There are numerous opportunities for adults to learn and practice their negotiation skills. Whether it’s working through an issue with a coworker, buying a home, or taking actual negotiation education classes, if you want to improve your negotiation outcomes, you can find ways to learn. But what about kids? Are they too young to learn good negotiation skills?

While kids still need plenty of guidance from parents and caregivers, there are ample opportunities to help them hone their negotiation skills.

Why kids need a negotiation education

We’ve all read the horror stories of college freshmen whose parents swoop in to negotiate on their behalf at the first sign of wounded feelings or a disappointing grade. Whether or not “helicopter parenting” is the epidemic the popular media portrays it to be, many parents are looking for ways to ensure that their children become effective self-advocates. Girls in particular may need to be encouraged to assert their rights and interests to counterbalance societal pressures to be accommodating.

These days, kids often learn principles of conflict resolution in school, but they rarely get a negotiation education that shares the types of mutual-gains negotiation skills that can help them advocate for their needs and head off conflict before it begins. Yet even young children are capable of grasping basic negotiation concepts, such as thinking about what they’ll do if they don’t get what they want and trying to meet their goals by giving others what they want.

You can introduce your kids to the concept of mutual-gains negotiation by explaining that it should always be a nonviolent process in which both sides treat each other respectfully, neither forces the other to give in, and both sides are satisfied with the outcome. Because parental lectures about negotiation best practices are likely to fall on deaf ears, you should give them a negotiation education through more subtle means, such as the following.

3 Ways to teach good negotiation skills to kids

1. Model good behavior. As our kids’ first teachers, the way we model negotiating behavior matters. Recently, I was frustrated by my six-year-old’s habit of talking over me—until I noticed I’m at least as guilty of finishing her sentences. Instead of putting words in her mouth, I’ve been trying to listen more actively: That is, to repeat back what she’s said, ask questions designed to test my understanding, and acknowledge her thoughts and feelings.
Similarly, when conducting everyday negotiations with others in front of your kids (with their soccer coach, a repair person, and so on), try to remain conscious of the fact that the children are watching and, presumably, learning from your behavior. (You may find that you negotiate more rationally and respectfully when you know they’re listening.) Talk to them about the situation after the fact, pointing out what went right and what you might have done better. You might also try discussing negotiation stories from the news, and lessons learned, at the dinner table.

2. Provide low-stress learning opportunities. Give children opportunities to respectfully ask others for what they would like. Teach very young children to order their own food at restaurants and to ask their teacher for missed homework assignments.

As kids get older, they can tackle more complicated “asks,” such as getting permission from a school administrator to sit at a different lunch table. Help your child prepare for such negotiations by setting goals, thinking about what the other side might value, and brainstorming potential compromises, concessions, or tradeoffs. In addition, discuss possible consequences of your child’s planned behavior and what he’ll do if he doesn’t reach his goals. After the negotiation, talk about how it unfolded and what he learned.

3. Don’t push too hard. As you give your children a negotiation education, factor in their personalities and maturity levels. Children learn empathy gradually, so don’t be surprised if they have difficulty focusing on the other party’s point of view.

In addition, remember that kids have strong emotions yet little experience managing their feelings and those of others. Teach them about the value of taking a break and talking to you or another trusted adult if they or others become upset during a negotiation. Finally, never push a stressed-out child into negotiating; instead, continue to model effective behavior on her behalf.

What steps have you taken to share a negotiation education with younger generations?

In recent years, some U.S. states have passed fair-pay laws that affect salary negotiations in the workplace. California, for example, passed a law in 2015 that requires all employers operating in the state to prove they pay employees of different genders equally for “substantially similar” work, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Such laws aim to prevent gender bias from creeping into the salary-negotiation process to the disadvantage of women, who have long been paid less than men for similar work. They have also opened the door to negotiation strategies that both employers and job candidates might try to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of salary negotiations.

Toward Greater Analysis

Only 38% of employers have a formal compensation structure or philosophy underlying their salary decisions, according to a PayScale analysis of 7,600 firms. “When it comes to pay, most companies are making things up as they go along,” writes Lauren Weber in the Journal. But, spurred in part by fair-pay laws, companies—including 34% of those surveyed by PayScale—are starting to adopt formal strategies for setting and negotiating pay.

Organizations typically strive to pay at the 50th percentile of the range that similar employers pay for a given role, with leeway to move 20% below or above that amount based on an individual’s experience and skills, compensation expert Steve Gross told the Journal. In fields where workers are scarce, organizations might set pay above the median; Web-services firm GoDaddy, for instance, starts talks with engineers at the 70th percentile of the market rate.

