What is the divide-and-conquer strategy in team negotiation? When negotiating with a team, you may be able to increase your own bargaining power by capitalizing on differing preferences, goals, or opinions within the other side’s team.

Key Insights

• The core concept: You can make a team negotiation more manageable when you identify and capitalize on areas of disagreement within the other side’s team.
• A unified front versus fractured alliances: Understanding how internal misalignment affects overall bargaining power is critical to effective team negotiation.
• The strategy: Reframe contentious issues to highlight differences in your opponents’ individual interests, thereby breaking down their internal cohesion.

Table of Contents

Playing Offense

A Divide-and-Conquer Case Study

Playing Defense

How Can You Implement a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy in Team Negotiation?

Navigating the Divide-and-Conquer Strategy

Team Negotiation FAQs

In team negotiations, dealing with a unified group on the other side of the table can seem like an overwhelming challenge. You may be able to make the task more manageable by implementing a classic “divide-and-conquer” strategy. This means looking for ways to fracture the other side’s internal alliances and thus reduce their collective bargaining power.

The divide-and-conquer strategy is rooted in the observation that when members of a negotiating team spend resources fighting one another, they will have fewer resources to use against their opposition, writes Griffith University senior lecturer Larry Crump in an article in the Negotiation Journal. A divide‐and‐conquer strategy can be particularly beneficial in distributive negotiations involving a single issue.

Crump identifies reframing as a useful tool when deploying the divide-and-conquer strategy. By intentionally changing the frame of a significant dealmaking issue, you may be able to compel individual members on the opposite team to reevaluate their shared goals. When negotiators realize their individual interests no longer perfectly align with those of their team, internal unity breaks down. This internal conflict can shift the balance of power toward your side in the team negotiation.

Related to the biblical saying “a house divided against itself shall not stand,” the divide-and-conquer strategy is most relevant to competitions, contests, and distributive negotiations where each side is trying to “win.” In integrative negotiations, where you are trying to build a long-term relationship, it should be used more cautiously.

The takeaway: Instead of treating your opponent in a team negotiation like a single monolithic entity, look for differences within the team that could help you increase your own bargaining power.

Playing Offense

Divide and conquer can be an effective team negotiation strategy when you see value in negotiating with one faction on a counterpart’s negotiation team to the exclusion of others, exploiting differences between allied parties, or sowing discord among counterparts.

Here are a few hypothetical negotiating examples:

• You are a developer facing a neighborhood committee that’s opposed to your proposed new building. Knowing the group is split over green space and traffic concerns, you offer to include a community garden. The green space advocates drop their resistance, fracturing the committee’s unified front.
• A teenager determines that his parents have different views about his curfew, despite their attempts to present a united front. When alone with his father, the teen asks for permission to stay at a cast party past curfew that weekend.
• You are selling software to a joint marketing and finance committee. Knowing finance wants to cut costs, you offer marketing a free trial of your premium features. Once hooked, the marketing team fights their own finance department to approve your deal.

The key to implementing a divide-and-conquer strategy is to recognize that the interests and preferences of negotiation team members are often misaligned. For example:

• One member might prioritize a personal financial incentive, like a commission or bonus, over their company’s broader goals.
• One member may value building a long-term partnership with you, while their colleague just wants a fast and profitable transaction.
• One member might have hidden friction or a rivalry with their own teammate, making them less committed to a unified strategy.

When you are having difficulty getting what you want, think about whether you can use such differences to your advantage.

The takeaway: The interests of negotiation team members are almost never perfectly aligned. Analyze possible differences that you might be able to use to your advantage.

A Divide-and-Conquer Case Study

The divide-and-conquer strategy can be particularly relevant to complex dealmaking situations. In his Negotiation Journal article, Crump offers a negotiation case study: 1992 negotiations surrounding the sale of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

In December 1991, Jeff Smulyan, the Mariners’ owner, put the team up for sale. To increase the odds that new owners would keep the team in Seattle, the team’s stadium lease legally required Smulyan to only consider possible bidders who were based in Seattle for the first 120 days of the sale.

Japanese video game manufacturer Nintendo, whose North American operations were headquartered near Seattle, formed a group, known as the Baseball Club of Seattle (BCS), to bid on the team. To try to minimize concerns about foreign ownership, Nintendo included Seattle businesspeople in the group. Major League Baseball (MLB) owners were divided on whether to consider their offer. Some team owners viewed BCS as foreign-led and therefore unacceptable. Other owners (along with many media editorials) criticized this position as xenophobic.

MLB leadership was stymied by infighting on the issue. Meanwhile, BCS maintained a highly disciplined and cohesive front. The group’s leaders and their advisors dedicated long hours to organizing and executing their financial, legal, organizational, and public relations strategies, according to Crump.

This meticulous organization enabled BCS to identify cracks in the MLB ownership group. By strategically reframing the debate from “foreign ownership” to “local operational control,” BCS empowered the more pragmatic MLB owners to block the hard-liners from within. Ultimately, this MLB faction pressured the remaining holdouts to capitulate, and the sale was approved unanimously.

The takeaway: Through careful preparation and reframing of contentious issues, you may be able to turn a supposedly unified opposition against itself.

