In late 2018, then-president Donald Trump refused to sign an appropriations bill to fund the U.S. federal government for the 2019 fiscal year that lacked funding for a wall on the Mexican border. The standoff with congressional Democrats that followed triggered a 35-day shutdown from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019. The devastating shutdown—to date, the longest in U.S. history—left hundreds of thousands of federal employees unpaid, suspended vital services, and damaged the U.S. economy.

During the shutdown, experts at the Program on Negotiation (PON) offered advice on how the parties might move beyond impasse in negotiation. Ultimately, Trump backed down and allowed the appropriations bill to pass without wall funding or any other significant concessions from Democrats. Yet today, the strategies suggested below for resolving these government negotiations could help you and your organization move beyond impasse in negotiation.

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Appeal to a bigger tribe

In his book Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts, Daniel Shapiro, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, describes the “tribes effect”—the innate tendency of groups to pit their identity against that of other groups. The resulting us-versus-them mindset leads us to devalue others’ viewpoints simply because they’re not our own.

“U.S. politics has become tribal,” Shapiro told PON during the 2018-2019 shutdown. “There’s the Democratic tribe, the Republican tribe, and the Trump tribe.” Shapiro identified three characteristics of conflict between tribes: “First, it’s adversarial. Second, it’s self-righteous: Each side believes it’s right and that legitimacy is on its side. Third, it’s insular: We close our ears and argue our side.” The impasse in Washington checked all these boxes. “Each side takes a stance and refuses to back down,” Shapiro said. “Threats, demands, and possible deception contribute to an unsurprising escalatory cycle.”

Unfortunately, loyalty to the tribe often leads to impasse in negotiation. To break free from their tribal mindset, parties need recognize that they all belong to a bigger tribe—in this case, the United States. “They need to emphasize that they’re all in this together,” said Shapiro. “None of them should want to harm the citizens of the United States.”

Help them save face

When negotiators have dug in on an issue and reached impasse in negotiation, they typically fear that compromising would signal weakness in the eyes of supporters, according to Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah Kolb. Respecting a counterpart’s dignity, which includes conveying that you won’t embarrass or undermine them, lays the groundwork for mutual trust.

The public nature of the budget talks and impasse in Washington made it especially difficult for Trump and the Democrats to identify face-saving solutions. As a result, they played to their respective bases rather than build bridges. During an Oval Office sparring match on December 11, 2018, for example, then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi and then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer scored political points by persuading Trump to take ownership of any shutdown that might occur—but in the process, reduced everyone’s motivation to reach agreement.

An important step in allowing a counterpart a “graceful retreat” from hard bargaining is to take talks private, said Kolb. Only in privacy will parties feel comfortable brainstorming tradeoffs and concessions.

Kolb also recommended switching out key players to try to break an impasse. In late 2012, when the White House and Congress faced a perilous “fiscal cliff” deadline for reaching a deal on the federal deficit, a breakthrough came only when then–vice president Joe Biden replaced Senate majority leader Harry Reid as the lead Democratic negotiator in talks with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader. Biden and McConnell had hashed out the last big federal-tax compromise in 2010 together and were able to do so again. Parties might also bring in a neutral third party, such as a mediator, to promote listening and put a stop to the blame game, says Kolb.

To break an impasse in negotiation, try value-creating moves

Once a small group of key players is at the table, how can they find common ground? One effective negotiation strategy might be to add an issue that “both sides want but neither has been able to get” to the mix of issues, Harvard Business School professor James Sebenius recommended in an article for the Hill during the shutdown.

At the time, Democratic and Republican leaders, including Trump, all enthusiastically supported giving the federal government the right to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries with pharmaceutical companies, as did voters, Sebenius noted. Adding such a popular proposal to a budget deal might have made Trump more amenable to altering wall funding to include other border security measures supported by Democrats, such as enhanced technology. The two sides might then have been able to do a deal on wall funding and a path to citizenship for the Dreamers (younger residents brought to the United States as children).

What if Trump refused such a deal? Having shown “willingness to compromise in return for popular policies,” wrote Sebenius, could have positioned themselves as the party of yes.

What other strategies have you found to be useful for moving beyond impasse in negotiation?

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Miscommunication often leads to impasse in negotiation. When we don’t understand what the other party wants, we can grow frustrated by their perceived lack of cooperation with our own wishes and give up prematurely on reaching agreement. Miscommunication also can be a problem when we are consulting advisers for help with an upcoming negotiation, whether formally or informally. Two recent studies examine common negotiation mistakes that can lead to communication breakdowns and offer ideas for avoiding such pitfalls.

