In these difficult times, many of us are thinking about how to help make the world better, including in our negotiations. The good news is that we can do so without huge sacrifices, writes Max H. Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, in his new book, Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness (Harper Business, 2020). Bazerman talked to us about how negotiators can create more value for all by broadening their perspective.

Negotiation Briefings: What does making “better, not perfect” decisions mean to you?

Max H. Bazerman: The book builds on a philosophical perspective that has a terrible name, utilitarianism, which asserts that an ethical decision is one that creates the greatest amount of pleasure and minimizes the greatest amount of pain. From a negotiation standpoint, this means creating as much value as possible, either across all people or all sentient beings. That’s a lovely goal, yet maximizing value without giving special consideration to yourself and those most important to you isn’t reasonable for most of us. To become a more ethical person, my goal isn’t to maximize value perfectly, but to do better than I have in the past and to do better next year than I’m doing now. In my book, I aim to provide a realistic view of how we can be better rather than perfect.

NB: How does business negotiation apply to the idea of better, not perfect?

MB: In the negotiation literature, there’s a familiar graph that plots your outcomes on the x-axis and those of your negotiating counterpart on the y-axis. A core theme is that we can create a bigger pie by moving to the northeast of this space of outcomes for both parties. We’re critical of those who view negotiation as a fixed pie and miss opportunities to expand the pie of value through tradeoffs across issues.

As I moved to the world of ethics, I began to picture outcomes for oneself on one axis and outcomes for all others—not just one’s negotiating partner—on the other axis. It’s great if you want to trade some of your welfare for the welfare of others who need it more, but you can often create value for others without such sacrifices, simply by making wiser decisions about how you spend your time and what you do at work.

NB: People who work for not-for-profit organizations have special moral obligations. Any advice for them?

MB: Too many not-for-profits forget that their main objective is to create value for those in need. Not-for-profits sometimes spend too much effort competing against other not-for-profits for the same charitable dollars. Those in need often would be far better off if some of those not-for-profits combined to reduce their overhead and generate more donations. Not-for-profits also destroy value when they hire for-profit fundraising companies that take a chunk of the money they raise. The charity often argues that they wouldn’t have gained such money otherwise. But donors could have given it to another organization that would have used it more effectively. By comparison, the charity Share Our Strength raises money in clever and creative ways. A chef might contribute their labor to a food event where donors happily pay to eat the food, and those who are hungry are the beneficiaries. Such an approach creates value rather than moving value from one not-for-profit to another.

NB: Can you give an example of a negotiation from the news that went awry, from an ethical standpoint, and how it might have gone better?

MB: Donald Trump presents himself as a master negotiator. But as a businessperson, Trump took advantage of U.S. bankruptcy laws to go out of business many times, leaving the debt he accumulated to others. That negotiation framework doesn’t work for a government.

Trump’s claim that his great negotiation skills were going to bring us enormous success have not come to fruition. Consider his trade negotiations, the most visible being with China. Under President [Barack] Obama, a variety of trade agreements were serving America very well. China, however, was not the most reliable trading partner. What was the best way to put pressure on China? Consider that many of China’s other trading partners were also unhappy with its behavior. If the United States formed an alliance with our allies and confronted China, we likely would have made significant progress toward a better trade agreement.

Instead, Trump started trade wars with most of our allies, so they were no longer even on our side regarding trade. Then he took a variety of unilateral actions against China, which predictably retaliated. We ended up with a trade war that harmed American manufacturers. Overall, Trump’s trade strategy made China a bit worse off, the United States much worse off, and the world worse off. Trump destroys value by mistakenly thinking he can simply issue a tough demand and the other side will cave and grant a concession. That makes him a bad negotiator. From an ethical perspective, the amount of value he’s destroyed and harm he’s caused makes him a bad human being as well.

In these difficult times, many of us are thinking about how to help make the world better, including in our negotiations. The good news is that we can do so without huge sacrifices, writes Max H. Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, in his new book, Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness (Harper Business, 2020). Bazerman talked to us about how negotiators can create more value for all by broadening their perspective.

Negotiation Briefings: What does making “better, not perfect” decisions mean to you?

Max H. Bazerman: The book builds on a philosophical perspective that has a terrible name, utilitarianism, which asserts that an ethical decision is one that creates the greatest amount of pleasure and minimizes the greatest amount of pain. From a negotiation standpoint, this means creating as much value as possible, either across all people or all sentient beings. That’s a lovely goal, yet maximizing value without giving special consideration to yourself and those most important to you isn’t reasonable for most of us. To become a more ethical person, my goal isn’t to maximize value perfectly, but to do better than I have in the past and to do better next year than I’m doing now. In my book, I aim to provide a realistic view of how we can be better rather than perfect.

NB: How does business negotiation apply to the idea of better, not perfect?

MB: In the negotiation literature, there’s a familiar graph that plots your outcomes on the x-axis and those of your negotiating counterpart on the y-axis. A core theme is that we can create a bigger pie by moving to the northeast of this space of outcomes for both parties. We’re critical of those who view negotiation as a fixed pie and miss opportunities to expand the pie of value through tradeoffs across issues.

