How to get a failing negotiation back on track?

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A negotiation gets difficult when your counterparts start displaying uncooperative behaviours.

They can

• be fixated on certain issues, refusing to move the conversation forward
• demonise you and goes off on a diatribe that have little relevance with the issue on hand
• be extremely defensive
• easily provoked into an angry response

Such uncooperative behaviours might happened out of anger and fear, because they either

• don’t know any more effective ways to behave
• don’t see any benefits to negotiating
• just simply asserting dominance as a alternative of not being dominated

In short, they decided to give up on proper communication.

In such situation, you can try to steer the ship from that impending iceberg by using this technique- meta-communication.

Meta-communication

Dr. Gary S. Goodman was negotiating a significant consulting project with a natural resources company. His negotiation counterpart was being uncooperative and not willing to close the deal.

Noticing the familiarity of his counterpart negotiation tactic, Dr. Gary blurted out:

You’re following an interesting negotiation strategy here, but I’m sensing it’s not a good fit. Whose playbook does it come from: Is it Karrass, Nierenberg, or Cohen?

“Karrass”, the other party replied sheepishly.

From then on, the negotiation took a turn for the better. They later went on to draft out a successful agreement for both parties.

Dr. Gary simply used meta-communication— commenting about the way they’re talking with the goal of improving communication.

A more colloquial definition for meta-communication would be “communicating about the communication”.

Why meta-communication works?

During a negotiation, every instance of communication contains multiple messages. Some messages are explicitly understood such as verbal content. But there are a lot of concurrent implicit messages that are being sent too.

Meta-communication is about developing an awareness of such implicit messages and then sharing the view on these observation.

Once your counterparts knows that you understand their frame of mind and are aligned with them, it establishes a common playing ground between both parties. This helps to mitigate their uncooperative behaviours.

In the above example, Dr. Gary understands his counterpart’s implicit messages and he decide to communicate it by identifying his counterpart’s negotiation playbook.

Labeling the negatives

Chris Voss defined the act of addressing underlying emotions as labeling. It’s an effective tactic to earn empathy from your counterparts.

He and his colleagues managed to convince three fugitives to surrender by repeatedly labeling the fugitives’ fears:

... looks like you don’t wanna come out …

… seems like you are worried that we might come in gun blazing …

… looks like you don’t want to go back to jail…

Meta-communication is just like labeling the negatives. You develop an awareness of the interpersonal problematic interaction and then you point it out to your counterparts.

Conclusion

The next time you encounter an uncooperative negotiation counterparts, calm down and listen to them objectively.

Try to identify the implicit messages that they are communicating and also their underlying emotion that comes with it.

With enough observation, utilise meta-communication to get the failing negotiation back on track.

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