How Anger Hinders Perspective Taking in Negotiation

The ability to take another person’s perspective is a valuable negotiation skill. Perspective taking enhances the discovery of joint gains in negotiation, makes groups more effective, reduces stereotypical thinking, and aids in conflict resolution, to name just a few benefits.

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Some people are naturally better perspective takers than others, but all of us have the capacity to pay closer attention to how things look from someone else’s point of view. However, certain scenarios and emotional states can make this difficult and lead to communication breakdowns. Time pressure and demands on our attention hinder our perspective-taking ability, as does power: Generally, powerful people give less thought to how others view a situation, often because they don’t think they need to.

Particular emotions can also impede perspective taking. When we’re feeling happy, we’re not as good at making inferences about others’ perspectives because happiness promotes superficial information processing. People who are feeling anxious also are less attuned to others.

Anger also impairs perspective taking, researchers Jeremy A. Yip (Georgetown University) and Maurice E. Schweitzer (University of Pennsylvania) found in a 2019 study. Anger puts us in a state of high arousal—the physiological state of being energized and stimulated—which promotes self-centered thinking and self-interested behavior. In some of Yip and Schweitzer’s experiments, participants who were induced to feel angry were less skilled at perspective taking in a subsequent, unrelated task than participants who were instead induced to feel sad, disgusted, or neutral.

In another experiment, anger triggered by a task also reduced participants’ perspective-taking ability when performing that task. However, those who were asked to label how they felt—such as angry—were just as skilled perspective takers as those in a neutral state. This result suggests that taking note of when we feel angry can help us avoid the egocentric bias that hinders perspective taking and thus triggers communication breakdowns. On the flip side, recognizing that an angry negotiating counterpart may be more self-centered than they usually are can keep us from overreacting and escalating conflict.

Whether you feel angry during a negotiation or the other party is losing their cool, call for a break and then try to calmly discuss the tension that filled the room. In the process, you are likely to experience the type of perspective taking that prompts creative thinking and mutually beneficial solutions.

Keeping Advisers on Our Side

Seeking advice from others is a wise and common step to take before any important negotiation. We often can gain valuable information about whom to approach, what to offer, what to accept, and how to navigate an unfamiliar negotiation process from trusted advisers. Whether our negotiation adviser is an experienced lawyer negotiating on our behalf or a friend sharing their personal experience with a similar situation, we weigh their advice and decide whether or not to follow it.

Unfortunately, when we reject someone’s advice, we may suffer a backlash, researcher Hayley Blunden (American University) and her team found in a 2019 study. In their experiments, advisers—especially expert advisers—tended to view people who didn’t take their advice as less competent than those who did take their advice. As a result, from then on, the advisers were less willing to work with those advice seekers who ignored their counsel. And, ironically, while soliciting advice from multiple experts is a proven strategy in negotiation and other realms, advisers tend to react more negatively to those who seek advice from multiple advisers than to those who consult only one adviser (that is, themselves).

Advisers’ negative reactions stem from the fact that they significantly overestimate the degree to which others will follow their advice, the researchers found. Why? Advisers mistakenly tend to  assume that advisees view them as uniquely qualified to provide guidance on the issue at hand. In fact, people ideally try to gather as much information as possible before making an informed decision—a strategy that can lead to a lot of rejected advice.

How can we maintain good relationships with negotiation advisers whose advice we don’t take? Blunden and her colleagues recommend explicitly discussing our goals before seeking advisers’ counsel—for example, “I want to explore all of my options, so I’m soliciting opinions from people in lots of different spheres.” Doing so can manage their expectations and avoid communication breakdowns.

What experiences have you had with communication breakdowns in negotiation?

What do you do when you believe you’ve been wronged, the offending party won’t talk to you, and you have no legal recourse? Would you look for new paths for communication and conflict resolution? Or would you go public?

That’s what the world-renowned art museum the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, did in January 2019 to try to draw attention to its attempts to reclaim a work of art stolen during World War II and in the possession of a German family. The 18th-century Vase of Flowers by Dutch master Jan van Huysum has been difficult to recover because of a German law that puts a 30-year statute of limitations on legal claims for stolen property, according to the New York Times.

In 2018, the German family that has the painting tried to sell it back to the Uffizi, reportedly for about $567,000. “We’re trying to get the German family to understand that we are not in a legal position to buy something that according to Italian and international law we already own,” Uffizi director Eike Schmidt, who is German, told the Times.