Weber describes how GoDaddy, which has 5,000 employees, overhauled its haphazard pay structure. The company mapped out job descriptions and created levels for each job title; each level was given a pay grade with a wide salary range pegged at a market rate (for example, $101,000 to $165,000 for “Software Developer III”). Hiring managers discuss with job candidates where their skills and experience place them in this range. About 6% of GoDaddy’s workforce received salary increases to bring them up to the proper pay grade.

Should Past Pay Stay in the Past?

Because women often earn lower salaries than men in their first jobs, gender inequities can widen over time if employers anchor employees’ pay on what they earned at their previous job. For this reason, many states have passed laws that prevent employers from asking prospective employees about their past salaries. 

If asking about past pay is still legal in your state or area, how should you respond in an interview if an employer asks how much you earned at your last job? Ask whether the company has a formal pay-grade system that you should consult. Explain that you believe broader benchmarks offer a more accurate snapshot of your current worth. If no benchmarks are available, be sure you have researched pay for comparable jobs in your industry to move the discussion in a more relevant direction.

The Benefits of Transparency

Employees, particularly younger ones active on social media, are increasingly open about their earnings. Websites such as Glassdoor.com and Salary.com, where workers can post their salaries and other job information, have become a popular resource for job seekers. 

Recent pay-transparency laws in some states require employers to make salary information public. Salary transparency raises wages, Washington University in St. Louis professor Jake Rosenfeld has found in his research, in part by legitimizing employees’ arguments in salary negotiations and improving women’s wages.

That said, when salaries are made public, employees need to be aware of the common tendency to think that they deserve more than others. If you find out a colleague with a similar job earns more than you do, remember that they could have experience or responsibilities of which you’re unaware.

Toward More Rational Salary Negotiations

Fair-pay laws should motivate both sides in salary negotiations to navigate the process with greater foresight and analysis.

Advice for employers. Employers can improve salary negotiations with new employees by auditing existing pay practices to determine if decision-makers are relying too much on intuition. The audit may lead organizations to standardize pay or to leave room for case-by-case negotiation within pay-grade ranges. When salary negotiations become more analytical, employers will benefit from more satisfied employees and from the knowledge that a significant expenditure—employee pay—is being determined more rationally.

Advice for would-be employees. For job candidates, negotiating starting salary is likely to become more methodical. You can help make your own salary negotiations more rational by researching pay thoroughly and by encouraging potential employers to analyze salaries for comparable hires rather than using your past pay as a benchmark. And if you have another great offer, mention this BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement, to try to increase your pay.

Broadening the discussion. Employers and potential hires alike can improve both sides’ satisfaction by broadening the compensation discussion beyond salary. Either side can suggest improving the candidate’s job compensation package by negotiating issues such as bonuses, shares in the company, retirement contributions, and insurance plans. By doing so, you may be able to reach a creative solution that avoids an impasse.

What other trends in salary negotiations have you observed recently?

Emotions play a critical but little-understood role in negotiation. Strong emotions such as anger can derail negotiations, yet keeping emotions under wraps can lead to misunderstandings and impasse. Increasingly, researchers are looking more closely at how emotions affect negotiations. The results of two studies offer lessons related to the impact of emotions in negotiation.

How Emotions Affect Negotiations: Reading Between the Lines

In negotiation, reading others’ emotions is a critical skill. When you can accurately assess whether a job candidate is pleased by a salary offer, if a potential customer is growing impatient with a sales pitch, or if a colleague was hurt by something you said, you will be able to respond appropriately and better determine if an agreement is in sight.

From experience, we know that some people are better at reading emotions than others. But why? People tend to assume that empathic accuracy, or the ability to discern others’ feelings, is associated with intuition, University of La Verne professor Christine Ma-Kellams and Harvard University professor Jennifer Lerner found in one experiment on the topic. But the results of other experiments the researchers conducted showed that, in fact, people who tend to rely on their intuition are less empathically accurate than those who think more analytically.

In one experiment, for example, participants in an executive-education program at Harvard were paired up and engaged in mock job interviews. Afterward, they answered questions about how they felt and how they thought their partners felt during the interviews. Participants’ general tendency to rely on intuitive versus analytical thought was also assessed in a separate test.

The results showed that the more participants relied on systematic (rather than intuitive) thought, the more accurately they read their partners’ emotions. In another experiment, participants who were encouraged to rely on systematic thinking before engaging in a mock interview were better at reading their partners’ feelings than were those who were induced to rely on intuitive thinking.