As I moved to the world of ethics, I began to picture outcomes for oneself on one axis and outcomes for all others—not just one’s negotiating partner—on the other axis. It’s great if you want to trade some of your welfare for the welfare of others who need it more, but you can often create value for others without such sacrifices, simply by making wiser decisions about how you spend your time and what you do at work.

NB: People who work for not-for-profit organizations have special moral obligations. Any advice for them?

MB: Too many not-for-profits forget that their main objective is to create value for those in need. Not-for-profits sometimes spend too much effort competing against other not-for-profits for the same charitable dollars. Those in need often would be far better off if some of those not-for-profits combined to reduce their overhead and generate more donations. Not-for-profits also destroy value when they hire for-profit fundraising companies that take a chunk of the money they raise. The charity often argues that they wouldn’t have gained such money otherwise. But donors could have given it to another organization that would have used it more effectively. By comparison, the charity Share Our Strength raises money in clever and creative ways. A chef might contribute their labor to a food event where donors happily pay to eat the food, and those who are hungry are the beneficiaries. Such an approach creates value rather than moving value from one not-for-profit to another.

NB: Can you give an example of a negotiation from the news that went awry, from an ethical standpoint, and how it might have gone better?

MB: Donald Trump presents himself as a master negotiator. But as a businessperson, Trump took advantage of U.S. bankruptcy laws to go out of business many times, leaving the debt he accumulated to others. That negotiation framework doesn’t work for a government.

Trump’s claim that his great negotiation skills were going to bring us enormous success have not come to fruition. Consider his trade negotiations, the most visible being with China. Under President [Barack] Obama, a variety of trade agreements were serving America very well. China, however, was not the most reliable trading partner. What was the best way to put pressure on China? Consider that many of China’s other trading partners were also unhappy with its behavior. If the United States formed an alliance with our allies and confronted China, we likely would have made significant progress toward a better trade agreement.

Instead, Trump started trade wars with most of our allies, so they were no longer even on our side regarding trade. Then he took a variety of unilateral actions against China, which predictably retaliated. We ended up with a trade war that harmed American manufacturers. Overall, Trump’s trade strategy made China a bit worse off, the United States much worse off, and the world worse off. Trump destroys value by mistakenly thinking he can simply issue a tough demand and the other side will cave and grant a concession. That makes him a bad negotiator. From an ethical perspective, the amount of value he’s destroyed and harm he’s caused makes him a bad human being as well.

Group negotiations over emotional issues can quickly deteriorate. After a player walkout put the remainder of the National Basketball Association’s season in jeopardy, leaders stepped up to help players and owners come to an agreement they could all accept.

An unstable agreement

As we described in our August issue, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) agreed in June to wrap up the league’s 2019–20 season, which had been halted by the coronavirus, in a “bubble” at Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. Players and staff would be protected from the outside world as they practiced and played televised games.

But, amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd, some players objected to being offered up as entertainment while isolated from family and friends. To make the bubble more palatable to Black players, who comprise about 80% of the NBA, the league began allowing them to kneel during the national anthem and wear agreed-upon protest slogans on their uniforms. “BLACK LIVES MATTER” was printed on court floors.

Some players expressed a desire to leave the bubble to reunite with their families and protest in their communities. Others thought the playoffs gave them the most visible protest platform.

As the NBA wrapped up its shortened regular season and commenced playoffs, it succeeded in keeping the coronavirus out of the bubble. But on August 23, after a White police officer shot Jacob Blake multiple times in the back in Kenosha, Wisc., some players questioned the point of playing basketball.

“We shouldn’t have even come to this damn place, to be honest,” Milwaukee Bucks guard George Hill said at a press conference the following day. “I think coming here just took all the focal points off what the issues are.”

Two days later, on Wednesday the 26th, the Bucks refused to come out of their locker room for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Hill and teammate Sterling Brown read a team statement calling on the Wisconsin state legislature to “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality, and criminal justice reform.”

The Women’s National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer canceled their Wednesday games as well, and three Major League Baseball games were also called off.

NBA team owners openly supported the protest, postponing all three of that day’s games. As compared to the National Football League, the NBA has a relatively harmonious relationship with its players. NBA owners split revenue evenly with players and give them some leeway to express their views on social issues. Earlier in August, NBA owners committed $300 million over 10 years to an economic empowerment fund for Black Americans. But, obviously, they had financial incentives to hope the players would finish up the season.

That evening, the players gathered within their bubble—first with coaches, then on their own—to discuss the issue.

Hashing it out

The emotional meeting reportedly opened with a phone call to the family of Jacob Blake before turning to the question at hand. Some players expressed a desire to leave the bubble to reunite with their families and protest in their communities. Others thought the playoffs gave them the most visible protest platform, according to Yahoo! Sports.

A number of players reportedly groused that the Bucks’ hasty unilateral decision to boycott, which came without concrete demands, had caught them off guard and placed them in a difficult situation. After disrupting the playoffs, the Bucks irritated some players, including Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James, by favoring a resumption of play.

Michele Roberts, the executive director of the players’ union, spoke up about the financial ramifications— especially to younger players—of ending the season. Los Angeles Clippers guard Patrick Beverley interrupted her and, when she asked to continue, said, “No, I pay your salary,” according to Yahoo! Sports. Other players told Beverley that disrespect would not be tolerated.