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With the Italian authorities unable to get satisfaction from the German government, Schmidt took the dispute to the court of public opinion. On January 1, the Uffizi posted on its website a video showing Schmidt hanging a black-and-white photo of Vase of Flowers in the Pitti Palace, where the painting used to be hung, with the word stolen surrounding it in red letters in Italian, English, and German. A caption informs the public that the work was taken by German soldiers and is now held by a German family. The Uffizi also posted a lengthy “appeal to Germany for 2019” by Schmidt on Twitter.

The campaign was ultimately effective, but some call it hypocritical. Like Germany, Italy has been criticized for being slow to return Nazi-looted art that hangs in its museums.

A new partner can change everything

Personnel changes can lead a trusting trade relationship to deteriorate in a flash, as Paris’s Louvre Museum found in negotiations with Italian counterparts.

In 2017, Louvre directors asked Italian museums to loan several masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci to help round out the Paris museum’s planned 2019 exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of the great Renaissance master’s death. In return, the Louvre agreed to loan works by Raphael for a 2020 Rome exhibition marking 500 years since that Italian master’s death.

But the trade was in doubt after Italy’s new populist government took power in June 2018. Lucia Borgonzoni, the new undersecretary for Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and a member of the hard-right League party, told the Telegraph that the deal was “one of the biggest, most shameful acts of the previous government with regard to cultural heritage.” For the trade to be fair, according to Borgonzoni, France should be loaning something of equal value during Leonardo’s anniversary year. “Leonardo was Italian, after all,” she said. “Why don’t they loan us the Mona Lisa?”

Borgonzoni said her ministry had taken over negotiations from museum directors and was working to cancel the loans. The anti-globalist regime in Italy also picked fights with pro-European French president Emmanuel Macron on migration and trade, according to the Times.

At least one Italian curator said the spat over the Leonardos was much ado about nothing. Uffizi Gallery director Eike Schmidt said his museum had never agreed to loan the Leonardo masterpieces requested in 2015 because they were too fragile. The only major work scheduled to go to the Louvre is Leonardo’s La Scapigliata, from the National Gallery of Parma, whose director called the brouhaha “a total Italian soap opera.”

Eventually, through strong communication and conflict resolution efforts, the two countries agreed to a deal wherein several Italian galleries would lend works by Leonardo to the Louvre. In return, Italy would acquire works from France (as well as other countries) for their Raphael exhibit.

3 guidelines for artful communication and conflict resolution management

1. Think twice before going public. It’s tempting to take a private dispute public when you’re getting no satisfaction. But be aware that doing so often only escalates the conflict and can make the other party less likely to back down.
2. Look in the mirror. Don’t expect your counterpart to meet demands you aren’t willing to meet yourself. Live up to your own responsibilities and ethical standards before taking the moral high ground.
3. Anticipate personnel changes. If there’s a possibility your negotiating counterpart could be replaced (as there almost always is), try to formalize existing deal terms so you won’t have to start over from square one if someone new takes over.

What have you found to be effective communication and conflict resolution techniques?

Compensation negotiation tips often revolve around encouraging job candidates to ask for a higher salary and teaching them how to frame their salary requests. But negotiators who take a broader approach to evaluating a job offer may be able to set themselves up for much greater long-term earnings. A negotiation initiated by the original cast of the hit musical Hamilton that took this approach not only improved the performers’ compensation but also motivated industrywide change. Keep reading to get some compensation negotiation tips from their experience. 

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Every Experiment Sets a Precedent

For many decades, Broadway plays have been developed and refined in workshops. Performers, producers, stage managers, and the creative team meet to rehearse for about a month, reports Michael Paulson in the New York Times. If all goes well, the producers stage the show for potential investors.

Under the Actors’ Equity union’s standard agreement, workshop participants received about $600 per week plus benefits, a right of first refusal to play their role on Broadway, and a share of 1% of any future royalty pool for 18 years. Workshop actors for the hit musical The Book of Mormon, which opened in 2011, earned about $3 million total in profit sharing during the show’s first five years, or about several thousand dollars a month per actor, according to the blog Broadway Journal.

Around 2010, producers began replacing workshops with so-called development labs, which were intended to be shorter and more specialized (focusing, for example, on choreography alone). However, labs eventually became nearly indistinguishable from workshops, except in terms of compensation: Actors earned more up front—about $1,000 per week—but usually received no right of first refusal or royalty guarantee.