Overall, the results are good news for those of us who believe that our intuition fails us when it comes to reading counterparts’ emotions in negotiation: We should be able to improve our empathic accuracy by thinking more deeply about what the other party might be feeling and why. Although intuition can be helpful in certain aspects of life, these results confirm that in negotiation, more methodical analysis may lead to more accurate conclusions and better results.

How Emotions Affect Negotiations: When Emotions Conflict

Business negotiators often find themselves feeling positive and negative emotions simultaneously, such as concern that an offer won’t be received well and excitement over the offer’s potential.

We often try to hide our emotions in negotiation for fear of appearing unstable or vulnerable. Indeed, past research has suggested that expressions of emotional ambivalence—the signs of tension or conflict that show in our faces and bodies when we experience negative and positive feelings at the same time—can be dangerous in distributive negotiations, or those in which negotiators are battling over a fixed pie of resources. In such situations, counterparts tend to view ambivalent negotiators as submissive and consequently are able to dominate them.

But a 2015 study suggests that in the more complex negotiations typical of our business and personal lives, feeling and expressing conflicting emotions may actually be beneficial. In their study, Naomi B. Rothman of Lehigh University and Gregory B. Northcraft of the University of Illinois looked at how emotionally ambivalent negotiators are perceived in integrative negotiations, or those where negotiators have opportunities to create value across issues.

In one of their experiments, where participants were encouraged to cooperate, some watched a silent videotape of a negotiation in which one party (an actor) appeared either happy, angry, ambivalent, or unemotional. The participants who watched a video were told they would engage in a negotiation simulation over a new car via instant messaging with the person in the video; in actuality, they were paired with another participant who had not seen a video. During their 30-minute negotiation, the pairs of participants could potentially claim or create value across such issues as sales price, warranty, financing, and delivery date.

When participants were negotiating with a partner they perceived as emotionally ambivalent, pairs achieved higher joint value than did pairs in which the partner had expressed anger or no emotion. (When partners expressed happiness, the results were inconclusive.) Participants perceived ambivalent partners as submissive, and this submissiveness explained the pairs’ success at creating value in negotiation. Expressing ambivalence may have invited assertive behavior from negotiation partners and helped expand the pie of resources. Thus, when considering how emotions affect negotiations, note that your conflicting emotions in multi-issue negotiations may be less of a hindrance than you might think, especially if you can set a cooperative tone.

What insights have you reached regarding how emotions affect negotiations?

Apple isn’t used to making negotiation mistakes. The company has often found success by charging headfirst into unfamiliar industries, from book publishing to music to mobile phones, and disrupting its long-standing business models. In the early 2000s, for example, the company’s cofounder, Steve Jobs, pressured music labels to switch from selling $15 CDs to selling songs online for 99 cents each.

No surprise, then, that when the company decided to take Apple TV to the next level, it tried to sell media companies on new ways of doing business. But the company’s aggressive strategy led to a string of negotiation mistakes, as Shalini Ramachandran and Daisuke Wakabayashi reported in the Wall Street Journal in July 2016. The failed negotiation case study resonates to this day.

A Bigger Bite out of TV

For years, Apple referred to Apple TV—a small box that connects to TVs so that users can stream content from providers—as a “hobby,” according to Fortune.com. But when sales of the iPhone began to level off, the company became eager to beef up its TV business. In 2009, Apple tried to entice media companies to contribute channels to its service by offering above-average fees, but they balked when Apple would take only some of their channels.

In 2011, Apple tried to reach deals with cable companies Comcast and Time Warner Cable for joint TV services. But Apple asked for too high a payment from subscribers ($10 per month) and was reluctant to share details about its proposed interface, sources told the Journal.

Two years later, new meetings with Time Warner got off to a rocky start when Apple executive Eddy Cue reportedly showed up late at the cable company’s Manhattan offices dressed in jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, and tennis shoes. Apple’s aggressive demands at that meeting and others—such as that viewers should be allowed to skip ads when watching new shows—led TV channel owners to wonder whether “the Apple guys” had “any idea how this industry works,” one former Time Warner executive told the Journal.

One cable-industry executive summed up Cue’s strategy as simply saying, “We’re Apple.” Another told the Journal that the TV industry was comfortable saying no to Apple because it didn’t need a “white knight to come racing in” the way the music industry had.

More Unfruitful Talks

In early 2015, Cue began pitching media companies such as Disney, Fox, and CBS on the idea of putting together a “skinny bundle” of about 25 channels that would include their hit shows.

Cue reportedly made unheard-of demands of Disney, including freezing the monthly rate-per-viewer Apple would pay to license Disney channels for several years. Disney and other companies knew such a concession would set a bad precedent. Once again, talks broke down.