Miami Heat forward Udonis Haslem, a veteran player, reportedly reminded James that the league was likely to fall behind whatever decision he advocated. “We’re out,” James said. Most of his teammates and the Los Angeles Clippers filed out the door with him. No other teams joined them.

After three hours, tensions were running high, and the group agreed to reconvene the following morning. “The hope from the collective was after a good night’s sleep, players would be in a better space to make a sound decision,” Yahoo! Sports reports.

Full court press

At the morning meeting, the Lakers and Clippers reversed course and joined the other teams in advocating for the playoffs to resume. When several players objected, James and other leaders in the group vowed to speak to team owners on their behalf— and to support ending the season if the owners were not responsive.

Meanwhile, another giant of the sport had stepped into the fray: NBA legend Michael Jordan, who owns the Charlotte Hornets and is the only Black majority owner in the league. Jordan reached out to NBPA president Chris Paul to find out what the players hoped to achieve, then offered to help them make their case to the NBA board of governors, ESPN.com reports.

During their own Thursday morning meeting, team owners expressed support for the players and discussed how they might amplify their voices while continuing the season. Jordan reportedly urged his colleagues to listen before offering solutions.

In a Zoom call that afternoon, James called on team owners to take more concrete actions to fight systemic racism and reportedly was reassured by their promises to do more. The playoffs resumed that weekend.

Nothing but net

Here are a few takeaways from the recent negotiations within the NBA:

• Amass a strong coalition. The Bucks’ decision to boycott without notifying other teams or trying to garner their support created disarray and conflict among the players. The Bucks likely would have amassed greater negotiating power by forming a broader coalition.
• Recognize who will be heard. The players concluded that James was uniquely positioned to bring their concerns and complaints to the league. Wisely, they secured his commitment to represent more marginal voices.
• Find a mediator who straddles both sides. The fact that Jordan was trusted and respected by each side made him the ideal mediator and advocate for the players’ views. In group negotiations, try to identify someone on the opposing team who is sympathetic to your cause—and ask for their support.
• Find ways to stay in the game. Both owners and the majority of players recognized they had strong incentives to get along and forge an agreement. That recognition led them to work together rather than split apart.

Group negotiations over emotional issues can quickly deteriorate. After a player walkout put the remainder of the National Basketball Association’s season in jeopardy, leaders stepped up to help players and owners come to an agreement they could all accept.

An unstable agreement

As we described in our August issue, the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) agreed in June to wrap up the league’s 2019–20 season, which had been halted by the coronavirus, in a “bubble” at Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. Players and staff would be protected from the outside world as they practiced and played televised games.

But, amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd, some players objected to being offered up as entertainment while isolated from family and friends. To make the bubble more palatable to Black players, who comprise about 80% of the NBA, the league began allowing them to kneel during the national anthem and wear agreed-upon protest slogans on their uniforms. “BLACK LIVES MATTER” was printed on court floors.

Some players expressed a desire to leave the bubble to reunite with their families and protest in their communities. Others thought the playoffs gave them the most visible protest platform.

As the NBA wrapped up its shortened regular season and commenced playoffs, it succeeded in keeping the coronavirus out of the bubble. But on August 23, after a White police officer shot Jacob Blake multiple times in the back in Kenosha, Wisc., some players questioned the point of playing basketball.

“We shouldn’t have even come to this damn place, to be honest,” Milwaukee Bucks guard George Hill said at a press conference the following day. “I think coming here just took all the focal points off what the issues are.”

Two days later, on Wednesday the 26th, the Bucks refused to come out of their locker room for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Hill and teammate Sterling Brown read a team statement calling on the Wisconsin state legislature to “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality, and criminal justice reform.”

The Women’s National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer canceled their Wednesday games as well, and three Major League Baseball games were also called off.

NBA team owners openly supported the protest, postponing all three of that day’s games. As compared to the National Football League, the NBA has a relatively harmonious relationship with its players. NBA owners split revenue evenly with players and give them some leeway to express their views on social issues. Earlier in August, NBA owners committed $300 million over 10 years to an economic empowerment fund for Black Americans. But, obviously, they had financial incentives to hope the players would finish up the season.

That evening, the players gathered within their bubble—first with coaches, then on their own—to discuss the issue.

Hashing it out

The emotional meeting reportedly opened with a phone call to the family of Jacob Blake before turning to the question at hand. Some players expressed a desire to leave the bubble to reunite with their families and protest in their communities. Others thought the playoffs gave them the most visible protest platform, according to Yahoo! Sports.

A number of players reportedly groused that the Bucks’ hasty unilateral decision to boycott, which came without concrete demands, had caught them off guard and placed them in a difficult situation. After disrupting the playoffs, the Bucks irritated some players, including Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James, by favoring a resumption of play.

Michele Roberts, the executive director of the players’ union, spoke up about the financial ramifications— especially to younger players—of ending the season. Los Angeles Clippers guard Patrick Beverley interrupted her and, when she asked to continue, said, “No, I pay your salary,” according to Yahoo! Sports. Other players told Beverley that disrespect would not be tolerated.