Smashing Every Expectation

When Hamilton was in development, Actors’ Equity tried to negotiate a workshop (rather than lab) contract that would include future profit sharing, but couldn’t reach a deal with the show’s producers. The actors accepted a modified lab contract that would give them a right of first refusal but no royalties, according to the Times.

The original cast helped craft the show alongside the show’s creative team, led by Lin-Manuel Miranda, during rehearsals and a long off-Broadway run. In the summer of 2015, Hamilton opened on Broadway and began raking in $500,000 per week. With a long run, awards, touring companies, and productions in other cities seeming likely, the original performers approached Jeffrey Seller, the show’s producer, individually to ask for profit sharing but were denied.

The Challenge: Demand Satisfaction

Then 22 of the original off-Broadway cast members decided to join forces and use compensation negotiation tips from The Book of Mormon. In a joint letter to Seller, they referenced the play’s profit-sharing agreement and asked for a stake in Hamilton’s future gross box-office receipts and royalties from other productions and film rights. Royalty payments, they wrote, would allow them to “take care of our bodies and voices in the way that this work demands” and lessen the stress of career transitions as they aged.

Cognizant of the precedent such a deal would set, the cast members called it an investment in “the future of the American Theater” and, in a nod to one of Hamilton’s key themes, told Seller, “That can be your legacy.”

The Situation Is Fraught

Seller offered to send each original cast member a lump-sum check, ranging from $29,000 to $36,000, to reconcile the low salaries they’d earned off-Broadway and the minimum Broadway wage, according to Bloomberg News. The gesture focused on the past, not the future.

“There is NO counter offer that we should accept under ANY circumstances,” Leslie Odom Jr., who played Hamilton’s rival and assassin, Aaron Burr, emailed to his castmates. Odom Jr. said he’d been back in touch with members of The Book of Mormon cast and reiterated that “this is ground worth standing,” Bloomberg reports.

The cast unanimously rejected Seller’s offer.

How the Parties Get to Yes

A week later, just before showtime, Seller had checks delivered to the 22 cast members’ dressing rooms with a note reading, “This brings to an end this powerful issue that has been weighing on many of us.”

The actors huddled about how to proceed. Though some were tempted to cash the checks, they agreed to stand firm. Ultimately, they hired a lawyer to represent them jointly in private negotiations with the producers. Months passed.

On April 15, 2016, the news broke that Hamilton’s producers had agreed to share 1% of the musical’s net (rather than gross) profits for the Broadway production with the original off-Broadway cast retroactive to the start of its run, as well as 0.33% of net profits from most future Hamilton productions. The deal expanded to include 38 early Hamilton participants, including Miranda.

Though compromising somewhat on the numbers, the cast got more than they gave. The Hamilton franchise grew to encompass multiple productions and touring companies, likely giving them a healthy supplemental income.

Tomorrow There’ll Be More of Us

As news of the Hamilton deal broke, Actors’ Equity asked the Broadway League, the New York trade association of theaters and producers, for an industrywide profit-sharing clause for developmental lab participants.

In January 2019, with the two sides locked in impasse, the union called a strike, ordering its members to stop participating in labs, workshops, and staged readings. A month later, the two sides reached a deal: Actors and stage members who spend more than eight weeks developing a show will split 1% of a Broadway show’s profits, including from touring productions, for 10 years after 110% of production costs are recouped, according to Broadway News. The minimum salary for developmental work rose as well.

Francis Jue, a representative of Actors’ Equity, told Broadway News the agreement ushers in a “new business model” that would shake up the industry. Theatrical development dropped off during the Covid-19 pandemic. But with Broadway shows preparing to open at full capacity on September 14, 2021, new work—and, eventually, new hits—will be coming to life.

Compensation Negotiation Tips

The Hamilton and Actors’ Equity deals offer the following compensation and wage negotiation tactics:

• Wait for it. In salary negotiations, we often prefer to be paid upfront, even if that means sacrificing money on the backend. Wise negotiators look beyond salary to find ways to maximize long-term earnings, such as negotiating for profit sharing in a new venture.

• Don’t fracture into factions. When facing a powerful party, you can often gain significant leverage by teaming up with others. Build your coalition by thoroughly discussing each member’s underlying interests and agreeing on a negotiating strategy that will withstand attempts to divide you.

• Make it a movement, not a moment. The other party may be wary of granting a concession that would potentially lead to systemic change. Appealing to their higher values, such as their sense of fairness, your shared history, or the need for industry-wide change, may win them over.

What compensation negotiation tips would you add to our list?