Following these negotiation mistakes, Apple was unable to announce a streaming TV service when it launched its newest Apple TV set-top box in September 2015.

Apple Tries to Go Hollywood

Apple then turned to revamping its TV device to allow apps from networks and to broaden its original programming. The company started meeting with Hollywood executives about creating new shows. The executives reportedly were “bemused” that Apple sent a little-known producer to negotiations that typically would involve high-level players from all sides, according to the Journal.

Eventually, Apple put its Apple TV set-top box on the back burner and invested heavily in Apple TV+, a subscription streaming service for original content, and Apple TV Channels, an app that manages users’ streaming services. According to one estimate, Apple TV+ was earning about $76 million in revenues by late 2020—but the company likely was still spending much more. Apple’s early negotiation mistakes contributed to it being slow out of the gate relative to competitors.

Lessons Learned from Apple’s Negotiation Mistakes

Apple made several common negotiation mistakes that could have been avoided by following these negotiation skills and strategies:

• Study industry practices. When proposing an alternative model in an unfamiliar industry, you need to be able to compellingly explain what advantages it would offer your counterpart over the prevailing one.
• Fulfill cultural norms. Norms surrounding meetings—such as what to wear, who should attend, and whether punctuality is important (hint: It almost always is)—can vary across industries and cultures. When meeting someone for the first time, research norms and expectations so you can make a great initial impression.
• Analyze power levels. If an aggressive approach worked for you in one negotiation, don’t assume that a hard-bargaining style will automatically transfer to negotiations with other organizations. Apple’s disruptive mentality was effective in industries that were desperate to innovate. The TV industry, by contrast, had less need to do business with Apple. Thus, it gained bargaining power from its ability to walk away. A mutual gains approach to negotiation would have been more effective for Apple.

What negotiation mistakes have you observed and learned from lately? 

Though we’re often advised against mixing friends and business, it’s not only inevitable at times; it can also be beneficial to everyone involved. The key is to negotiate in a way that ensures a win win relationship between parties, and in bigger business deals, that may include seeking outside help.

We connected with Guhan Subramanian, Joseph Flom Professor of Law & Business at Harvard Law School, Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law at Harvard Business School, and author of Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions (Norton, 2011), to answer a question regarding this topic.

How to maintain a win win relationship in personal negotiations

Q: My wife and I are friends with another couple who live in our neighborhood. For many years they have told us that they love our home and street and that if we ever wanted to move, they would like to buy our house. From the number of times they have said it, we know they’re serious. Well, we are now moving to another town and would like to sell our house to them. We could use a real estate broker, but I don’t see the point of paying a 5% commission when we already have the ideal buyer. Is there some process you could recommend? We’d like to get to a fair price while also preserving a win win relationship with our good friends.

A: I agree that it seems unnecessary to work through real estate brokers in the traditional way. One potential strategy would be to use different types of agents on both sides, such as real estate attorneys. Because these representatives generally work for an hourly rate, they should be cheaper in this scenario than brokers, who would divide a 5% commission. Each of you would begin by briefing your attorney on your reservation price (for your friends, their maximum willingness to pay; for you, your minimum willingness to accept), then the attorneys would negotiate on your behalf. Using intermediaries in this way is a common approach when both sides want a fair price but also want to preserve a win win relationship. For example, investment bankers often play this role in mergers and acquisitions because the two management teams often have to work together after their companies combine.

Another option would be to agree on a process for determining the fair value of the property. For example, you might hire three real estate brokers whom you trust (for the same fixed fee) and ask them each to independently appraise the property. (Alternatively, you might each pick one real estate broker and have those brokers decide on the third—a common approach in selecting three-judge arbitration panels.) Once you both have the three appraisals, you can negotiate a fair price, or you could simply agree in advance to take the average of the three.

A third possibility takes a page out of the private-equity playbook. Sometimes a buyer will offer what is called a “floor bid,” which the seller then has the right to shop around for a higher offer for some period of time, typically 45 to 60 days. In this context, you could ask your friends to make a floor bid with the understanding that you would hire a real estate broker to try to find a higher-value buyer. You would tell the broker the floor bid as well as the time frame the broker has to find a higher bid. You might even propose a different kind of fee arrangement for the broker—for example, 20% of any increment over the floor bid (rather than 5% of the total price) that he or she finds.

