294. Ask & You Shall Receive: Questions For Better Negotiations

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Successful negotiation is not about winning. It's about building long-term relationships. My name is Matt Abrahams. I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I look forward to speaking with my friend Stan Christensen. Stan is a professional negotiator who has both practiced and taught negotiation for his entire career, and he teaches a very popular Stanford negotiation course. Additionally, Stan is the host of the very informative All Things Negotiation podcast. Well, welcome Stan. I thoroughly enjoyed being on your show and I'm glad you're here. Thanks for being here. 

[00:00:40] Stan Christensen: Thanks for inviting me. 

[00:00:41] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started?

[00:00:42] Stan Christensen: We should do it.

[00:00:43] Matt Abrahams: Alright. If you think about it, we are always negotiating, sometimes formally and many times informally. How do you define negotiation and what makes for success in a negotiation? 

[00:00:54] Stan Christensen: It's a great question. I define negotiation as any attempt to persuade or influence another party, which is very broad. In terms of the second part of your question, how do you define success? Most people think of negotiation statically. It's you and I, there's a fixed pie. We're trying to get more for ourself and less for the other party. When in reality, probably 95% of the negotiations you're gonna do are gonna be with people you see again. So I define success as, are you contributing to the value of the long-term relationship? 

[00:01:22] Matt Abrahams: Yeah, and I think that's really important because you can do some things to better your position in a negotiation that might not be bettering your future interaction with the person. And so we really need to be thinking about not just what's happening in the moment, but its consequences. I think about as I was raising my kids, there were lots of things that I chose not to really negotiate because I knew we would have future conversations. So I think that's an important way to look at negotiation. Like me, you teach Stanford students and your students really enjoy your class. What are two or three key things you hope your students take away from your content on negotiation? 

[00:01:57] Stan Christensen: Yeah. The first thing is just awareness that they're negotiating all the time. So the very first week of class, I have them keep track of the negotiations that they engage in throughout the week. And it's probably a hundred, if they're honest about it. And number two, I try to help them be effective, negotiating in the context they're most likely to negotiate in. Those tend to be roommates, uh, romantic partners, employers, potential employers, parents. And so if they come away from the class more confident that they can do those things, that's a success for me.

[00:02:24] Matt Abrahams: So it sounds like awareness and confidence in the ability to do it. And I like that idea of reflecting. You know, we communicate all the time. Not all communication is negotiation, although much of it is, taking the time to say, what am I doing? What do they look like? And maybe some of your students identify patterns and you can help them better understand what's working and what's not working. I think that's really helpful. I know one of the things you teach, which I believe personally is really important in all communication, but you teach listening. Why is listening part of negotiation curriculum and can you share some of the best practices you teach your students about listening and how it applies to negotiation?

[00:03:01] Stan Christensen: Listening is more than a nice to have. It's essential. One of the things that I say about listening is you need to think about what you're listening for in the negotiation. Think about questions you might have that might elicit things that make you question some of your assumptions. I'll give you a recent example. I was visiting a family friend in a retirement community and the family wanted to move her from the first floor to the second floor. She was resisting tremendously. They assumed she didn't like the smaller room. They assumed she didn't like the stairs.

[00:03:29] It was really a lot of bickering, and they came in and said, Stan, you know, you're a good friend of the family. Can you help us with this situation? When I asked her, what are the real reasons that you're afraid to move? She said, I'm worried that I'm gonna lose my nurse because she's the nurse on the first floor and I don't want to change nurses. And so I simply said to the director of the facility, what if we had that nurse stay with her and have the nurse travel rather than her get someone new? And they said, that'd be fine. And she said, that'd be fine. And so we solved the problem and that was based on listening to her real concerns. 

[00:03:57] Matt Abrahams: What I find so interesting about what you just said is listening is equipping you to ask the right questions. And I don't often think of negotiation as question asking. I think of it as asserting. Talk to me about how questioning inquiry, thinking about the other person, plays out when you're negotiating. 

[00:04:15] Stan Christensen: Well, you know, we have classes in public speaking. What we probably should do is have a class in public listening, because listening is probably, should be more than half of the conversation. If you listen, it's not just to be a moral person or be a friendly person, it's because it's gonna equip you to come up with solutions that expand the pie, as we talked about before. And so it's a persuasive element to listen as opposed to a nice to have. 