Miami Heat forward Udonis Haslem, a veteran player, reportedly reminded James that the league was likely to fall behind whatever decision he advocated. “We’re out,” James said. Most of his teammates and the Los Angeles Clippers filed out the door with him. No other teams joined them.

After three hours, tensions were running high, and the group agreed to reconvene the following morning. “The hope from the collective was after a good night’s sleep, players would be in a better space to make a sound decision,” Yahoo! Sports reports.

Full court press

At the morning meeting, the Lakers and Clippers reversed course and joined the other teams in advocating for the playoffs to resume. When several players objected, James and other leaders in the group vowed to speak to team owners on their behalf— and to support ending the season if the owners were not responsive.

Meanwhile, another giant of the sport had stepped into the fray: NBA legend Michael Jordan, who owns the Charlotte Hornets and is the only Black majority owner in the league. Jordan reached out to NBPA president Chris Paul to find out what the players hoped to achieve, then offered to help them make their case to the NBA board of governors, ESPN.com reports.

During their own Thursday morning meeting, team owners expressed support for the players and discussed how they might amplify their voices while continuing the season. Jordan reportedly urged his colleagues to listen before offering solutions.

In a Zoom call that afternoon, James called on team owners to take more concrete actions to fight systemic racism and reportedly was reassured by their promises to do more. The playoffs resumed that weekend.

Nothing but net

Here are a few takeaways from the recent negotiations within the NBA:

• Amass a strong coalition. The Bucks’ decision to boycott without notifying other teams or trying to garner their support created disarray and conflict among the players. The Bucks likely would have amassed greater negotiating power by forming a broader coalition.
• Recognize who will be heard. The players concluded that James was uniquely positioned to bring their concerns and complaints to the league. Wisely, they secured his commitment to represent more marginal voices.
• Find a mediator who straddles both sides. The fact that Jordan was trusted and respected by each side made him the ideal mediator and advocate for the players’ views. In group negotiations, try to identify someone on the opposing team who is sympathetic to your cause—and ask for their support.
• Find ways to stay in the game. Both owners and the majority of players recognized they had strong incentives to get along and forge an agreement. That recognition led them to work together rather than split apart.

This past May, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments on conference calls rather than in person. To keep chaos in check, Chief Justice John Roberts imposed order on the typically freewheeling process of justices questioning attorneys representing both sides of a case: He began calling on justices one by one, in order of seniority, and tried to give them roughly equal speaking time. Despite this effort to be evenhanded, over the course of 10 cases, Roberts disproportionately interrupted the three female justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor), even when they spoke the same amount or less than their male colleagues, according to an analysis by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor Tonja Jacobi and University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman.

Women tend to get less speaking time in workplace and business discussions, abundant research shows. Although people tend to perceive women as being more talkative than men, men actually talk more—and interrupt more—than women do, Adrienne Hancock and Benjamin A. Rubin of George Washington University found in a 2014 study. Men who speak more often are perceived as more competent, whereas women who speak more often are perceived as less competent, Yale psychologist Victoria Brescoll found in her research. Even on Twitter, men are retweeted twice as often as women, although women make up the majority of the platform’s users.

Such inequities may be exacerbated when we negotiate at a distance. Because body language and other nonverbal cues can be more difficult to read in online formats, meeting attendees may be more likely to interrupt one another, with women often losing the battle for speaking time.

Or maybe we’re just noticing the disparity more. After all, these challenges existed well before we all went online, Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah Kolb told Negotiation Briefings. From 2011 to 2017, male Supreme Court justices and attorneys arguing before the Court interrupted the female justices twice as often as the male justices, a study by Jacobi and Goodwin Procter LLP associate Dylan Schweers shows.

In a society where men have historically been granted higher status than women and are stereotyped as assertive, women’s ideas and opinions tend to be undervalued in the workplace and beyond. As a result, men are more likely to dominate conversations, women are interrupted more frequently, and men are sometimes given credit for women’s contributions.

In her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” writer Rebecca Solnit ruefully recounted frequent experiences she’d had in which men condescended to her in conversation by assuming she didn’t know things she did, a phenomenon that came to be known as “mansplaining” when the essay went viral. The terms “manterrupting” and “bropriating” (in which a man takes credit for a woman’s idea) have also caught on.

Of course, as Solnit acknowledges, many men listen respectfully to women and value their ideas. But the cumulative impact of feeling marginalized and overlooked takes a toll—both on women in the workplace and on the organizations deprived of their good ideas.

Interruptions, dismissiveness, condescension, and other conversational put-downs are particularly common when one party holds more power or status than the other—whether because of their gender, race, age, position, or other difference. Such behaviors are part of the “shadow negotiation”—the unspoken dynamics that hum beneath the surface of both formal business negotiations and informal workplace negotiations, including how well we treat each other and whose voice is heard, write Kolb and Judith Williams in their book The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Navigate the Hidden Agendas That Determine Bargaining Success (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

There are three types of strategies, or “moves,” that women and others who are at risk of being undervalued and overlooked can take to guide the shadow negotiation, according to Kolb and Williams. Power moves can be used to show reluctant negotiators the value of negotiating with you. Process moves can counteract silencing—when you’re being interrupted, dismissed, or ignored. And appreciative moves can “unstick” negotiations stalled by conflict, suspicion, or impasse.