Playing Defense

How can you keep a counterpart from dividing and conquering your own negotiation team? Here are three negotiation skills to master:

1. Prepare thoroughly. As seen in the Mariners sale, the more time your team spends preparing to negotiate, the more united you’ll remain. So, before negotiations begin, devote ample time to discussing key issues, assigning roles and tasks based on skills, and planning the process. Choose an overarching goal that will drive your negotiation strategy, such as reaching a deal that will contribute to your organization’s long-term health. In addition, decide on fairness standards and decision-making rules for your group.
2. Anticipate conflict. Don’t assume your team will rise above any internal conflict that emerges. Discuss in advance how you will head off or cope with conflict. Set regular times for the group to meet privately during the negotiation to discuss progress and potential wedge issues. Commit to discussing openly and respectfully any differences that arise.

3. Manage alliances. Because internal coalitions can sink a negotiating team, it’s important to be on the lookout for alliances that may develop. Crump recommends assigning a “link person” to be responsible for building and strengthening ties across team members. You should also consider financial and career incentives that could distract individual members from the group’s larger goals—and consider how to minimize them.

The takeaway: To keep your own team unified, engage in rigorous preparation, conflict management, and alliance building.

How Can You Implement a Divide-and-Conquer Strategy in Team Negotiation?

• Identify individual motivations: Look closely at the opposing team members to spot differing personal incentives, such as one person wanting a financial bonus and another wanting a fast resolution.

• Reframe the debate: Shift the focus to an issue where you know the opposing team members have conflicting views.

• Target likely supporters: Approach receptive members on the other side to motivate them to challenge those who disagree with them.

Navigating the Divide-and-Conquer Strategy

Team Negotiation FAQs

What is the divide-and-conquer strategy in team negotiation?

It’s a tactic used to increase your bargaining power by identifying disagreements, differing preferences, or misaligned goals within an opposing negotiation team.

How can I protect my own team from being divided?

Protect your team by preparing extensively before talks begin, anticipating potential internal conflicts, and assigning a member to monitor and strengthen your internal alliances.

When should I avoid using a divide-and-conquer strategy?

Be cautious about using this strategy if your aim is to build long-term trust and collaborative relationships, as intentionally sowing discord can damage future partnerships.

How have you used or defused the divide-and-conquer strategy in team negotiation?

In dealmaking, the parties at the table are often laser-focused on each other’s positions and interests—but if they fail to account for potential deal spoilers, their negotiations may be doomed from the start. That was the key lesson from a U.S. government negotiation case study from September 2017.

At the time, the clock was ticking for Congress. President Donald Trump had just announced he would begin phasing out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in six months. The Obama-era policy had protected from deportation roughly 800,000 people who were brought to the United States illegally as children.

Republican and Democratic members of Congress seeking permanent protections for the so-called Dreamers faced a March 2018 deadline to pass an immigration bill. They would need to not only negotiate a bipartisan agreement, but stop opponents from blocking it.

A Public Display of Harmony

Talks took off on January 9, 2018, when Trump convened a White House meeting with members of Congress who had been active on immigration and then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

Typically, presidents allow the news media to observe the first few minutes of such meetings “to record the traditional platitudes before being kicked out,” writes Peter Baker in the New York Times. This time, however, Trump allowed the media to stay and record the first hour of the negotiating session.

The meeting, broadcast on television and online, offered the public a rare glimpse of Washington dealmaking.

Trump discussed with members of Congress which immigration-related issues to include in their deal. Given their tight deadline, most preferred a narrow bill covering just three issues: (1) protections for Dreamers; (2) beefed-up border security, including Trump’s campaign promise of a border wall between the United States and Mexico; and (3) efforts to reduce immigration based on family ties.

Surprisingly, given his anti-immigrant rhetoric during the presidential campaign, Trump said he was open to including more comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the undocumented. He also expressed willingness to soften his past demands for a border wall. “I’ll take the heat, I don’t care,” he said.

“When this group comes back, hopefully with an agreement . . . I’m signing it,” he added. “I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room.”

Shooting for the Moon

Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein then made a bold proposal to Trump: “What about a clean DACA bill now?” She was asking for a bill on a single, Democratic-favored issue—protections for Dreamers—with no other issues on which Republicans could negotiate concessions, such as border security.

“I have no problem [with that],” Trump responded. “We’re going to do DACA, and then we can start immediately on the phase two, which would be comprehensive [reform].”

No doubt alarmed, Republican Senator and Trump ally Kevin McCarthy interjected: “Mr. President, you need to be clear, though. . . . We have to have security. . . .”

“I think what we’re all saying is we’ll do DACA and we can certainly start comprehensive immigration reform the following afternoon,” Trump said.

Feinstein suggested postponing the security issue. McCarthy then reiterated his support for three-pronged talks on DACA, border security, and chain migration. Trump added a fourth issue: replacing the annual random lottery for 50,000 U.S. visas with merit-based visas for immigrants from underrepresented countries. Feinstein didn’t press her case further.

The Gang of 6 Reaches a “Peachy” Deal

Trump’s collegial tone throughout the meeting left many of the lawmakers feeling upbeat. “There’s a path forward,” Republican Senator John Thune told reporters. “Everybody wants, eventually, to get to yes.”