In my book Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions, I note that most real estate deals in the United States tend to be “tight”—that is, the seller has no right to pull out of the deal. In contrast, the proposed floor-bid structure would be “loose,” in that you could pull out to take a higher offer. You should make clear to your friends that you might not come back to them for a higher bid if your broker finds a better offer, a nuance that should induce them to put their best foot forward when making their initial offer. But the process would also benefit them by requiring the broker to find a better offer (net of the broker’s fees)—thus giving your friends a leg up against any prospective third-party bidder.

In general, research shows that when people feel good about the negotiation process, they are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome. In this context, a fair process should allow you to achieve a fair outcome and preserve a win win relationship with your neighbors. If all goes well, they will invite you to your old house for dinner once it’s all over!

How have you handled similar situations with mixing friends and business?

If you’ve ever made a decision tree, engaged in risk analysis, or created a scoring system when preparing for a negotiation, you benefited from the work of economist Howard Raiffa, whether you realized it or not. And the decisions you’ve made in your negotiations likely have been far smarter as a result. After all, decision-making and negotiation go hand in hand.

Raiffa, a Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School emeritus professor and co-founder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, died on July 8, 2016 at age 92. His pioneering work in decision-making and negotiation analysis has helped people across the globe reach better outcomes.

Questioning intuition in decision-making and negotiation

In his early career, Raiffa contributed to game theory, a mathematical approach to decision making. But before long he moved away from game theory because of its assumption that the world is populated by “impeccably rational, supersmart people,” as Raiffa wrote in his influential book The Art and Science of Negotiation: How to Resolve Conflicts and Get the Best out of Bargaining.

Raiffa developed a more descriptive and realistic approach to decision-making and negotiation. His approach considered how “erring folks like you and me actually behave,” he wrote, rather than “how we should behave if we were smarter, thought harder, were more consistent, were all-knowing.” He advised negotiators to replace their intuition with more careful analysis and to anticipate that their negotiation counterparts’ behavior could tend toward irrationality, according to Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman.

Researchers have since documented the many ways in which intuition fails us in the face of important decisions. Howard Raiffa added to this work by identifying overconfidence as a persistent bias that leads negotiators to take undue risks and make sloppy decisions.

A broad influence and a wealth of ideas in decision-making and negotiation

At Harvard, Howard Raiffa was among the first professors to have his students role-play negotiation simulations, now the predominant form of negotiation instruction worldwide. Raiffa also lent his expertise to negotiations in the news, including those related to the Cold War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

In his negotiation writing and teaching, Raiffa promoted a mutual-gains approach aimed at improving all parties’ outcomes, which he viewed as the most effective way to create value and build lasting relationships. He advised negotiators to analyze each party’s BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement; each party’s interests; and their relative importance.

Raiffa also addressed the ethical challenges of negotiation. In 1979, the Harvard Crimson reported that he concluded his Harvard Business School negotiation course by telling his students, “When we see we could improve our profit or further maximize our desired result, we might ask, Is this a ‘dirty’ dollar or a ‘clean’ one that we could earn here? What would happen if everybody did this? Would we be able to sleep at night if we did this? How would we feel if we had to explain this to our families?”

After his retirement from Harvard in 1994, Raiffa and his wife, Estelle, to whom he was married for 71 years, moved to Arizona. There, Raiffa dug into his wealth of ideas. “I had the luxury of doing exactly what I wanted, and my files were full of partially done projects,” he wrote in a memoir. “I became animated once again and realized I would continue what I did pre-retirement—only with fewer interruptions.”

Making smart choices

In his book with John S. Hammond and Ralph L. Keeney, Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, Howard Raiffa presented an eight-step decision-making model that can be applied to any important decision:

• Work on the right decision problem. Frame the decision you’re facing carefully, being sure to acknowledge any complexities and avoid making assumptions that limit your options.
• Specify your objectives. Consider what you want to accomplish most and which of your interests, values, concerns, and fears are most relevant to achieving your goal.
• Create imaginative alternatives. Make sure you consider a range of creative and desirable alternatives to meeting your goal.
• Understand the consequences. What would be the consequences of achieving your goal? Think about both the pros and the cons.
• Grapple with tradeoffs. Because objectives often compete, you need to strike a balance between them by setting priorities—which can, in turn, require tradeoffs. For example, buying an affordable house may require you to rule out your first-choice neighborhood.
• Clarify your uncertainties. Confront uncertainty by weighing the likelihood of different outcomes and assessing their possible effects.
• Think hard about your risk tolerance. People vary in their willingness to accept risk and in the risk they’ll accept from one situation to the next. Determine the risks inherent in your choices and how willing you are to accept them.
• Consider linked decisions. The choices you make today could very well affect those you face tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow affect your choices today. Gather the information you need to resolve choices you will likely face in the future before making short-term decisions.