1. Plant the seeds of your ideas.

By working behind the scenes, you may be able to make it easier for your ideas to be heard, according to Kolb and Williams. In Everyday Negotiation, they give the example of a manager, Pat, whose fellow managers tended to tune her out during annual staff reviews because they felt she pushed her ideas too hard. As a result, her team was at risk of being overlooked in decisions about merit raises, which would reflect poorly on Pat.

As the next staff review approached, Pat made a point during lunches with her fellow managers to ask about openings in their departments. She’d then talk up her star employees and say it was too bad they weren’t available. By informally promoting her team members in this manner, Pat earned name recognition for her top staff and was able to make herself heard in the staff review without needing to oversell. This type of process move may be especially beneficial to women, who risk a backlash when they take a direct or aggressive approach.

2. Enlist allies behind the scenes.

In the early days of the Obama administration, men made up two-thirds of the president’s top aides. Among their ranks were a number of forceful personalities, including then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and economic adviser Lawrence Summers. Female advisers found they were being excluded from key meetings and, when they did attend, being ignored.

Together, they adopted a strategy that they called amplification: “When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author,” Juliet Eilperin reported in the Washington Post in 2016. Amplification prevented the men in the room from taking credit for the women’s good ideas and encouraged them to recognize the women’s contributions. The women staffers also complained to the president that their voices weren’t being heard.

As a result of their power moves, Obama “began calling more often on women and junior aides,” according to Eilperin. By the president’s second term, women comprised half of his inner circle. “Backstage efforts provide opportunities to gather momentum behind your agenda,” write Kolb and Williams. “As that support grows, it isolates the blockers, making continued opposition harder and harder for them.”

3. Address power dynamics.

If Chief Justice Roberts had difficulty performing his timekeeping responsibility accurately while engaging in oral arguments, it’s hardly surprising. Multitasking leads to shallow thinking, which in turn makes us more susceptible to bias. A logical solution would be for someone else to take charge of timekeeping if Supreme Court arguments continue to be heard remotely, Jacobi and Litman suggest. Doing so would allow Roberts to focus more on the substance of the discussion and likely result in more evenhanded turn taking.

If you notice on your video calls that some people seem reluctant to speak or are being interrupted, look for ways to make the environment more hospitable and equitable. Calling on those who are being marginalized is one obvious fix. To encourage those who are more reticent, Mita Mallick, the head of diversity and inclusion at Unilever, told the New York Times that she has learned to rely on the chat function and nonverbal cues. During a recent 25-person online meeting, she said, “I was giving a thumbs up, I was making a heart with my hands, I was smiling” to show someone “nonverbally that I was excited about what they’re saying.” Online negotiations create unique challenges, but creative negotiators will always find work-arounds.

This past May, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments on conference calls rather than in person. To keep chaos in check, Chief Justice John Roberts imposed order on the typically freewheeling process of justices questioning attorneys representing both sides of a case: He began calling on justices one by one, in order of seniority, and tried to give them roughly equal speaking time. Despite this effort to be evenhanded, over the course of 10 cases, Roberts disproportionately interrupted the three female justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor), even when they spoke the same amount or less than their male colleagues, according to an analysis by Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor Tonja Jacobi and University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman.

Women tend to get less speaking time in workplace and business discussions, abundant research shows. Although people tend to perceive women as being more talkative than men, men actually talk more—and interrupt more—than women do, Adrienne Hancock and Benjamin A. Rubin of George Washington University found in a 2014 study. Men who speak more often are perceived as more competent, whereas women who speak more often are perceived as less competent, Yale psychologist Victoria Brescoll found in her research. Even on Twitter, men are retweeted twice as often as women, although women make up the majority of the platform’s users.

Such inequities may be exacerbated when we negotiate at a distance. Because body language and other nonverbal cues can be more difficult to read in online formats, meeting attendees may be more likely to interrupt one another, with women often losing the battle for speaking time.

Or maybe we’re just noticing the disparity more. After all, these challenges existed well before we all went online, Simmons School of Management professor emerita Deborah Kolb told Negotiation Briefings. From 2011 to 2017, male Supreme Court justices and attorneys arguing before the Court interrupted the female justices twice as often as the male justices, a study by Jacobi and Goodwin Procter LLP associate Dylan Schweers shows.

In a society where men have historically been granted higher status than women and are stereotyped as assertive, women’s ideas and opinions tend to be undervalued in the workplace and beyond. As a result, men are more likely to dominate conversations, women are interrupted more frequently, and men are sometimes given credit for women’s contributions.

In her 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” writer Rebecca Solnit ruefully recounted frequent experiences she’d had in which men condescended to her in conversation by assuming she didn’t know things she did, a phenomenon that came to be known as “mansplaining” when the essay went viral. The terms “manterrupting” and “bropriating” (in which a man takes credit for a woman’s idea) have also caught on.

Of course, as Solnit acknowledges, many men listen respectfully to women and value their ideas. But the cumulative impact of feeling marginalized and overlooked takes a toll—both on women in the workplace and on the organizations deprived of their good ideas.