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A budget impasse growing more adversarial by the day. A government shutdown that kept hundreds of thousands unpaid, suspended vital services, and damaged the economy. Presidential threats to bypass Congress and declare a national emergency.

How did we get there? The budget impasse in Washington, D.C., apparently started in 2014 when those advising Donald Trump on a run for the presidency were trying to get him to stay focused on the issue of border security and did so by using a mnemonic device: in this case, a wall. Trump adviser Sam Nunberg recalled to the New York Times that he told another adviser to the future president, Roger Stone Jr., “We’re going to get him to talk about [how] he’s going to build a wall.”

The rest is history. After his calls for a “big, beautiful wall” drew cheers in arenas across the country, Trump latched onto his advisers’ memory trick with gusto. Believing it buoyed him into office, the president has been talking about the wall ever since.

If the proposed wall cemented Trump’s support on the far right, opposition to it galvanized the left. Senator Elizabeth Warren referenced Trump’s “stupid wall” at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, while House speaker Nancy Pelosi recently called the proposed wall “immoral.”

It might have been predictable, then, that when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives early this year, budget negotiations broke down over wall funding and culminated in a devastating shutdown. As the impasse dragged on, Trump began talking about bypassing Congress entirely to fund the wall by declaring border security a national emergency. On January 25, he agreed to fund the government for three weeks without wall funding, but threatened another shutdown if Congress didn’t meet his demand in that time.

The battle over wall funding may seem to uniquely illustrate the dysfunction of today’s Washington, but in fact, this type of impasse is common in all types of negotiations. We talked to experts at the Program on Negotiation about how negotiators in Washington and beyond can get unstuck when one or both sides have dug in their heels on a single issue.

Appeal to a bigger tribe

In his book Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts (Viking, 2016), Daniel Shapiro, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, describes the “tribes effect”— the innate tendency of groups to pit their identity against that of other groups. The resulting us-versus-them mindset leads us to devalue others’ viewpoints simply because they’re not our own.

“U.S. politics has become tribal,” Shapiro told Negotiation Briefings. “There’s the Democratic tribe, the Republican tribe, and the Trump tribe.” Shapiro identifies three characteristics of conflict between tribes: “First, it’s adversarial. Second, it’s self-righteous: Each side believes it’s right and that legitimacy is on its side. Third, it’s insular: We close our ears and argue our side.” The impasse in Washington checked all these boxes. “Each side takes a stance and refuses to back down,” says Shapiro. “Threats, demands, and possible deception contribute to an unsurprising escalatory cycle.”

Unfortunately, the rules of tribal negotiation don’t work well in a multitribal negotiation. That’s because loyalty to the tribe becomes more important than the substance and outcome of any negotiation. To break free from their tribal mindset, parties need to begin by recognizing that they all belong to a bigger tribe—in this case, the United States. “They need to emphasize that they’re all in this together,” says Shapiro. “None of them should want to harm the citizens of the United States.”

Help them save face

When negotiators have dug in on an issue, they typically fear that compromising would signal weakness and cause them to lose face in the eyes of supporters, Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah Kolb told Negotiation Briefings. Respecting a counterpart’s dignity, which includes conveying that you won’t embarrass or undermine him, lays the groundwork for mutual trust.

The public nature of the budget talks and impasse in Washington made it especially difficult for Trump and the Democrats to identify face-saving solutions. As a result, they’ve played to their base rather than build bridges. During an Oval Office sparring match on December 11, 2018, for example, Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer scored political points by persuading Trump to take ownership of any shutdown that might occur—but in the process, they reduced everyone’s motivation to reach agreement.

An important step in allowing a counterpart a “graceful retreat” from hard-line positions is to take talks private, says Kolb. Only in privacy will parties feel comfortable brainstorming tradeoffs and concessions. Shapiro recommends that the White House and Congressional Democrats have a very small number of senior staff—one or two people on each side—meet to brainstorm creative solutions. Because the budget negotiations have been as leaky as a sieve, the fewer the number of people present, the better.

Kolb also recommends switching out key players to try to break an impasse. In late 2012, when the White House and Congress faced a perilous “fiscal cliff” deadline for reaching a deal on the federal deficit, a breakthrough came only when Vice President Joe Biden replaced Senate majority leader Harry Reid as the lead Democratic negotiator in talks with Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader. Though political opponents, Biden and McConnell had hashed out the last big federal-tax compromise in 2010 together and believed, rightly, that they could do it again. Parties might also bring in a neutral mediator to promote listening and put a stop to the blame game, says Kolb.