The Senate’s so-called Gang of 6, a bipartisan working group that included Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, splintered off for dealmaking.

Within two days, they had reached an “agreement in principle” according to Republican Senator and group member Jeff Flake. It included the following deal terms:

·         Dreamers would be given a 12-year path to citizenship, but their parents would not be eligible to become citizens.

·         The deal would allocate $2.7 billion for border security, including Trump’s requested $1.6 billion for a border wall.

·         The Democrats agreed to a request from Trump to replace the current annual random lottery for 50,000 U.S. visas with merit-based visas given to immigrants from underrepresented countries.

“It’s all peachy,” Flake told reporters, according to Vox. Durbin and Graham visited the Oval Office that morning to brief Trump on the deal.

The Mood Sours

But at the White House, Durbin and Graham got an unwelcome surprise. Trump had invited several Republican senators who were immigration hard-liners to the meeting, including McCarthy and Tom Cotton. Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly objected to the draft agreement and were trying to scotch it.

Trump’s mood had darkened since the public White House confab. He rejected the bipartisan deal, saying it didn’t include enough money for a border wall. He also insulted African countries using vulgar language. Immigrants from countries such as Norway should be admitted instead, he said.

Graham and Durbin left feeling shaken. Negotiations to protect the Dreamers were in tatters.

An Unresolved Issue

Federal courts and a 2020 Supreme Court ruling prevented Trump’s immediate cancellation of DACA. President Biden issued an executive order to preserve the policy in 2021. During the second Trump administration, DACA has been trapped in ongoing litigation. While federal court rulings have prevented the approval of new DACA applications, existing DACA recipients generally have been able to renew their status while awaiting court rulings.

Had the 2017 negotiations succeeded, Congress and Trump could have resolved the issue. Instead, years later, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers remain in legal limbo.

What Can We Learn from a Dealmaking Failure?

The Gang of 6’s bipartisan dealmaking on immigration reform did not succeed. Nonetheless, they offer negotiation skills and strategies to learn from:

• Negotiate the scope of talks. In negotiation, having an array of issues on the table offers opportunities to create value through trade-offs. On the other hand, you may need to narrow the scope to ensure agreement, especially when trust is low and deadlines are tight. Look for the sweet spot between complexity and simplicity.
• Weigh the costs and benefits of going public. Public negotiations create room for grandstanding and thus can be more contentious than private ones. But the opposite can be true when negotiators want to seem conciliatory and reasonable. Before negotiating publicly, consider whether cooperation or competition is more likely.
• Try shooting for the moon. Feinstein’s request for a single-issue negotiation on Dreamer protections was unlikely to succeed, but it was worth a try. A big “ask” can serve as an anchor that pulls the discussion in your desired direction.
• Include potential deal blockers. The Gang of 6’s deal was thwarted by hard-line voices on immigration. It’s a reminder that outsiders may rebel if they feel excluded from dealmaking. You should either try to give them input into negotiations or find ways to defuse their influence. A side deal on an issue they care about might persuade them to accept your plans.

What techniques have you used in dealmaking to defuse potential spoilers?

In a negotiation case study from 2018, the question of fairness in negotiation loomed large.

After actor Kevin Spacey faced accusations of sexual misconduct in late 2017, director Ridley Scott and Imperative Entertainment, the company that produced and financed the film All the Money in the World, decided to edit Spacey out of the film and hire Christopher Plummer to reshoot his scenes. The cast and crew were summoned back to reshoot scenes as well.

On January 8, 2018, the news broke that actress Michelle Williams had been paid only about $80 per day, just above the union minimum, for 10 days of reshoots—and that her costar, Mark Wahlberg, had received about $1.5 million more than she had for his own reshoots.

The pay difference was reported as an example of gender pay inequities in Hollywood and beyond. The disparity seemed ironic, given that the reshoots had been instigated by the #MeToo movement set off by sexual harassment charges against film producer Harvey Weinstein. But, as it turns out, this negotiation case study was a bit more complicated.

A Tale of Two Contracts

Typically, actors have clauses in their contracts that require them to be available for reshoots. When asked to return for a reshoot, Williams quickly agreed, given the circumstances, according to the website The Wrap. Over Thanksgiving weekend, she flew to London and spent 10 days refilming for relatively little money, despite having agreed to appear in the film for less than her standard fee. Actor Timothy Hutton and other actors in the film reportedly also agreed to return for reshoots for minimum pay.

“I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me,” Williams told USA Today. “And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”

By contrast, Wahlberg balked at taking part in reshoots. He had shot more scenes with Spacey’s character than Williams had and thus had more scenes to reshoot. Like Williams, Wahlberg was earning less than his going rate on the film and was not pleased to be called in for more work at relatively low pay, the New York Times reports. An action star, he’d already seen the producers capitalize on his reputation as a box-office draw when financing the film.

A clause in Wahlberg’s All the Money in the World contract gave him approval over costars, and he used that as dealmaking leverage: He refused to approve Plummer unless the producers paid him $1.5 million for reshoots, according to USA Today.