Interruptions, dismissiveness, condescension, and other conversational put-downs are particularly common when one party holds more power or status than the other—whether because of their gender, race, age, position, or other difference. Such behaviors are part of the “shadow negotiation”—the unspoken dynamics that hum beneath the surface of both formal business negotiations and informal workplace negotiations, including how well we treat each other and whose voice is heard, write Kolb and Judith Williams in their book The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Navigate the Hidden Agendas That Determine Bargaining Success (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

There are three types of strategies, or “moves,” that women and others who are at risk of being undervalued and overlooked can take to guide the shadow negotiation, according to Kolb and Williams. Power moves can be used to show reluctant negotiators the value of negotiating with you. Process moves can counteract silencing—when you’re being interrupted, dismissed, or ignored. And appreciative moves can “unstick” negotiations stalled by conflict, suspicion, or impasse.

1. Plant the seeds of your ideas.

By working behind the scenes, you may be able to make it easier for your ideas to be heard, according to Kolb and Williams. In Everyday Negotiation, they give the example of a manager, Pat, whose fellow managers tended to tune her out during annual staff reviews because they felt she pushed her ideas too hard. As a result, her team was at risk of being overlooked in decisions about merit raises, which would reflect poorly on Pat.

As the next staff review approached, Pat made a point during lunches with her fellow managers to ask about openings in their departments. She’d then talk up her star employees and say it was too bad they weren’t available. By informally promoting her team members in this manner, Pat earned name recognition for her top staff and was able to make herself heard in the staff review without needing to oversell. This type of process move may be especially beneficial to women, who risk a backlash when they take a direct or aggressive approach.

2. Enlist allies behind the scenes.

In the early days of the Obama administration, men made up two-thirds of the president’s top aides. Among their ranks were a number of forceful personalities, including then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and economic adviser Lawrence Summers. Female advisers found they were being excluded from key meetings and, when they did attend, being ignored.

Together, they adopted a strategy that they called amplification: “When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author,” Juliet Eilperin reported in the Washington Post in 2016. Amplification prevented the men in the room from taking credit for the women’s good ideas and encouraged them to recognize the women’s contributions. The women staffers also complained to the president that their voices weren’t being heard.

As a result of their power moves, Obama “began calling more often on women and junior aides,” according to Eilperin. By the president’s second term, women comprised half of his inner circle. “Backstage efforts provide opportunities to gather momentum behind your agenda,” write Kolb and Williams. “As that support grows, it isolates the blockers, making continued opposition harder and harder for them.”

3. Address power dynamics.

If Chief Justice Roberts had difficulty performing his timekeeping responsibility accurately while engaging in oral arguments, it’s hardly surprising. Multitasking leads to shallow thinking, which in turn makes us more susceptible to bias. A logical solution would be for someone else to take charge of timekeeping if Supreme Court arguments continue to be heard remotely, Jacobi and Litman suggest. Doing so would allow Roberts to focus more on the substance of the discussion and likely result in more evenhanded turn taking.

If you notice on your video calls that some people seem reluctant to speak or are being interrupted, look for ways to make the environment more hospitable and equitable. Calling on those who are being marginalized is one obvious fix. To encourage those who are more reticent, Mita Mallick, the head of diversity and inclusion at Unilever, told the New York Times that she has learned to rely on the chat function and nonverbal cues. During a recent 25-person online meeting, she said, “I was giving a thumbs up, I was making a heart with my hands, I was smiling” to show someone “nonverbally that I was excited about what they’re saying.” Online negotiations create unique challenges, but creative negotiators will always find work-arounds.

National governments across the globe face the challenge of securing enough doses of a safe, effective coronavirus vaccine when one or more become available. Many wealthier nations are taking a competitive approach to this challenge, jostling with each other to tie up deals with pharmaceutical companies for the most promising vaccine candidates. A coordinated global plan promising greater fairness and efficiency has since emerged— but it may be too little, too late. The situation highlights best and worst practices for those pursuing scarce resources through negotiation.

Vaccine hoarders

Early in the Covid-19 crisis, drug manufacturers worldwide dove into developing vaccines that could provide immunity to the virus without harmful side effects. Governments of higher-income nations quickly began negotiating with drugmakers to ensure their citizens would be first in line to be vaccinated. The race was on, with wealthier nations trying to elbow one another out of negotiations and poorer nations left sitting on the sidelines.

“Vaccine nationalism” quickly ate up most of the world’s near-term vaccine manufacturing capacity, experts tell the Wall Street Journal. By September 1, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom had unilaterally agreed to purchase a total of at least 3.7 billion doses of at least eight vaccines for their own use from Western vaccine developers. Knowing that only a few vaccine candidates would likely prove safe and effective, nations bought many more doses than they would need. China and India also invested in vaccines for their huge populations. Vaccine hoarding had begun.

A step toward coordination

As wealthy nations and regions pursued vaccine deals full throttle, less-resourced nations were left to wonder how they would protect their citizens from the virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the public-health arm of the United Nations, came up with a plan aimed at ensuring that Covid-19 vaccines reach the world’s most vulnerable populations. On August 24, the WHO announced that 172 nations, comprising about 70% of the world’s population, had made preliminary commitments to participate in the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a global initiative to secure two billion doses of safe, effective vaccines for the most high-risk populations worldwide.

