possible? Negotiation researchers have begun to answer these questions, as professor Hillary Anger Elfenbein of Washington University describes in a chapter of the Handbook of Research on Negotiation (Edward Elgar, 2013).

When one size doesn’t fit all
Obviously, negotiation advice isn’t “one size fits all,” though human beings do make similar mistakes as a result of widespread biases such as overconfidence. Some scholars have argued that it’s pointless to study how individual differences affect negotiation outcomes because people may have little, if any, capacity to change enduring facts about themselves, such as their cultural heritage or level of extroversion.

Although some past reviews of negotiation research have concluded that individual differences do not play a significant role in our outcomes and satisfaction, Elfenbein and her colleagues are finding evidence to the contrary. In a study aimed at determining whether people have a personal negotiating style, they had sets of five participants negotiate “round-robin” style, each bargaining with the other four in turn. Individual differences, including personality, accounted for an impressive 49% of the variance in negotiators’ performance and satisfaction. And evidence increasingly suggests that we do have the ability to compensate for at least some of the traits that could be holding us back.

Elfenbein identifies several categories of individual differences and how they affect the objective terms of our deals and our subjective satisfaction. In recent issues of Negotiation Briefings, we have discussed broad-scale differences among negotiators, such as gender, culture, and race. Here we look at three other categories of differences (and a fourth in the sidebar at right) that have been shown to affect how we negotiate.

1. Personality differences
Our tendency to act the same way in similar situations over time—that is, our personality—can be broken down into various components, some of which influence our negotiation outcomes and satisfaction, research finds.

Extroversion, or one’s levels of sociability, assertiveness, and optimism, can be a liability when negotiators are haggling over a single issue such as price, writes Elfenbein. To understand why, imagine an outgoing negotiator spilling the beans about his bottom line or enthusing too much about a product he just has to have. By contrast, extroversion is generally an asset in more complex negotiations, where parties can work together to create value—thanks, presumably, to sociable negotiators’ ability to draw out the other side’s interests in conversation.

Neuroticism, or a person’s overall level of anxiety, depression, worry, and insecurity, has not been linked to differences in negotiators’ economic outcomes, but, not surprisingly, those who score high in neuroticism tend to react more negatively to negotiation. On a related note, negotiators who are in a good mood perform especially well thanks to their tendency to use cooperative strategies, set higher goals, and exchange information more effectively than others. By contrast, those in a bad mood have difficulty reading their counterparts and are prone to rejecting offers that would benefit them. Interestingly, moody negotiators may be especially focused and vigilant in negotiation—a possible positive side effect of a negative trait.

Openness, a measure of one’s imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and intellectual curiosity, is associated with higher gains for both parties in multi-issue negotiations. Negotiators who score high in openness are skilled at identifying solutions that benefit both themselves and their counterparts.

Finally, the sense of satisfaction that comes with high self-esteem may lead negotiators to end talks prematurely, believing that they’ve performed as well as they can. Those high in self-esteem also tend to be more pleased with their outcomes than those who are less self-assured.

2. Intelligence and other abilities
Perhaps the thorniest question related to individual differences and negotiation is the extent to which various measures of intelligence affect our outcomes and satisfaction at the table. Oddly, little research has looked at whether cognitive intelligence, or general mental ability, improves outcomes, though some studies suggest that it helps negotiators create value.

Other abilities have been more closely studied. Cognitive complexity, or the ability to recognize and integrate multiple perspectives, is one measure of intelligence that is correlated with negotiation success. Individuals who score high in cognitive complexity approach negotiation in a sophisticated manner, seeking out a broad array of information, generating various alternatives, and making accurate predictions. Thus they are well positioned to reach mutually beneficial agreements in complex negotiations.

Emotional intelligence—the ability to appraise, express, regulate, and use emotions—has received little attention from negotiation researchers, but work in other realms suggests that emotionally intelligent negotiators are likely to benefit from this ability. For example, they may be skilled at deciphering their counterparts’ feelings, controlling their own emotions, and defusing tensions, writes Elfenbein.

Creativity, a common individual difference, has been linked to better problem solving in negotiation and “win-win” agreements, though not to better financial outcomes. Finally, negotiators who score high in cultural intelligence, or the capacity to adapt to culturally diverse situations, are particularly skilled at facilitating information sharing and, as a result, reach more integrative agreements than others.