Have you applied lessons from Howard Raiffa to your own negotiations?

Q:My wife and I are friends with another couple who live in our neighborhood. For many years they have told us that they love our home and street and that if we ever wanted to move, they would like to buy our house. From the number of times they have said it, we know they’re serious. Well, we are now moving to another town and would like to sell our house to them. We could use a real estate broker, but I don’t see the point of paying a 5% commission when we already have the ideal buyer. Is there some process you could recommend? We’d like to get to a fair price while also preserving the relationship with our good friends.

A: I agree that it seems unnecessary to work through real estate brokers in the traditional way. One potential strategy would be to use different types of agents on both sides, such as real estate attorneys. Because these representatives generally work for an hourly rate, they should be cheaper in this scenario than brokers, who would divide a 5% commission. Each of you would begin by briefing your attorney on your reservation price (for your friends, their maximum willingness to pay; for you, your minimum willingness to accept), then the attorneys would negotiate on your behalf. Using intermediaries in this way is a common approach when both sides want a fair price but also want to preserve their relationship. For example, investment bankers often play this role in mergers and acquisitions because the two management teams often have to work together after their companies combine.

Another option would be to agree on a process for determining the fair value of the property. For example, you might hire three real estate brokers whom you trust (for the same fixed fee) and ask them each to independently appraise the property. (Alternatively, you might each pick one real estate broker and have those brokers decide on the third—a common approach in selecting three-judge arbitration panels.) Once you both have the three appraisals, you can negotiate a fair price, or you could simply agree in advance to take the average of the three.

A third possibility takes a page out of the private-equity playbook. Sometimes a buyer will offer what is called a “floor bid,” which the seller then has the right to shop around for a higher offer for some period of time, typically 45 to 60 days. In this context, you could ask your friends to make a floor bid with the understanding that you would hire a real estate broker to try to find a higher-value buyer. You would tell the broker the floor bid as well as the time frame the broker has to find a higher bid. You might even propose a different kind of fee arrangement for the broker—for example, 20% of any increment over the floor bid (rather than 5% of the total price) that he or she finds.

In my book Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions, I note that most real estate deals in the United States tend to be “tight”—that is, the seller has no right to pull out of the deal. In contrast, the proposed floor-bid structure would be “loose,” in that you could pull out to take a higher offer. You should make clear to your friends that you might not come back to them for a higher bid if your broker finds a better offer, a nuance that should induce them to put their best foot forward when making their initial offer. But the process would also benefit them by requiring the broker to find a better offer (net of the broker’s fees)—thus giving your friends a leg up against any prospective third-party bidder.

In general, research shows that when people feel good about the negotiation process, they are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome. In this context, a fair process should allow you to achieve a fair outcome and preserve the relationship with your neighbors. If all goes well, they will invite you to your old house for dinner once it’s all over!

Guhan Subramanian
Joseph Flom Professor of Law & Business,
Harvard Law School
Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law,
Harvard Business School
Academic Editor,  Negotiation Briefings
Author,  Dealmaking: The New Strategy of Negotiauctions (Norton, 2011)

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Males and females react to one-on-one conflict differently, research suggests, and perhaps from an early age. Irreconcilable conflicts are more likely to disintegrate the activities and social groups of girls than those of boys, studies have found. Male college roommates were less likely than females to become embroiled in conflicts that led them to change roommates, Emmanuel College professor Joyce F. Benenson and her colleagues concluded from their research. And in a workplace study by Sun Young Lee of University College London and colleagues, female coworkers reported their relationships as being more damaged after competition than men did.

Benenson and Harvard University professor Richard W. Wrangham recently took a closer look at whether men and women rebound from conflict differently within the context of sports competitions. They had coders study videotapes of what happened after pairs of men and pairs of women from 44 countries finished matches in four sports: tennis, table tennis, badminton, and boxing. The coders found that following their competitions, men were far more likely than women to engage in friendly physical contact, such as handshakes, pats on the back, and hugs.

The results don’t contradict ample research showing that men are more competitive and aggressive than women. Rather, they show that men, at least in sports, may feel more compelled than women to strengthen bonds with adversaries after the competition ends.

Why? Drawing from evolutionary biology, Benenson and Wrangham cite the male warrior hypothesis, or the idea that men evolved with a strong motivation to repair relationships following competition and conflict due to the need to gather allies who could help them defend their group from outsiders in the future. Similarly, the authors note that rival male chimpanzees from the same troop tend to reconcile immediately following brutal fights— because of their need to build a broad, cooperative network to face off against other troops of chimps.