Harnessing the buying power of many economies, COVAX is investing in nine promising vaccine candidates being developed by manufacturers in countries ranging from China to the United States to Northern Ireland. Eighty higher-income economies are expected to financially support the participation of 92 lower- and middle-income economies in the program. Not-for-profit partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are also contributing to the fund. While COVAX aims to reduce vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations, participating governments can continue to pursue bilateral deals with drug companies.

At first glance, COVAX might sound like a charitable enterprise founded on financial sacrifices from wealthy nations, but that’s not the case. “For higher-income countries, [COVAX] represents a win-win,” says Dr. Seth Berkley, the CEO of COVAX partner Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “Not only will you be guaranteed access to the world’s largest portfolio of vaccines, you will also be negotiating as part of a global consortium, bringing down prices and ensuring truly global access.”

“Whatever we have, it won’t be enough to vaccinate everyone,” WHO assistant director general Mariângela Simão told the Journal. “It is in everybody’s interest to collaborate globally because we need this pandemic controlled in all countries.” Nations that focus on eradicating the virus only within their borders will remain at risk from international travel and trade. The result could be a “patchwork pattern” of immunization with Covid-19 hot spots continuing to crop up around the world.

If none of the vaccine candidates that the United States has invested in prove viable, the nation will be left unprotected.

A risky gamble

A week after the COVAX Facility was announced, the Trump administration said it would not be joining the global effort. The decision was in keeping with Trump’s “America first” attitude toward trade, climate change, and other multinational agreements. It was also consistent with his decision in May to withdraw the United States from the WHO, which he has accused of being biased toward China.

Politics aside, passing on access to a promising pool of vaccine candidates is a high-risk gamble. If none of the vaccine candidates that the United States has invested in prove viable, the nation will be left unprotected. Even if it does secure an effective vaccine, it is unlikely to offer complete protection to the U.S. population, leaving residents vulnerable, disease experts tell the Washington Post.

Opting out of the COVAX Facility is akin to passing on an insurance policy, Kendall Hoyt, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, told the Post. “By joining the facility at the same time that you do bilateral deals, you’re actually betting on a larger number of vaccine candidates,” Simão said at a press briefing.

The promise of coordination

In his influential 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” ecologist Garrett Hardin shares the parable of a group of herdsmen who graze their cattle in a common pasture. Each is motivated to increase the size of his herd to grow his profits. But if the number of animals gets too large, the pasture will be destroyed by overgrazing, and all the herdsmen will suffer financially. The best long-term solution to this so-called social dilemma is for all of the herdsmen to cooperate with one another by agreeing to limit the size of their herds.

When a finite resource is at stake—such as a pasture, departmental funding, or a vaccine—those involved typically will reach better long-term outcomes by negotiating to divide the resource equitably than by each trying to claim the biggest piece for themselves. Unfortunately, they will often have difficulty recognizing the benefits of such cooperation and coordination. Desperate to “win,” parties compete with one another to claim as much of the resource as possible—and end up harming themselves and others in the process.

Imagine if the world’s leading economies agreed to put all their vaccine dollars in COVAX or a similar consortium, to not sign bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies, and to negotiate equitable distribution of vaccine doses. The efficiency resulting from such coordination should help lower costs, streamline production and distribution, and save lives.

Promoting a collaborative mindset

Here are three tips on how to encourage coordination when allocating scarce resources:

1. Plan ahead. In the midst of a crisis, when emotions are running high, self- interested, inefficient behavior will be difficult to keep in check. “If the perception is that every other government is going to hoard, your government will hoard also,” Council on Foreign Relations director Thomas Bollyky told the Journal. The time to negotiate the outlines of such an agreement is before a crisis, not in the middle of one.

2. Show the benefits of cooperation. Negotiators often assume that when they lose, the other side wins, and vice versa, as Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman explains in our interview on page 8. Encourage counterparts to move beyond this mythical fixed-pie mindset by showing them what you all stand to gain through cooperation.

3. Take a broader view. Organizations, including governments, feel a special duty to look out for those they represent. But we should also take time to consider how our decisions might affect others, including the earth’s most vulnerable stakeholders. Moreover, ingroup bias doesn’t preclude solutions that would also benefit outsiders. In fact, you may be able to expand the pie by considering what out- group members might bring to the table.

National governments across the globe face the challenge of securing enough doses of a safe, effective coronavirus vaccine when one or more become available. Many wealthier nations are taking a competitive approach to this challenge, jostling with each other to tie up deals with pharmaceutical companies for the most promising vaccine candidates. A coordinated global plan promising greater fairness and efficiency has since emerged— but it may be too little, too late. The situation highlights best and worst practices for those pursuing scarce resources through negotiation.

Vaccine hoarders

Early in the Covid-19 crisis, drug manufacturers worldwide dove into developing vaccines that could provide immunity to the virus without harmful side effects. Governments of higher-income nations quickly began negotiating with drugmakers to ensure their citizens would be first in line to be vaccinated. The race was on, with wealthier nations trying to elbow one another out of negotiations and poorer nations left sitting on the sidelines.