The film’s theatrical release was just a month away; there was no time to waste. Imperative felt it had little choice but to pay Wahlberg his requested $1.5 million for the reshoots.

Learning from a Negotiation Case Study

Ultimately, Wahlberg gave the troubled story a happy ending, or at least one that allowed the controversy to die down: He announced that he would donate, in Williams’s name, the $1.5 million he earned for reshoots to the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which women in the entertainment industry established to help victims of sexual harassment find justice in court. “I 100% support the fight for fair pay,” Wahlberg tweeted.

Here are three guidelines to emerge from the negotiation case study:

• Factor in fairness perceptions. If a negotiator finds out that you gave someone they consider to be their peer a better deal, they are likely to feel mistreated. Anticipate that salary and other data may not remain private in the course of your negotiations. Strive for equity, and make sure you have clear justifications for any discrepancies that may emerge.
• Use time to your advantage. When issuing their demand on reshoots, Wahlberg and his agent took advantage of the time pressure the filmmakers were facing. Negotiation deadlines can be an oft-overlooked source of leverage.
• Try a generous gesture. If you’re facing negative PR after a negotiation outcome, try reframing the conversation by doing a good deed that tries to rectify the situation, as Wahlberg did with his donation.

What other lessons do you take away from this negotiation case study?

“Rocket Man.” “Little Marco.” “Crooked Hillary.” “Sloppy Steve.”

These are just a few of the mocking nicknames that President Donald Trump has given to his perceived rivals. Trump seems to have a penchant for trash talk—which psychologists define as boastful comments about oneself or insulting comments about an opponent delivered before or during a competition—but he’s not the only one.

In the 1960s, boxing great Muhammad Ali elevated trash-talking to an art form. “He’s too ugly to be world champion,” he said of rival Sonny Liston. “The world champ should be pretty like me!” And before defending his title against Floyd Patterson in 1965, Ali said, “I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on!”

Trash talk isn’t limited to the competitive realms of politics and sports. In a survey of office workers from Fortune 500 companies, Georgetown University professor Jeremy Yip and his colleagues found that 61% recalled hearing or engaging in boastful or insulting comments at work within the prior three months.

Moreover, people tend to believe that trash talk is an effective means of intimidating competitors. In a pilot study, Yip and his team found that individuals who were asked to imagine sending a trash-talking message, as compared to a neutral message, to someone with whom they were competing against on an online task expected the competitor to be more distracted and less motivated when working on the task.

Is the intuition that talking trash harms our competitors’ performance correct? Yip and colleagues explored
this and related questions in a recent set of experiments.

Up to the challenge

In their first experiment, the researchers had pairs of participants chat online with one another for two minutes about whatever they liked. Next, the participants were told they would compete against their partner on an online task for a $1 bonus (on top of the $10 they were each being paid for participating). The participants then received a message purported to be from their partner. The message was either neutral—“Let’s see what happens,” etc.—or contained trash talk: “You’re definitely going to lose,” “I’m smarter than you,” etc.

Participants who had been taunted with trash talk performed significantly better on a routine online task than those who had not been taunted, the results showed. Those confronted by trash talk experienced a greater sense of rivalry with their opponent, which motivated greater effort and accuracy.

A destructive impulse

Trash talk appears to motivate people not only to do well for themselves but also to punish their counterparts. In an experiment that unfolded similarly to the one described above, Yip and his team told participants they had performed better than their opponent in an online task and thus could choose how to allocate the bonus money: they could either take 75 cents and their opponent would get 60 cents, or they could take 60 cents and their opponent would get nothing. Among participants who had faced a trash-talking opponent, 19% chose to punish their opponent and sacrifice a bit of money for themselves. By comparison, none of the participants who received a neutral message chose penalizing the opponent over maximizing personal outcomes.

In another experiment, participants were more likely to cheat on a task when facing a trash-talking competitor than when facing a competitor who didn’t trash-talk. And in another experiment, participants were less likely to come up with a creative solution to a task when their opponent trash-talked.

If you can’t say something nice …

Overall, the results of these experiments challenge our intuition on trash talk. Rather than intimidating an opponent to the point that the opponent’s performance suffers, trash talk appears to motivate targets to work harder and better at competitive tasks, both for their own sake and to punish the trash talker. The findings should serve as cautionary not only to politicians and athletes who include trash talk in their arsenal of competitive strategies but also to salespeople and other business negotiators who may be tempted to try to get the best of competitors by putting them down or boasting. 

Resource: “Trash-Talking: Competitive Incivility Motivates Rivalry, Performance, and Unethical Behavior,” by Jeremy A. Yip, Maurice E. Schweitzer, and Samir Nurmohamed. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2017

“Rocket Man.” “Little Marco.” “Crooked Hillary.” “Sloppy Steve.”

These are just a few of the mocking nicknames that President Donald Trump has given to his perceived rivals. Trump seems to have a penchant for trash talk—which psychologists define as boastful comments about oneself or insulting comments about an opponent delivered before or during a competition—but he’s not the only one.

In the 1960s, boxing great Muhammad Ali elevated trash-talking to an art form. “He’s too ugly to be world champion,” he said of rival Sonny Liston. “The world champ should be pretty like me!” And before defending his title against Floyd Patterson in 1965, Ali said, “I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on!”