Try value-creating moves

Once a small group of key players is at the table, how can they find common ground? They need to begin by addressing the interests underlying their stated positions, says Shapiro. Trump’s promotion of a border wall is rooted in the security concerns his supporters share. The Democrats’ opposition is, in turn, based on their supporters’ belief that the wall isn’t the best way to curb illegal immigration. Yet both sides share concerns over border security, avoiding shutdowns, and other key interests.

“Normal hard bargaining would transform the wall into some kind of physical barrier to be erected in key places; a compromise on money and other border security measures; and a reopened government,” writes Harvard Business School professor James Sebenius in an article in the Hill during the shutdown. But, he adds, “These are not normal times.” Democrats value a path to citizenship for Dreamers (undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children), but Trump hasn’t been willing to make that concession in return for the wall.

To break the impasse, Sebenius recommends adding to the mix an issue that “both sides want but haven’t been able to get.” Democratic and Republican leaders, including Trump, all enthusiastically support giving the federal government the right to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries with pharmaceutical companies, Sebenius notes; voters do as well. Adding such a popular proposal to a budget deal might make Trump more amenable to altering wall funding to include other border security measures supported by Democrats, such as enhanced technology. The two sides might then be able to do a deal on wall funding and a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, writes Sebenius.

What if Trump refused such a deal? Democrats would be on record having agreed to a reasonable package that included wall funding. Having shown “willingness to compromise in return for popular policies,” writes Sebenius, they would position themselves for the next presidential election as the party of yes.

Appealing to observers

What do you do when you believe you’ve been wronged, the offending party won’t talk to you, and you have no legal recourse? For many people, the answer is . . . go public.

That’s what the world-renowned art museum the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, did in January to try to draw attention to its attempts to reclaim a work of art stolen during World War II and in the possession of a German family. The 18th-century Vase of Flowers by Dutch master Jan van Huysum has been difficult to recover because of a German law that puts a 30-year statute of limitations on legal claims for stolen property, according to the New York Times.

In 2018, the German family that has the painting tried to sell it back to the Uffizi, reportedly for about $567,000. “We’re trying to get the German family to understand that we are not in a legal position to buy something that according to Italian and international law we already own,” Uffizi director Eike Schmidt, who is German, told the Times.

With the Italian authorities unable to get satisfaction from the German government, Schmidt has taken the dispute to the court of public opinion. On January 1, the Uffizi posted on its website a video showing Schmidt hanging a black-and-white photo of Vase of Flowers in the Pitti Palace, where the painting used to be hung, with the word stolen surrounding it in red letters in Italian, English, and German. A caption informs the public that the work was taken by German soldiers and is now held by a German family. The Uffizi also posted a lengthy “appeal to Germany for 2019” by Schmidt on Twitter.

The campaign may prove effective, but some call it hypocritical. Like Germany, Italy has been criticized for being slow to return Nazi-looted art that hangs in its museums.

Dealing with a new partner

Personnel changes can lead a trusting trade relationship to deteriorate in a flash, as Paris’s Louvre Museum found in recent negotiations with Italian counterparts.

In 2017, Louvre directors asked Italian museums to loan several masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci to help round out the Paris museum’s planned 2019 exhibition commemorating the 500th anniversary of the great Renaissance master’s death. In return, the Louvre reportedly agreed to loan works by Raphael for a 2020 Rome exhibition marking 500 years since that Italian master’s death.

But the trade was in doubt after Italy’s new populist government took power in June 2018. Lucia Borgonzoni, the new undersecretary for Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and a member of the hard-right League party, told the Telegraph that the deal was “one of the biggest, most shameful acts of the previous government with regard to cultural heritage.” For the trade to be fair, according to Borgonzoni, France should be loaning something of equal value during Leonardo’s anniversary year. “Leonardo was Italian, after all,” she said. “Why don’t they loan us the Mona Lisa?”

Borgonzoni said her ministry had taken over negotiations from museum directors and was working to cancel the loans. The new anti-globalist regime in Italy also has picked fights with pro-European French president Emmanuel Macron on migration and trade, according to the Times.

At least one Italian curator said the spat over the Leonardos was much ado about nothing. Uffizi Gallery director Eike Schmidt said his museum had never agreed to loan the Leonardo masterpieces requested in 2015 because they were too fragile. The only major work scheduled to go to the Louvre is Leonardo’s La Scapigliata, from the National Gallery of Parma, whose director called the brouhaha “a total Italian soap opera.”