Meanwhile, human women, like female chimps, evolved to focus on cultivating cooperative relationships with family and a small number of close friends who could help with child rearing. Evolutionarily, women may have had less of a need than men to repair relationships with those outside their circle, the researchers theorize.

It would be premature to generalize the results of this study on sports competitions to business conflicts. But the findings offer interesting food for thought on how we may continue to be influenced by age-old human behaviors and should inspire negotiation researchers to examine possible differences in how men and women react to workplace conflict.

Resource: “Cross-Cultural Sex Differences in Post-Conflict Affiliation Following Sports Matches,” by Joyce F. Benenson and Richard W. Wrangham, Current Biology, 2016.

Males and females react to one-on-one conflict differently, research suggests, and perhaps from an early age. Irreconcilable conflicts are more likely to disintegrate the activities and social groups of girls than those of boys, studies have found. Male college roommates were less likely than females to become embroiled in conflicts that led them to change roommates, Emmanuel College professor Joyce F. Benenson and her colleagues concluded from their research. And in a workplace study by Sun Young Lee of University College London and colleagues, female coworkers reported their relationships as being more damaged after competition than men did.

Benenson and Harvard University professor Richard W. Wrangham recently took a closer look at whether men and women rebound from conflict differently within the context of sports competitions. They had coders study videotapes of what happened after pairs of men and pairs of women from 44 countries finished matches in four sports: tennis, table tennis, badminton, and boxing. The coders found that following their competitions, men were far more likely than women to engage in friendly physical contact, such as handshakes, pats on the back, and hugs.

The results don’t contradict ample research showing that men are more competitive and aggressive than women. Rather, they show that men, at least in sports, may feel more compelled than women to strengthen bonds with adversaries after the competition ends.

Why? Drawing from evolutionary biology, Benenson and Wrangham cite the male warrior hypothesis, or the idea that men evolved with a strong motivation to repair relationships following competition and conflict due to the need to gather allies who could help them defend their group from outsiders in the future. Similarly, the authors note that rival male chimpanzees from the same troop tend to reconcile immediately following brutal fights— because of their need to build a broad, cooperative network to face off against other troops of chimps.

Meanwhile, human women, like female chimps, evolved to focus on cultivating cooperative relationships with family and a small number of close friends who could help with child rearing. Evolutionarily, women may have had less of a need than men to repair relationships with those outside their circle, the researchers theorize.

It would be premature to generalize the results of this study on sports competitions to business conflicts. But the findings offer interesting food for thought on how we may continue to be influenced by age-old human behaviors and should inspire negotiation researchers to examine possible differences in how men and women react to workplace conflict.

Resource: “Cross-Cultural Sex Differences in Post-Conflict Affiliation Following Sports Matches,” by Joyce F. Benenson and Richard W. Wrangham, Current Biology, 2016.

January 16, 2016, was a memorable day in U.S.-Iranian relations. That day, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was in compliance with the terms of the nuclear agreement it reached in mid-2015 with the United States, which represented Russia, China, France, Germany, and Great Britain in the talks. The news prompted the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations to officially lift their longtime economic sanctions against Iran. That same day, following more than a year of negotiation, Iran released four Americans who had been imprisoned in Iran; in return, the United States freed seven Iranians and rescinded international arrest warrants on 14 other Iranians.

Both the nuclear and prisoner-swap deals were controversial. In the United States, officials and observers on the political right objected to the idea of the Obama administration agreeing to concessions on Iran’s nuclear program, which they said could threaten U.S. security. The prisoner deal was panned for setting a dangerous precedent that could put Americans in Iran at risk.

Moreover, to some, the timing of the two deals seemed suspicious. U.S. and Iranian leaders had made efforts to separate the two sets of negotiations, the New York Times reports. Yet the fact that Iran freed Americans the same day its sanctions were lifted gave the impression that the prisoners had been pawns in a larger game.

This past summer, new revelations revived criticism of the two deals. In this article we describe those developments and then offer advice on how to ensure your negotiation and its outcomes will be palatable to observers.

A settling of dues or a ransom?

On August 3, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that on the same day Iran released the four imprisoned Americans, the Obama administration airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran. The image painted by the Journal of “wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies . . . flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane” suggested to many that the White House had secretly authorized a ransom payment for the prisoners.

In fact, the $400 million was the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement that the Obama administration had reached with Iran over a failed arms deal the two countries had signed back in 1979, the Journal reports. President Obama announced the resolution of the dispute and its terms on January 17, the day after the prisoners were released, but did not disclose the timing of the $400 million payment.