Trash talk isn’t limited to the competitive realms of politics and sports. In a survey of office workers from Fortune 500 companies, Georgetown University professor Jeremy Yip and his colleagues found that 61% recalled hearing or engaging in boastful or insulting comments at work within the prior three months.

Moreover, people tend to believe that trash talk is an effective means of intimidating competitors. In a pilot study, Yip and his team found that individuals who were asked to imagine sending a trash-talking message, as compared to a neutral message, to someone with whom they were competing against on an online task expected the competitor to be more distracted and less motivated when working on the task.

Is the intuition that talking trash harms our competitors’ performance correct? Yip and colleagues explored
this and related questions in a recent set of experiments.

Up to the challenge

In their first experiment, the researchers had pairs of participants chat online with one another for two minutes about whatever they liked. Next, the participants were told they would compete against their partner on an online task for a $1 bonus (on top of the $10 they were each being paid for participating). The participants then received a message purported to be from their partner. The message was either neutral—“Let’s see what happens,” etc.—or contained trash talk: “You’re definitely going to lose,” “I’m smarter than you,” etc.

Participants who had been taunted with trash talk performed significantly better on a routine online task than those who had not been taunted, the results showed. Those confronted by trash talk experienced a greater sense of rivalry with their opponent, which motivated greater effort and accuracy.

A destructive impulse

Trash talk appears to motivate people not only to do well for themselves but also to punish their counterparts. In an experiment that unfolded similarly to the one described above, Yip and his team told participants they had performed better than their opponent in an online task and thus could choose how to allocate the bonus money: they could either take 75 cents and their opponent would get 60 cents, or they could take 60 cents and their opponent would get nothing. Among participants who had faced a trash-talking opponent, 19% chose to punish their opponent and sacrifice a bit of money for themselves. By comparison, none of the participants who received a neutral message chose penalizing the opponent over maximizing personal outcomes.

In another experiment, participants were more likely to cheat on a task when facing a trash-talking competitor than when facing a competitor who didn’t trash-talk. And in another experiment, participants were less likely to come up with a creative solution to a task when their opponent trash-talked.

If you can’t say something nice …

Overall, the results of these experiments challenge our intuition on trash talk. Rather than intimidating an opponent to the point that the opponent’s performance suffers, trash talk appears to motivate targets to work harder and better at competitive tasks, both for their own sake and to punish the trash talker. The findings should serve as cautionary not only to politicians and athletes who include trash talk in their arsenal of competitive strategies but also to salespeople and other business negotiators who may be tempted to try to get the best of competitors by putting them down or boasting. 

Resource: “Trash-Talking: Competitive Incivility Motivates Rivalry, Performance, and Unethical Behavior,” by Jeremy A. Yip, Maurice E. Schweitzer, and Samir Nurmohamed. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2017

After actor Kevin Spacey faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct in late 2017, director Ridley Scott and Imperative Entertainment, the company that produced and financed the film All the Money in the World, decided to edit Spacey out of the film and hire Christopher Plummer to reshoot his scenes. The cast and crew were summoned back to reshoot scenes as well.

On January 8, the news broke that actress Michelle Williams had been paid only about $80 per day, just above the union minimum, for 10 days of reshoots—and that her costar, Mark Wahlberg, had received about $1.5 million more than she had for his own reshoots.

The pay difference was reported as a further example of gender pay inequities in Hollywood and beyond. The disparity seemed ironic, given that the reshoots had been instigated by the #MeToo movement set off by sexual harassment charges against producer Harvey Weinstein. But the story that soon emerged was a bit more complicated.

A tale of two contracts

Typically, actors have clauses in their contracts that require them to be available for reshoots. When asked to return for a reshoot, Williams quickly agreed, given the circumstances, according to the website The Wrap. After arranging for her daughter to spend Thanksgiving weekend without her, she flew to London on an overnight flight and spent 10 days refilming for relatively little money, despite the fact that she had agreed to appear in the film for less than her standard fee. Actor Timothy Hutton and other actors in the film reportedly also agreed to return for reshoots for minimum pay.

“I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me,” Williams told USA Today. “And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”

By contrast, Wahlberg balked at taking part in reshoots. He had shot more scenes with Spacey’s character than Williams had and thus had more scenes to reshoot. Like Williams, Wahlberg was earning less than his going rate on the film and was not pleased to be called in for more work at relatively low pay, the New York Times reports. An action star, he’d already seen the producers capitalize on his reputation as a box-office draw when financing the film.

A clause in Wahlberg’s All the Money in the World contract gave him approval over costars, and he used that as leverage: He refused to approve Plummer unless the producers paid him $1.5 million for reshoots, according to USA Today.

The film’s theatrical release was just a month away; there was no time to waste. Imperative felt it had little choice but to pay Wahlberg his requested $1.5 million for the reshoots.

A satisfying resolution

Ultimately, Wahlberg gave the troubled story a happy ending, or at least one that allowed the controversy to die down: he announced that he would donate, in Williams’ name, the $1.5 million he earned for reshoots to the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which women in the entertainment industry recently established to help victims of sexual harassment find justice in court. “I 100% support the fight for fair pay,” Wahlberg tweeted.