3 guidelines for artful conflict management:

• 1. Think twice before going public. It’s tempting to take a private dispute public when you’re getting no satisfaction. But be aware that doing so often only escalates the conflict and can make the other party less likely to back down.
• 2. Look in the mirror. Don’t expect your counterpart to meet demands you aren’t willing to meet yourself. Live up to your own responsibilities and ethical standards before taking the moral high ground.
• 3. Anticipate personnel changes. If there’s a possibility your negotiating counterpart could be replaced (as there almost always is), try to formalize existing deal terms so you won’t have to start over from square one if someone new takes over.

In the summer of 2015, the cast of Hamilton was on top of the world. Their highly anticipated hip-hop musical about the life of Founding Father and U.S. treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton had opened to rave reviews and euphoric audiences at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre after a stint off-Broadway. A long run, Tony awards, touring companies, and productions in other cities were beginning to seem inevitable.

But as 22 of Hamilton’s original off- Broadway cast members wrote in a letter to the show’s producer just a few weeks after opening night, there was also “low-rumbling and permeating pain” over what they perceived as “this flawless work of art’s only lingering mistake.” That mistake? The cast members had crafted the show alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s author, and his creative team during workshops and a long off-Broadway run, yet they were not contractually entitled to a share of the many millions in profits Hamilton was expected to earn.

In recent years, due in part to changes to their union-negotiated contracts, New York actors have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the way they’re financially compensated for helping to develop hit Broadway plays and musicals. The profit-sharing deal reached by the Hamilton cast in 2016 has been at the eye of the hurricane, prompting tense negotiations and, this past January, a strike.

Every experiment sets a precedent

For many decades, Broadway plays have been developed and refined in workshops. Performers, producers, stage managers, and the creative team meet for about a month in a rehearsal room to work on scripts, songs, and dances, reports Michael Paulson in the New York Times. If all goes well, the producers then stage the show for potential investors.

Under the Actors’ Equity union’s standard agreement, New York actors participating in workshops receive about $600 per week plus benefits, a right of first refusal to play their role on Broadway, and a share of 1% of any future royalty pool for 18 years. Actors who were part of the workshop for the hit musical The Book of Mormon, which opened in 2011, earned about $3 million total in profit sharing during the show’s first five years, or about several thousand dollars a month per actor, according to the blog Broadway Journal.

Around 2010, producers began replacing workshops with so-called development labs. Although labs were intended to be shorter and more specialized than workshops (focusing, for example, on choreography alone), today they have largely replaced workshops and are difficult to distinguish from them. The main difference lies in how actors are compensated: Actors earn higher up-front pay for labs—about $1,000 per week—but usually receive no right of first refusal and no royalty guarantee.

Lab contracts give producers more flexibility to shape material by cutting, reducing, or changing roles without having to pay a steep penalty (about $10,000 per actor) for violating a right of first refusal, writes Broadway producer Ken Davenport on his blog, The Producer’s Perspective. And because many workshopped shows don’t make it to Broadway, some actors prefer to be paid more up front than to gamble on profiting from a hit show. (Davenport writes that he is always delighted to share profits from a hit with the developmental cast; other producers say that doing so conflicts with their responsibility to compensate investors.)

Smashing every expectation

When Hamilton was in development, Actors’ Equity negotiated on behalf of its actors for a workshop (rather than lab) contract that would include profit sharing if the show made it to Broadway but couldn’t reach a deal with the show’s producers. The actors accepted a modified lab contract that would give them a right of first refusal but no royalties, according to the Times.

Once Hamilton opened on Broadway and began raking in $500,000 per week, the actors who had been with it from the start began to regret that concession. After all, they argued, they had helped shape the show, especially its second act, yet their salaries constituted a tiny fraction of profits. (The union-mandated minimum pay for Broadway actors is $1,900 per week, though most Hamilton actors likely earned more.) Some cast members approached Jeffrey Seller, the producer, individually to ask for a share of profits, but they were denied.

The challenge: Demand satisfaction

After discussing their shared frustration, 22 of the original 24 off-Broadway cast members signed off on a carefully worded letter to Seller. Referring to themselves as “your family members,” they wrote, “We love you. We love HAMILTON.” They said they “stood together . . . begging you to reconsider our request to share in the success of this magnificent work” based on their “extreme generosity” during Hamilton’s development.

In recent years, due in part to changes to their union-negotiated contracts, New York actors have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the way they’re financially compensated for helping to develop hit Broadway plays and musicals.