“Vaccine nationalism” quickly ate up most of the world’s near-term vaccine manufacturing capacity, experts tell the Wall Street Journal. By September 1, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom had unilaterally agreed to purchase a total of at least 3.7 billion doses of at least eight vaccines for their own use from Western vaccine developers. Knowing that only a few vaccine candidates would likely prove safe and effective, nations bought many more doses than they would need. China and India also invested in vaccines for their huge populations. Vaccine hoarding had begun.

A step toward coordination

As wealthy nations and regions pursued vaccine deals full throttle, less-resourced nations were left to wonder how they would protect their citizens from the virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the public-health arm of the United Nations, came up with a plan aimed at ensuring that Covid-19 vaccines reach the world’s most vulnerable populations. On August 24, the WHO announced that 172 nations, comprising about 70% of the world’s population, had made preliminary commitments to participate in the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility, a global initiative to secure two billion doses of safe, effective vaccines for the most high-risk populations worldwide.

Harnessing the buying power of many economies, COVAX is investing in nine promising vaccine candidates being developed by manufacturers in countries ranging from China to the United States to Northern Ireland. Eighty higher-income economies are expected to financially support the participation of 92 lower- and middle-income economies in the program. Not-for-profit partners, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are also contributing to the fund. While COVAX aims to reduce vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations, participating governments can continue to pursue bilateral deals with drug companies.

At first glance, COVAX might sound like a charitable enterprise founded on financial sacrifices from wealthy nations, but that’s not the case. “For higher-income countries, [COVAX] represents a win-win,” says Dr. Seth Berkley, the CEO of COVAX partner Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “Not only will you be guaranteed access to the world’s largest portfolio of vaccines, you will also be negotiating as part of a global consortium, bringing down prices and ensuring truly global access.”

“Whatever we have, it won’t be enough to vaccinate everyone,” WHO assistant director general Mariângela Simão told the Journal. “It is in everybody’s interest to collaborate globally because we need this pandemic controlled in all countries.” Nations that focus on eradicating the virus only within their borders will remain at risk from international travel and trade. The result could be a “patchwork pattern” of immunization with Covid-19 hot spots continuing to crop up around the world.

If none of the vaccine candidates that the United States has invested in prove viable, the nation will be left unprotected.

A risky gamble

A week after the COVAX Facility was announced, the Trump administration said it would not be joining the global effort. The decision was in keeping with Trump’s “America first” attitude toward trade, climate change, and other multinational agreements. It was also consistent with his decision in May to withdraw the United States from the WHO, which he has accused of being biased toward China.

Politics aside, passing on access to a promising pool of vaccine candidates is a high-risk gamble. If none of the vaccine candidates that the United States has invested in prove viable, the nation will be left unprotected. Even if it does secure an effective vaccine, it is unlikely to offer complete protection to the U.S. population, leaving residents vulnerable, disease experts tell the Washington Post.

Opting out of the COVAX Facility is akin to passing on an insurance policy, Kendall Hoyt, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, told the Post. “By joining the facility at the same time that you do bilateral deals, you’re actually betting on a larger number of vaccine candidates,” Simão said at a press briefing.

The promise of coordination

In his influential 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” ecologist Garrett Hardin shares the parable of a group of herdsmen who graze their cattle in a common pasture. Each is motivated to increase the size of his herd to grow his profits. But if the number of animals gets too large, the pasture will be destroyed by overgrazing, and all the herdsmen will suffer financially. The best long-term solution to this so-called social dilemma is for all of the herdsmen to cooperate with one another by agreeing to limit the size of their herds.

When a finite resource is at stake—such as a pasture, departmental funding, or a vaccine—those involved typically will reach better long-term outcomes by negotiating to divide the resource equitably than by each trying to claim the biggest piece for themselves. Unfortunately, they will often have difficulty recognizing the benefits of such cooperation and coordination. Desperate to “win,” parties compete with one another to claim as much of the resource as possible—and end up harming themselves and others in the process.

Imagine if the world’s leading economies agreed to put all their vaccine dollars in COVAX or a similar consortium, to not sign bilateral deals with pharmaceutical companies, and to negotiate equitable distribution of vaccine doses. The efficiency resulting from such coordination should help lower costs, streamline production and distribution, and save lives.

Promoting a collaborative mindset

Here are three tips on how to encourage coordination when allocating scarce resources:

1. Plan ahead. In the midst of a crisis, when emotions are running high, self- interested, inefficient behavior will be difficult to keep in check. “If the perception is that every other government is going to hoard, your government will hoard also,” Council on Foreign Relations director Thomas Bollyky told the Journal. The time to negotiate the outlines of such an agreement is before a crisis, not in the middle of one.

2. Show the benefits of cooperation. Negotiators often assume that when they lose, the other side wins, and vice versa, as Harvard Business School professor Max H. Bazerman explains in our interview on page 8. Encourage counterparts to move beyond this mythical fixed-pie mindset by showing them what you all stand to gain through cooperation.

3. Take a broader view. Organizations, including governments, feel a special duty to look out for those they represent. But we should also take time to consider how our decisions might affect others, including the earth’s most vulnerable stakeholders. Moreover, ingroup bias doesn’t preclude solutions that would also benefit outsiders. In fact, you may be able to expand the pie by considering what out- group members might bring to the table.