At first, senior U.S. officials insisted that there was no connection between the payment and the prisoner release. President Obama himself denied the accusation, saying, “We do not pay ransom. We didn’t here and we won’t in the future.”

The fact that Iran freed Americans the same day its sanctions were lifted gave the impression that the prisoners had been pawns in a larger game.

The New York Times reported that senior U.S. Department of Justice officials had expressed reservations about how it would look to send a plane loaded with cash to Iran at the same time that Iran was releasing imprisoned Americans. But the U.S. State Department, which led the prisoner-swap negotiations, reportedly overruled those objections, with approval from the White House.

The story took another turn on August 18, when the State Department conceded that it had delayed making the $400 million payment to Iran for several hours on January 16 to ensure that Iran released the imprisoned Americans. State Department spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing that the United States “took advantage of the leverage” gained from dangling the possibility of the cash payment to ensure that the Americans “got out safely and efficiently.” The two deals—the prisoner release and the financial settlement with Iran—were separate, he noted, but their outcomes were deliberately timed to coincide. The news fanned Republicans’ charges that the Obama administration had paid a ransom for hostages. On the campaign trail, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Obama had lied about the motivation for the $400 million payment. House Republicans said they would hold hearings on the payment and introduce legislation aimed at preventing future hidden cash payments to Iran.

Questionable exemptions

On September 1, the Iran nuclear deal returned to the spotlight when the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security released a report alleging that the United States and its foreign negotiating partners had secretly agreed to allow Iran to evade certain restrictions in the agreement. The allowances were made to meet a deadline for securing relief from economic sanctions for Iran. The report drew on information from officials of several governments involved in the negotiations.

Iran was allowed to exceed the deal’s limits on the amount of low-enriched uranium it can keep in its nuclear facilities, among other exemptions, according to the report. A joint commission established to oversee the deal’s implementation, made up of representatives of the United States and its five partners in the negotiation, plus Iran, reportedly approved the exemptions.

The report claimed that the Obama administration had informed Congress about the exemptions on January 16, the day Iran’s sanctions were eased. But Democratic senator Robert Menendez, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a leading opponent of the Iran deal, told Reuters he had not been briefed on the exemptions.

The news revived Republican criticism of the nuclear deal and raised concerns among nuclear-arms experts that such secret allowances make it difficult to know how much weapons-grade uranium Iran is capable of producing.

Bringing ethics to the forefront

The two revelations—of pallets of cash being used as leverage in the release of American prisoners, and Iran’s secret exemptions in the nuclear deal—cast a pall over two of President Obama’s signature negotiations. The stories remind us of the importance of considering not only what a negotiation may achieve but also how outsiders will judge the fairness and ethicality of its processes and outcomes. How can professional negotiators avoid the mistakes of the Obama administration and secure broad approval for their deals? Consider the following three guidelines:

1. When dealing with an enemy, take extra precautions.

There are often valid reasons for doing business with a sworn enemy, such as a competitor you don’t trust or someone whose unethical behavior you condemn. For example, members of a community group might decide to sit down with a polluter in their area after public protests have failed to change its behavior. In such situations, observers may object to your decision to negotiate and try to put up roadblocks. You might meet with these potential deal spoilers privately and try to listen, without judgment, to their concerns. If you decide to move forward with negotiations, aim to keep interested observers informed and as engaged as possible throughout the process.

2. Link negotiations with care.

When you’re engaging in two negotiations with the same party (or even different parties) at once, you may stumble upon ways to link the two deals to maximum advantage. In 2015, for example, the New York Yankees simultaneously faced negotiations with (1) a fan who had caught a prized Alex Rodriguez home-run baseball and (2) Rodriguez over a marketing bonus. Team executives wrapped up both deals to their satisfaction by linking them. They convinced the fan to hand over the A-Rod home-run ball in exchange for a significant donation to a charity the fan supported and then included the ball as part of their revised offer to Rodriguez.

Such linkages can provide opportunities, but they can also create controversy in touchy situations. To take one example, to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Soviet Union in 1962, President John F. Kennedy agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Turkey. Kennedy denied that the two issues were linked, but they clearly were.

The lesson? Before linking two negotiations, consider how the parties involved, and interested observers, too, would react to the linkages if they found out about them.

3. Consider the optics.

This leads us to a broader point: It is always wise to consider what would happen if your decisions and behavior in a negotiation became public knowledge. That doesn’t mean your negotiations can’t be private. But it does mean that you should pause to think about how various proposals and arrangements would affect outsiders. When you do so, you are likely to bring ethical concerns to the forefront and clear the way for a fair and honest negotiation.