Referencing The Book of Mormon’s profit- sharing agreement, they asked for a shared stake in Hamilton’s future gross box-office receipts (starting at 1%) and subsidiary-rights income (about 1.5%), including royalties from other productions and the sale of film rights. Royalty payments, they wrote, wouldn’t make them rich but would allow them to “take care of our bodies and voices in the way that this work demands” and lessen the stress of career transitions as they aged.

Cognizant of the precedent such a deal would set, the cast members called it an investment in “the future of the American Theater” and, in a nod to one of Hamilton’s key themes, told Seller, “That can be your legacy.”

The situation is fraught

The next day, Seller responded by offering to send each of the original cast members a lump-sum check ranging from $29,000 to $36,000, according to Bloomberg News. The checks were intended to make up the difference between the low salaries they’d earned in the extended off- Broadway production and the minimum Broadway wage. The gesture focused on the past, not the future.

“There is NO counter offer that we should accept under ANY circumstances,” Leslie Odom Jr., who played Hamilton’s rival and assassin, Aaron Burr, wrote in an email to his castmates. Odom Jr. said he’d been back in touch with members of The Book of Mormon cast and reiterated that “this is ground worth standing,” Bloomberg reports. In an email, understudy Sasha Hutchings compared the fight to that of the revolutionaries the cast portrayed onstage: “They forged a way where there was no precedent, just as we are striving to do now. It’s messy, and scary, but possible.”

The cast unanimously rejected Seller’s offer.

How the parties get to yes

A week later, half an hour before showtime, Seller had checks delivered to the 22 cast members’ dressing rooms with a note that read, “This brings to an end this powerful issue that has been weighing on many of us.” Upset and confused, cast members huddled about how to proceed. Some who were financially struggling were tempted to cash the checks; others urged everyone to stand firm.

The cast debated boycotting the free—and unpaid—preshow sidewalk performances they’d been doing to entertain fans but backed down when the show’s creator, Miranda, begged them not to bring negative publicity to Hamilton. The cast hired a lawyer to represent them as a group in private negotiations with producers. Months passed.

On April 15, 2016, the cast’s lawyer announced that Hamilton’s producers had agreed to share 1% of the musical’s net (rather than gross) profits for the Broadway production with the original off-Broadway cast retroactive to the start of its run, as well as 0.33% of net profits from most future Hamilton productions. The deal expanded to include 38 early Hamilton participants, including Miranda.

Though compromising somewhat on the numbers, the cast got more than they gave in the negotiation. With the Hamilton franchise now encompassing Chicago, London, and New York productions and three touring companies, we can assume Hamilton’s originators—most of whom have since moved on from the musical—are earning a healthy supplemental income due to the deal.

Tomorrow there’ll be more of us

As news of the Hamilton deal ricocheted across Broadway in 2016, Actors’ Equity asked the Broadway League, the New York trade association of theaters and producers, for a profit-sharing clause for all participants in developmental labs.

This past January, with the two sides at impasse, the union called a strike, ordering its members to stop participating in all developmental stage work with commercial producers, including labs, workshops, and staged readings. The League said negotiations were ongoing and that producers should decide for themselves whether to share profits with performers.

What comes next? We’ll have to wait for the finale to find out. But by rewriting the game, the original cast of Hamilton gave their compatriots a strong shot at emerging victorious.

Get more than anyone bargained for

In contentious negotiations, the following tips can help you master the art of the trade:

• If you had to choose . . . To keep long-term conflict at bay, try making two or three offers that you value similarly rather than just one. On his blog, Broadway producer Ken Davenport writes that he favors giving individual actors a choice between either profit sharing and a low salary or no future profit and a high salary. “I love giving employees a choice,” he writes, “because the decision is theirs, so there can be no bad feelings no matter which way it ends up.”
• Wait for it. In negotiation and beyond, we tend to give our short-term desires more weight than our long-term interests, to our detriment. That’s why most people undersave for retirement and prefer to be paid up front, even if that means sacrificing money on the backend. To overcome this bias, take a long, hard look at your future needs; estimate the potential risks and rewards of a long-term contract; and choose rationally.
• Don’t fracture into factions. When facing off with what appears to be a more powerful party, try teaming up with others to gain leverage. Then thoroughly discuss each member’s underlying interests to craft a winning coalition and negotiating strategy that will withstand the other party’s attempts to divide you.
• Make it a movement, not a moment. Even if the party across the table thinks your grievance is legitimate, he may be wary of granting a concession that would disrupt precedent. If so, appeal to higher values, such as his sense of fairness, your shared history, or the need for industrywide change.