[00:04:39] Matt Abrahams: I really think that's important for everybody to think about when it comes to negotiation. I tend to look at negotiation as something where I want to win or have my point of view dominate in that conversation. And what I'm hearing you say is before you negotiate, you actually have to listen and then ask questions to best understand what's important. And the example you gave, I wouldn't have thought that the thing that was preventing that move was something external to the person who was having to be moved, but it was. And so by asking the questions, I guess it helps you focus in on where you have that negotiation.

[00:05:09] Stan Christensen: Yeah. A lot of my students show up to my class hoping they're gonna learn how to win, and a lot of them sign up because it's called negotiation. That sounds sexy. What I teach them is relationship management. Now, if I called the class, not negotiation, but relationship management, I think I get a lot fewer kids. So I use a little bit of a smoke screen there and teach relationship management. 

[00:05:25] Matt Abrahams: One of the big ways we manage relationships is through the negotiation, the influence that we have, but you have to really understand who you're talking to and what's important to them. My wife and I will often have negotiations, when in fact we probably didn't need to, because we didn't appreciate each other's perspective. The example I always give is if we wanna go out to dinner, and she says, Hey, let's go out to Mexican food. And I say, no, let's do Italian food. That could be a negotiation. But when we ask each other how important is it, for me it's not that important. And for her it's very important. Then we don't have to, and that helps us manage our relationship.

[00:05:58] So I like this idea of listening and inquiry, but it does bring up the question though, often in negotiation, emotion plays out. You're very passionate about the topic you're advocating for. You might get angry because somebody isn't going along. How do you deal with emotion in these kind of situations?

[00:06:15] Stan Christensen: It's a great and common question. The first piece is to be aware of your emotions. Let's just take one of the examples you brought up, anger. Have you ever been in an argument with your wife towards the end of the day where you might be going to bed angry, but you still try to work it out? Has that ever happened to you in your marriage?

[00:06:31] Matt Abrahams: I wish I could say no, but it, yes, it does happen. 

[00:06:33] Stan Christensen: And one of the pieces of advice you hear, I heard before I got married, is never go to bed angry. You couldn't give people worse marital advice. Often the best thing to do if you're feeling angry is to pause, and so you know when cooler heads prevail, maybe the next morning after a good night's sleep. And so when you're feeling emotionally hijacked, maybe a little bit out of control, the sophisticated negotiator hits the pause button and returns when cooler heads can prevail. 

[00:06:56] Matt Abrahams: Right. So I think it's first recognizing the emotion and then giving yourself permission to take that pause and find perhaps an outlet. Write it down, talk to somebody about it, and then come back to it. Does emotion though play a role? I can imagine that if I bring a level of intensity, passion, it could help me actually show that this is important to me. 

[00:07:13] Stan Christensen: Yeah. You don't wanna think about emotion tactically. What you wanna do is be as genuine and be yourself. People that use tactics and try to act like they're upset when they're not upset, we tend not to be very good at lying about our emotions. And so what I think you wanna do is be emotionally centered. What I often recommend to people is before you enter a important negotiation, go and just wherever the quiet place is for you, and pause and think about what am I feeling? What am I bringing? Do I need to shift gears in my emotion? Way too many people try to plow through negative emotions, whether they're hurt or sad or angry, or feeling melancholy. They just approach it and try to drive in. It's just like if you had too much to drink, you probably shouldn't jump in that car and drive. You shouldn't be an emotional drunk driver in negotiation. 

[00:07:54] Matt Abrahams: That's a really appropriate metaphor that I think can really help us remind ourselves that we need to be centered. And if we are in a place that's not going to lead to, not just the negotiation, but the future relationship the way we want it to, we need to address it. I am curious about how we show up in terms of our presence, what we do with our body and our voice. Does this have implications for negotiation? How you physically show up? 

[00:08:19] Stan Christensen: It absolutely does. A modern topic related to this is distant negotiations, whether it's Zoom or Google Meet, and I always recommend to people, if at all possible, meet live and in person because those nuances of body language. And not only that. It's much easier to create small talk if you're live in person. I find that when I'm on a Zoom meeting or any type of negotiation, it's get down to the business, and so we miss the subtleties. We miss the nuance. 

[00:08:45] Matt Abrahams: I've heard across several of your answers this notion of connection before you do the negotiation, with yourself, your emotions, where are you, help regulate that, but then connect with others. Given that in a negotiation, you're trying to assert a particular point of view or position, how do you balance, Hey, I'm a nice person. I want you to like me. I want this relationship to continue, but I also need this to get done or want this to get done or see this as the right way of doing things. I agree connection is important, but how do you thread that needle? That's a tough thing I would think. 