Here are three negotiation tips to emerge from the controversy:

• Factor in fairness perceptions. If a negotiator finds out that you gave someone the negotiator deems comparable a better deal, the negotiator is likely to feel mistreated. Anticipate that salary and other data may not remain private, strive for equity, and make sure you have clear justifications for any discrepancies that may emerge.
• Use time to your advantage. When issuing their demand on reshoots, Wahlberg and his agent took advantage of the time pressure the filmmakers were facing. Deadlines can be an oft-overlooked source of leverage in negotiation.
• Try a generous gesture. If you’re facing negative PR after a negotiation move, try reframing the conversation by doing a good deed, as Wahlberg did with his donation.

In a New Year’s Day address, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un proposed opening talks with South Korea to discuss the North’s possible participation in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Hoping to avoid disruption by the North, South Korean president Moon Jae-in had been calling on North Korea to send athletes to the games. In his speech, Kim also touted the success of his country’s nuclear weapons program and threatened, “All of the mainland United States is within the range of our nuclear strike.”

Just a week later, negotiators from the North and South met on their border, where the North agreed to the South’s request to send a large delegation to the Olympics. It was the first official dialogue between the two nations in two years.

Korea experts viewed the North’s overture as a “divide and conquer” strategy aimed at driving a wedge between South Korea and the United States, which recently persuaded its allies to impose tough new sanctions on North Korea. Both the South Korean and U.S. governments insist they continue to coordinate closely with each other to minimize the security threat posed by North Korea. In fact, Moon publicly credited Trump for instigating the negotiations between the two Koreas by pressuring the North with sanctions.

In negotiation, the “divide and conquer” strategy is rooted in the observation that when members of a bargaining team spend resources fighting one another, they will have fewer resources to use against their opposition, writes Griffith University senior lecturer Larry Crump in a 2005 Negotiation Journal article.

Related to the biblical saying “a house divided against itself shall not stand,” the divide-and-conquer strategy is most relevant to competitions, contests, and distributive negotiations where each side is trying to “win.” But parties in more collaborative team negotiations may also benefit at times from pitting factions within a counterpart’s team against each other. North Korea’s gambit raises two broader questions: (1) How can a divideand-conquer strategy be used successfully in negotiation? and (2) How can your team avoid becoming its next victim?

Playing offense

Divide and conquer can be an effective strategy when you see value in negotiating with one faction on a counterpart’s team to the exclusion of others, exploiting differences between allied parties, or sowing discord among counterparts. Here are a few hypothetical examples:

• You’re negotiating with the sales, marketing, and IT departments of a large organization for a potential purchase. Believing you have a strong rapport with the lead IT negotiator, you try to negotiate with that person one-on-one in the hope of securing a favorable commitment.
• A teenager detects that his parents have different views about his curfew despite their attempts to present a united front. When alone with his father, the teen talks about how eager he is to attend a late-night cast party and asks his dad to put in a good word with his mom.
• After receiving mixed messages from two different members of a negotiating team, you angrily tell the one whose proposal you prefer that her counterpart is difficult to work with.

The key to implementing a divide-andconquer strategy is to recognize that the interests and preferences of members of a negotiating team are often misaligned. One partner may have greater financial incentives to close a deal with you. One may have a stronger interest in building a long-term relationship with you. And one partner may have less motivation to get along well with her partner than the other person does. When you are having difficulty getting what you want out of a negotiation, try to identify such differences and think about whether you can use them to your advantage, whether by shutting out one counterpart, encouraging a counterpart to influence her partner, or trying to drive a wedge between factions.

Playing defense

How can you keep a counterpart from dividing and conquering your own negotiating team? Good defense depends on your ability to keep your team unified and harmonious. Here are three tips:

1. Prepare thoroughly.

1. The more time your team spends preparing to negotiate, the harder it will be for the other side to divide you. Before official negotiations begin, devote ample time to discussing the substance of the negotiation, assigning skills and roles, and planning the negotiation process with your team. Choose an overarching goal that will drive your negotiating strategy, such as reaching a deal that will contribute to your organization’s long-term health, and decide on fairness standards and decision-making rules for your group.

2. Anticipate conflict. Don’t assume your group will be able to rise above any internal conflict that emerges during your negotiation. Rather than dealing with conflict on the fly, discuss in advance how you will head it off and cope with it. Set regular times when the group can meet privately during the upcoming negotiation to discuss progress and potential “wedge” issues. Commit to discussing any differences that arise openly and respectfully.

3. Manage alliances. Internal coalitions can sink any negotiating team. For this reason, it’s important to be on the lookout for alliances that may develop and create disunity once negotiations get started. Crump recommends assigning a “link person” responsible for building and strengthening ties across team members. You can also reduce the odds that dysfunctional factions will form by meeting as a group whenever possible rather than caucusing separately.

On September 5, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that in six months he would phase out Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era policy that has shielded from deportation about 800,000 people brought to the United States illegally as children. Members of Congress seeking permanent protections for the so-called Dreamers covered under DACA then faced a March 5, 2018, deadline to get an immigration bill passed. To do so, they would have to win over lawmakers from both the right and left.