3. Motivational differences
As Vanity Fair’s account of Marissa Mayer’s salary negotiation with Yahoo suggests, our goals and motives affect how we behave at the bargaining table as much as what we see and hear does. Though individuals approach negotiations with varying goals and motives, we do have overarching drives and needs that guide our behavior from one situation to the next, according to Elfenbein.

One broad motivational difference among people is the degree to which we are generally concerned for ourselves versus others, a difference that has striking implications for how we negotiate. More specifically, negotiators can be categorized as (1) pro-social, or concerned about both sides’ gains; (2) competitive, or focused on outperforming the other party; or (3) individualistic, or self-focused and indifferent to a counterpart’s outcomes. Pro-social negotiators have been found to reach better outcomes for both parties than the other groups, but only when they set ambitious goals. At the far end of the pro-social spectrum, individuals high in “unmitigated communion” are so concerned about others that they set low goals and ask for little for fear of damaging the relationship.

A time to change?
We’ve looked at various individual differences that can improve or worsen your negotiation outcomes and satisfaction. Perhaps you’ve identified traits that may have helped you in your career and personal life, whether you knew it or not. And you may also have spotted some qualities that could be keeping you from performing at your best.

To what degree can you alter aspects of your personality, motives, and other traits to improve your negotiation results? It can be quite difficult for negotiators to change their natural tendencies, but with proper guidance, practice, and discipline, it often can be done. For example, highly competitive negotiators often reap the benefits of pro-social behavior after learning about the potential upside of working to expand the pie of resources for all.

Women negotiators often overcome a common reluctance to negotiate for a higher salary when they discover how much money they could be passing up over the course of their careers. And a painfully shy individual may be able to reduce his anxiety about negotiation by engaging in the practices recommended by our Negotiation Coach for this month, Alison Wood Brooks. (See page 8.)

Beyond comparisons
To what extent should we even want to change certain aspects of ourselves, if we could? Returning to Marissa Mayer’s job negotiation, her reported desire to enhance her status in the eyes of others might have cost her millions of dollars. To some that would be a foolish choice, but given Mayer’s wealth, she might have viewed it as an acceptable tradeoff.

This leads us back to the anonymous quote about CEOs wanting different things. We can all benefit from thinking about how our various traits and quirks could be keeping us from achieving as much as others do. In the end, though, we must carefully analyze what we truly value and then pursue it wholeheartedly, even if it seems illogical in the eyes of others.

As the lead negotiator in 18 months of top-secret talks with Iran over its nuclear program, State Department Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman found herself negotiating as if through a dark screen. Rather than dealing directly with Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, the United States delegation led by Sherman was assigned to interact with Iran’s American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the New York Times reports.

During the course of the discussions, it remained unclear exactly how much negotiating authority Zarif possessed, if any. “We are only going to find out by testing him,” Sherman said. She found the drawn-out process of “signal-sending” with Iran frustrating, the Times reports.

Most of us have had the experience of doubting a counterpart’s ability to make decisions on behalf of his organization. Fortunately, business negotiators typically have more options than Sherman did to improve the situation. Here are three guidelines:

1. Clarify your counterpart’s authority. Before you negotiate, ask your counterpart (and her superiors if necessary) to clarify the extent to which she is empowered to make proposals and commitments on behalf of her organization. Though negotiators often must clear significant decisions with their higher-ups, your counterpart should at least know the subject matter of the negotiation well enough to be able to make provisional commitments. Be willing to reveal your own negotiating mandate in return.

2. Consider adding players. Before or during the negotiation process, it may become apparent that your counterpart was appointed not because of his qualifications but because of his lack of them—that is, out of a deliberate intention to obfuscate or mislead. If you believe this to be the case, ask to bring in someone who has more relevant expertise and greater decision-making authority.

3. Know when to walk away. Suppose your efforts to bring a more knowledgeable negotiator to the table fail. At this point, it may be time to deal with a different organization. What if you are unable to cultivate good outside alternatives to further your objectives? Try to build relationships with others in your counterpart’s organization with the goal of working around the obstacle and building a coalition that will support your proposals.