[00:09:16] Stan Christensen: Number one, I would question the assumption that you need to assert in a negotiation. If I come to a negotiation with some questions that might change some of the assumptions I came with, I might wanna assert or problem solve or create options that are different than the thing I came with. And so in every negotiation, you are my teacher and I can learn things that help us both work together to expand the pie rather than advocating. The reason that attorneys often aren't very good at negotiation, and I don't wanna overgeneralize, but what are attorneys trained at doing mostly? They're advocates for their clients. How good are attorneys at joint problem solving? Let's roll up our sleeves. Let's figure out a structure that works for both sides and rewards the long-term relationship, which is, again, our goal. Attorneys aren't very good at that. 

[00:09:58] Matt Abrahams: Interesting. You said something there that I want to double down on. We had Michele Gelfand on, Michele teaches at the business school with me. She likes to talk about this notion of minding your metaphors. The metaphor you approach any communicative act frames how you do it. So if I see a negotiation as a battle, I'm going to approach it very differently than the metaphor you used, which I really liked, is the person you're negotiating with or the people you're negotiating with are your teachers.

[00:10:23] And if they're your teachers, that means one, you're both working to learn, they're to teach and you to learn. That there's a collaboration that's inherent in that. I really like that approach. Part of that then is the questions that we bring and ask. So I'm wondering, have you found in your own experience, and do you teach, I can imagine how I frame the position that I have or the issue we're negotiating really matters. If I frame it as a question, is that different than framing it as an assertion? What does framing mean for this? 

[00:10:52] Stan Christensen: So let's think of an example of framing. Let's say that I come to you, Matt, and we've had some tension in our relationship, and I say, Matt, I'd like to bring up something very difficult with you today. How does that make you feel? 

[00:11:02] Matt Abrahams: Concerned. I'm taken aback. 

[00:11:03] Stan Christensen: You're defensive. Exactly. And that's 99% of people. Now let's just change the frame a little bit. Matt, look, there's something I've been meaning to bring up with you. I've had a hard time bringing it up. I've sought counsel from some of my friends on how to do it, and I'm feeling ambivalent about doing it. But we're both teachers of communication and so I'd like to try to do that, but I want you to work with me on it. Would now be a good time to do that, or should we just set up a formal meeting? How do you feel now? 

[00:11:26] Matt Abrahams: One, I'm curious and two, much more willing to roll up my sleeves and work with you on it. So the way you frame that, the position you came from, does make a huge difference. 

[00:11:36] Stan Christensen: Yeah. And so what you want to do with someone is make them feel comfortable, come to them thinking, I wanna joint problem solve. I wanna figure out how to build the relationship over time. Put them at ease. And that's one of the key skills in negotiation.

[00:11:48] Matt Abrahams: Yeah. So that, that small talk, that connection really does make a difference in addition to the framing. Are there things that we can do in advance to the negotiation to help? I'm a big fan of setting expectations, helping people understand what's going to unfold. Can we do things in advance and can you give us an example or two? So I'll share with you sort of the thing I'm fishing for. When I run meetings, I will make sure in my meeting invite, I'm very specific about what we can expect, how we're going to go through it. So when people show up, they're not surprised. Are there things that we can do like that to help with negotiation?

[00:12:20] Stan Christensen: Let's just take your example of having an agenda. So I always do the same thing. I always start with an agenda. Now people can feel that you're being controlling if it's your agenda. Let's say it's a two party negotiation. So what I always say is, I've come with some thoughts and a draft agenda. We can either use that or we can use an agenda that you have, or we can create one together on the whiteboard. What would be your preference? How often do my counterparts say, yeah, I also came with an agenda and I'd rather use mine? How often does it happen?

[00:12:47] It's never happened in my whole career. So that gives you a lot of power in negotiation. You're gonna control the agenda, and so what should go on the agenda? You should think about what are the objectives, okay? What people should be there, what's the process for communication? Is this a one-time meeting? Are we clear about the outcomes? And then I would go into some of the things that I wanted to either communicate or learn in the meeting. Then we have other frameworks that we can talk about.

[00:13:10] Matt Abrahams: I really like the offer to co-create an agenda, even if they don't take you up on it. It shows that you are willing to be collaborative, listen and work together to define it, and I think that positions that connection and a respect that really only serves you benefit in that. 