Various small groups of lawmakers began meeting to negotiate a deal, but talks didn’t take off until the early days of 2018, when Trump gave his stamp of approval to bipartisan negotiations. On January 9, the president put talks on the fast track by convening a meeting at the White House with 25 Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have been active on immigration and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

Typically, presidents invite the news media into the room for the first few minutes of such meetings “to record the traditional platitudes before being kicked out,” writes Peter Baker in the New York Times. In an extraordinary move, however, Trump allowed the media to attend and record the first hour of the negotiating session.

The meeting, broadcast on television and online, gave the public a rare opportunity to witness Washington dealmaking in action. It also allowed the president to counter the impression conveyed in journalist Michael Wolff’s newly published bombshell book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, that he is forgetful, disengaged, and unstable. In addition, the meeting gave Dreamers and their supporters hope that an immigration deal was close at hand.

But these shifts were short-lived. In another meeting on immigration just two days later, this one private, Trump pivoted from cooperation to conflict. A close look at the two very different talks reveals the influential role of advisers in negotiations with highranking leaders.

Defining the scope

After kicking off the publicly broadcast White House meeting on January 9, Trump invited lawmakers to address the pivotal question of which immigration related issues to include in their hypothetical deal. As they were keenly aware, hot-button issues—including a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, border security, and rules on foreign workers—have stymied attempts at immigration reform in recent years and likely would be impossible to negotiate in two months.

With the clock ticking toward DACA expiration, most lawmakers argued for a bill that would cover just three issues: (1) protections for Dreamers; (2) beefed-up border security, including Trump’s campaign promise of a border wall between the United States and Mexico; and (3) efforts to reduce immigration based on family ties, sometimes known as chain migration. The scope was narrow, but the inclusion of issues on which they disagreed could give Democrats and Republicans opportunities to make tradeoffs.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who supports a path to citizenship for the undocumented, said he agreed with the “smart but hard” decision to postpone more comprehensive immigration reform.

“You talk about comprehensive reform,” Trump said to Graham. “If we do the right bill here, we are not very far away [from that]. And if you want to take that further step, I don’t care. I’ll take the heat. I’ll take all the heat you want to give me . . . from both Democrats and Republicans. My whole life has been heat. I like heat, in a certain way.”

Those present were surprised by Trump’s newfound openness to comprehensive immigration reform, given his antiimmigrant rhetoric during the presidential campaign. The president also hedged on his past demands for a wall spanning the entire U.S.-Mexico border. “We don’t need a 2,000-mile wall,” he said, noting that parts of the border have natural barriers.

Trump went on to tell the lawmakers that he trusted them to reach a good deal. “When this group comes back, hopefully with an agreement,” he said, “I’m signing it. I’m not going to be saying, oh gee, I want this or I want that. I’ll be signing it. Because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room.”

Shooting for the moon

Democratic senator Diane Feinstein then made a bold proposal. “I don’t know how you would feel about this,” she said to Trump, “but I’d like to ask the question: What about a clean DACA bill now, with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform procedure?”

Feinstein was asking for a bill on a single, Democratic-favored issue—protections for Dreamers—with no other issues on which Republicans could negotiate concessions, such as border security.

“I have no problem [with that],” Trump responded. “We’re going to do DACA, and then we can start immediately on the Phase 2, which would be comprehensive [reform].”

“Would you be agreeable to that?” Feinstein said.

“Yeah, I would like to do that,” Trump said.

No doubt alarmed, Republican senator Kevin McCarthy, a close ally of Trump, interjected: “Mr. President, you need to be clear, though…you have to have security.…”

“I think that’s what she’s saying,” President Trump said of Feinstein.

“I think she’s saying something different,” said McCarthy. “I’m thinking you’re saying DACA without security,” he said to Feinstein. “Are you talking about security as well?”

Feinstein suggested that the security issue should be postponed. McCarthy then reiterated his support for three-pronged talks on DACA, border security, and chain migration.

“Do you really think there can be agreement on those three difficult subjects . . . in time to get DACA passed and effective?” Feinstein asked McCarthy doubtfully.

“Yes,” said McCarthy. “Us getting to the room? I haven’t seen us be this close at having this discussion in quite a few years. . . . I believe we can get there, and we can just keep working each day on this.”

Feinstein didn’t press the issue further. Later in the meeting, Trump clarified that he did not support a DACA-only bill and would require a border wall but was flexible on other issues. Throughout the meeting, Trump also added a fourth issue to the discussion, repeatedly arguing that the current random “Green Card lottery” for legal immigration to the United States should be replaced with a merit-based system that prioritizes in-demand workers.

A “peachy” deal

When Trump finally dismissed the media after an hour, he had met his goal of appearing presidential, rational, and focused. “He was in command of the meeting while inviting input,” wrote Baker in the Times. “He did not berate anyone. He did not call anyone derogatory nicknames. He signaled that he was open to compromise.”