[00:13:26] Stan Christensen: The other thing I'll do to even go the next step is I will maybe put my chair on their side of the table, share the agenda, or put it up on a whiteboard so that we're co-creating it. There's a famous saying in negotiation that the art of negotiation is letting them have your way. Now it feels a little manipulative, but on the agenda having them feel like a co-creator of that agenda makes all the difference in the world. 

[00:13:48] Matt Abrahams: I like that. Let them feel like they're having your way. That's great. You said something there that I really wanna highlight, that you can actually manage not only the agenda, but the physical setup of the room. I remember when I was learning to be a high school teacher, I taught high school for two years when I left high tech before I started the career I have today, I taught high school and they taught us classroom management.

[00:14:10] And one of the things they said is, when you are sitting down with a student who has done something inappropriate, wrong, challenging, think about how you set your chair to face their chair. Is it shoulders facing each other or do you set the chairs askew so you're not directly? And it makes a tremendous difference. So I really like you highlighting where you put yourself in the room, where the orientation is towards whatever the shared experience, the whiteboard, et cetera. Thank you for bringing that up though. And most of us don't think about that at all. We just come sit wherever we can. 

[00:14:40] Stan Christensen: Yeah, I think just put that under the category of setup. You want to have a setup that works for both sides. 

[00:14:46] Matt Abrahams: Before we switch topics to talk about a few other things, can you share one mistake many people make when they go to negotiate that does a disservice to them? And is there one thing beyond listening and some of the other things you've talked about that you wish everybody was doing that would really help them in negotiation?

[00:15:02] Stan Christensen: The biggest mistake I see people make is to get hijacked by a surprise. Often something will come up that you weren't expecting. All that means is that some assumption you are making is coming into question. So what they should do is then start inquiring and drilling down, what was I missing? How do I get to this assumption I made that was in fact incorrect? And so that's a mistake a lot of people make. 

[00:15:25] Matt Abrahams: I like that. So the mistake and the correction there. So if something goes awry or doesn't go the way you expected, rather than entrench yourself or get distant, lean in and ask questions. Really helpful. You host an amazing podcast. You were very kind to have me on as a guest. It's called All Things Negotiation. I've learned a lot from it. Why did you choose to do a podcast and what do you hope to accomplish with it? 

[00:15:48] Stan Christensen: It's a great question. Really two things. We teach here at Stanford, that's a very small elite group of students, and so my podcast is an effort to get the word out of how to negotiate to a broader audience. So how do you learn negotiation? The best way you can learn is by hearing people's stories. So I interview people who are experienced. They might be working in the startup world, they might be working in government, they might be working in the world of sports. I've even had athletes on there. And so it's sharing people's stories about negotiation to create learning. That's really the most important thing. The second reason is it's fun. You and I met each other because of my podcast, and so I'm constantly meeting new people and improving the things that I teach my students. 

[00:16:29] Matt Abrahams: One of the things I really value about how you do your podcast is you solicit a lot of stories from your guests. Is there a story that you learned that had a change or impact on the way you communicate and negotiate? 

[00:16:40] Stan Christensen: I do think I've learned from all of my guests, including you, of course, the one that jumps to mind is General Stanley McChrystal. I was fortunate to interview him and I've been thinking about the interview ever since. And the reason I've been thinking about it, he recently wrote a book called On Character, and he talks about how character is in fact a negotiation and it's a lifetime of negotiating your character, the ability to trust one another, more importantly to be trustworthy. And if we look at our country and what's going on right now, we need more people that have developed relationships of trust and character. And he's not only a great example of that, but in the interview he teaches us how to do that. 

[00:17:16] Matt Abrahams: I love that you learned from somebody who's a great teacher. I've had the good fortune to interview him as well, but also point about trust and building trust, so important.

[00:17:26] This has been a great conversation as I knew it would. Before we end, I'd like to ask everybody three questions. One I'm gonna make up for you and the other two I've been asking across all the podcast episodes. Are you up for that?

[00:17:36] Stan Christensen: Absolutely.

[00:17:37] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Beyond the negotiating you do and the teaching that you do of negotiation, you've navigated the venture capital world, you've raised money, you've helped people raise money. What's your best advice for communicating a new disruptive idea to those who might be skeptical or unsure of what you're saying? 

[00:17:54] Stan Christensen: Yeah, the most important advice here is to present as they want to be presented to. Most venture capitalists either have a video or a blog or something online talking about how they like presentations to go. So if you come with that information, Hey, I did some research on your firm and you guys tend to like to use PowerPoint, or you guys tend to just like to do Q and A. And I would start by saying, I've done some research. I assume that what you guys really like to do is Q and A. Should we jump right to that? Or, I have a PowerPoint, we can use that. So you're kind of asking for permission and then they feel like, wow, you're sophisticated.

[00:18:25] The second thing about venture capitalists is they're a little bit like car dealers in the sense that they know what they're doing. If you try to play their game, they're gonna win. They're gonna play it better. And so what I say is, rather than try to play their game better, create the terms for the game. I tell students, create a two week period that you're willing to talk to venture capitalists. Define that so that they don't drag it out for four months and introduce you individually to their partners over a long period of time. And it creates a little bit of a scarcity mentality, so don't try to play their game. Play your game, 'cause you're not gonna play their game better. 

[00:18:59] Matt Abrahams: So the very first thing I heard you say is take time to reflect on your audience. And many of these folks will tell you how they want to be communicated with. So appreciate that and act accordingly. And then the other thing that's implied in that is you have to adjust and adapt your message. A lot of people I know who I help with pitching just create one pitch and they just keep delivering it in different circumstances. And what you're advising is no, you have to adjust and adapt to what they tell you. And then the second part of your advice is set up parameters. You can bring your own parameters and boundaries to the interaction, and that can be helpful because it can build momentum more quickly. I'll be curious to hear your answer to question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:19:38] Stan Christensen: Gosh, there's so many. The one that comes to mind is Dr. Martin Luther King, and the why is he was able to fuse beautiful, vivid storytelling with moral authority in a way that I don't know anyone else who has done that. For my students, I have them read the letter from Birmingham Jail every semester, and we look at that as a persuasive document. It's in effect a negotiation. And so what Martin Luther King was able to do by both the written and spoken word, for me, puts him in the hall of fame. No one touches him. He essentially appealed to our consciousness. And if you can appeal to someone's consciousness and change a generation, he fast forwarded how we manage and we're still negotiating race relations, but he did more to change how we think about that than any other person. And so I think he's my top choice. 

[00:20:24] Matt Abrahams: I really love that you use one of his speeches as an example of negotiation. I have used several of his speeches as examples of lots of things, rhetorical flourish, clarity, engagement, but I've never used it as a negotiation, and I think that's really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for doing that with our students. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:20:47] Stan Christensen: I'm not much of a cook, but I have a lot to say about negotiation. I would say the first one that comes to mind is vulnerability. We assume that we should come in very strong, very powerful, to use your word, advocate, when in reality if you can be vulnerable, it tends to beget vulnerability on the other side. So that would be my first ingredient. Second would be to question your assumptions and let's just drill into that a little bit more than we did earlier. We all come with assumptions. I come with certain assumptions to this conversation. We're both white males. We both teach at Stanford. We're both middle aged. We have kids. A lot of similarities, but there are probably some things that we really see differently and fleshing that out.

[00:21:20] And so question the assumption that you understand the other party, that you know what they want, and as we talked about earlier, that there's nothing they could tell you that wouldn't change your objectives for what a successful outcome would be in the negotiations. That would be second, is questioning your assumptions. I'd say third, have an action plan for going forward. Often people negotiate very complex agreements and they go file that in the digital file somewhere, and what gets implemented is totally different. In the world that I used to work in, mergers and acquisitions, often they don't work out very well, and the reason is no one is focused on the implementation. So it doesn't matter how effective you are at negotiation if the deal doesn't get implemented effectively. So that'd be my third ingredient. 

[00:22:00] Matt Abrahams: I really like that you start answering this question with vulnerability. When I think about negotiation, vulnerability is the antithesis of what I think about, but I can really see based on what you've shared, not just in this answer, but prior, how that really sets you up to have a relationship that sets the negotiation on a path to success. Questioning assumptions, absolutely understand why that's important. We come in perhaps more rigid than we should, and staying open, and then having a clear action plan for what comes next. Even though you say you're not a good cook, I can certainly see that you're gonna set up a great negotiation. Stan, this has been fantastic. This has really been helpful. You've laid out what makes for successful negotiation and more importantly, successful relationships. And really negotiation is but one tool for managing those relationships. And thank you for challenging us to see negotiation more broadly and providing us with the tools and techniques to do it better. Thank you. 

[00:22:50] Stan Christensen: Nice to be here. 

[00:22:53] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about negotiation, please listen to episode 15 with Maggie Neal in episode 204 with Sheila Heen. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to the Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, Ask Matt Anythings and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.