Trump reportedly continued in that collaborative vein after the doors closed. “It was more constructive than I believed it was going to be,” Democratic senator Michael Bennet told the Times after the meeting. The collegial tone left many of the lawmakers feeling upbeat. “There’s a path forward,” Republican senator John Thune told reporters. “Everybody wants, eventually, to get to yes.” But some conservatives were alarmed by Trump’s expressed flexibility. “We were freaked out,” immigration hardliner Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, told the Washington Post.

Having received their marching orders from Trump, the Senate’s so-called “Gang of 6,” a bipartisan immigration working group that included Graham and Senate Democrat Richard Durbin, splintered off to negotiate a deal they could bring to the president. That evening, a San Francisco federal judge issued an order blocking the Trump administration from ending the DACA program, a ruling viewed by most as only temporary.

Two days later, on January 11, the Gang of 6 had reached an “agreement in principle,” according to Republican senator and group member Jeff Flake. Under the proposal, Dreamers would be given a 12-year path to citizenship, but in a concession to Republicans, their parents would not be eligible to become citizens. The deal would allocate $2.7 billion for border security, including Trump’s requested $1.6 billion for a border wall. Finally, in line with Trump’s request, the Democrats in the group made a significant new concession on legal immigration. The current annual random lottery for 50,000 U.S. visas would be eliminated. Merit-based visas would instead be given to immigrants from underrepresented countries. In addition, immigrants previously admitted after natural disasters from countries such as El Salvador and Haiti, whose visas are expiring, would regain their protected status.

Durbin called Trump around 10:15 that morning to brief him on the deal, the Post reports. According to White House officials and congressional aides, Trump expressed pleasure, praised Durbin’s efforts, and invited him and Graham to visit him at noon. “It’s all peachy,” Flake told reporters, Vox reports.

The mood sours

When Durbin and Graham arrived at the Oval Office to brief Trump on their proposal, they were surprised to find immigration hard-liners from the Senate— Republicans McCarthy, Tom Cotton, David Perdue, and Bob Goodlatte—also in attendance. The White House summoned the conservatives to the White House at the last minute, according to the Post, because Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief immigration adviser, was concerned that Durbin and Graham would try to “trick” Trump into signing a bill that would antagonize his political base. In addition, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly cautioned Trump before the meeting that the proposal would probably harm his agenda.

Trump’s mood had darkened considerably since his phone call with Durbin. He rejected Durbin and Graham’s deal, saying it didn’t include enough money for his desired border wall. And in a discussion of merit-based immigration, the president asked why the nation needed more Haitians, insulted African countries using vulgar language, and suggested that immigrants from countries such as Norway should be admitted instead, according to the Post.

Goodlatte urged Durbin to adopt the more conservative bill that he’d proposed, but Durbin was not interested. Overall, the meeting was “short, tense, and often dominated by loud cross-talk and swearing,” Democrats and Republicans told the Post—the complete opposite of the Tuesday meeting. Graham and Durbin left feeling shaken. “Tuesday we had a president that I was proud to golf with, call my friend, who understood immigration had to be bipartisan,” Graham lamented during a Senate hearing. “I don’t know where that guy went, but I want him back.”

Trump’s rejection of the deal and the report that he’d used vulgar, racially charged language left negotiations to protect the Dreamers in tatters. (Durbin and Graham confirmed the Post’s reporting; Trump tweeted that his language had been “tough” but not as reported, and Perdue and Cotton accused Durbin of misrepresenting the president.) The Gang of 6 continued to negotiate and lobby for its deal in the Senate, but it and other immigration proposals failed to gain traction.

On January 14, the Trump administration resumed receiving renewal applications from DACA-eligible individuals in accordance with the federal court order. The same day, Trump tweeted that DACA was “probably dead.” When Republicans refused to attach protections for Dreamers to a short-term spending bill, Democrats filibustered and induced a three-day government shutdown that ended with no clear resolution on DACA.

5 lessons from two very different meetings

The following negotiation takeaways emerged from the White House talks on immigration:

• Negotiate the scope of talks. Generally in negotiation, the more issues on the table, the more opportunities there are to create value through tradeoffs. But when you’re negotiating controversial issues on a tight deadline, you may need to narrow the scope to ensure agreement, especially when trust is low. Look for the sweet spot between complexity and simplicity.
• Weigh the costs and benefits of going public. Because negotiators may be tempted to grandstand for their constituents, negotiations conducted in public often are more contentious than those held behind closed doors. But when a party has an interest in appearing conciliatory and reasonable, that tendency may be reversed. Before negotiating publicly, consider whether doing so is likely to promote cooperation or competition.
• Try shooting for the moon. Feinstein’s request for a single-issue negotiation on Dreamer protections was unlikely to succeed, but it was worth a try. A big “ask” can serve as an anchor that pulls the discussion in your desired direction.
• Anticipate the influence of advisers. Top leaders often take a “big picture” approach and let their close advisers negotiate the details. For this reason, it’s often wise to negotiate with those advisers directly. Lobby them for their support, and encourage them to get leaders on board. If advisers won’t fall in line, look for ways to reduce their influence on the leader.
• Establish a representative working group. The Gang of 6’s deal was thwarted by hard-line voices on immigration in Congress and the White House, which felt excluded from the group’s negotiations. When appointing a committee to represent a larger group, make sure it includes the full range of perspectives.