Tag Archives: relationships

I’m outta here! Five questions to ask before walking away from a negotiation

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In September, I tackled the thorny problem of where to spend the holidays. Briefly, I suggested that fighting with your spouse about which family to visit (a distributive strategy) is less productive than figuring out a way to satisfy both of you (an integrative strategy).

Well, suppose you gave my suggestion a try—you offered to spend Christmas with your spouse’s family in San Francisco if she’d spend Easter in Chicago with yours—but she wasn’t too interested. If only she’d read these incredibly useful posts! Regardless, you’re now thinking of defaulting to what I originally called a “50/50 person split”: you spend Christmas in Chicago, while she heads to San Francisco. In effect, you’re considering walking away from this particular bargaining table. And the tenor surrounding your dinner table is starting to reflect it.

The impending holiday impasse is unpleasant, but still negotiable! In this post, I’ll discuss five simple questions to ask yourself before giving up on this or any negotiation. Though they won’t necessarily prevent you from giving up, they’ll at least help to ensure that impasse is the best option. So here go the questions:

  1. Have I asked why? In other words, have you explored the reasons behind her preferences? Why did she flat-out decline your offer to split the holidays? If you asked, she might tell you that her brother will visit San Francisco for Easter but not Christmas, which opens up the possibility of making her happy by reversing the order of the cities in your offer.
  2. Have I said why? In other words, have you communicated the reasons behind your preferences? Perhaps your mother is having an operation around Easter, and you really need to be in Chicago to help her. If you said so, perhaps your spouse would realize that your collective Easter plans are much more important to you than her, especially since her brother’s visiting both of you later this year.
  3. Am I angry? In other words, is emotion propelling you toward an impasse? Few decisions are best made angry, and negotiation decisions are no exception. If you’re angry, I’d suggest ratification as a means of justifying a short break.
  4. Do we have to decide now? Even better than a short break is an extended break in which both parties ponder their options. No, you can’t wait too long in the face of rising airfares, nor is procrastination generally a great strategy. But in the face of an impending impasse, it’s usually worth the wait in order to collect your thoughts.
  5. Is the alternative really better? In other words, is the 50/50 person split (your BATNA) really preferable to the worst deal you could reach with your spouse? Suppose she’s still insisting on both of you spending both holidays in San Francisco. While that makes you angry, is it worse than spending Christmas (and probably Easter too) apart? Perhaps so, and then an impasse is justified. But the point is to ask the question, as we often impasse out of anger even though the alternative is actually worse (previously called hubris).

So the bottom line is this: Before walking away from this or any other negotiation table, make sure you’ve asked and said why, taken the time to diffuse your anger and weigh your options, and verified that the alternative is preferable. If you’ve skipped any of those steps, it’s worth spending a little more time at table, if only to make the holidays that much merrier.

How do you decide whether to walk away from a negotiation?

Household harmony: Carving up the chores without conflict

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How often have you stopped and thought: “Gee, I wish I was doing more housework”? Whether it’s washing the dishes, vacuuming the carpet, or cleaning the cat box, few of us want more housework. As a result, those of us who live with others are likely to eventually experience chore-based conflict.

Dividing up the chores can be contentious! But it’s negotiable.

To negotiate this particular morass, it helps to understand negative bargaining zones and how to deal with them. This post will introduce that topic and propose one strategic response; future posts will offer many more.

So imagine a simple example: you’re fighting with a dissatisfied spouse about washing the dishes. You wash the dishes on Saturday and Sunday, which seems appropriate since your high-stress (and high-paying) job occupies your time Monday through Friday. Your spouse does the dishes the rest of the week, which might seem unfair except that he (to alternate genders in my posts) works a low-stress, part-time job that leaves lots of time for scrubbing.

“Thomasina,” he says, “you’re not pulling your weight around the sink.” “Thomas,” you say, “you’re making 1/100th of my salary.” And thus it’s come to a head.

In a pinch, you’re also willing to wash dishes on Friday (for a total of three days per week). But you’d really rather sip a margarita that night, and you think the idea of Thursday dishes is outrageous. Unfortunately, Thomas doesn’t see it that way: “Every time you come home late, you eat nachos and sip margaritas! Do you know how many dishes that creates, and how hard I have to scrub that nacho cheese? It’s only right for you to do dishes at least Thursday through Sunday!”

This is a negative bargaining zone: the least that one party would accept (four days of dishes) is more than the most that the other party is willing to offer (your three days). And, if you and Thomas just try to persuade each other on the dishes, this is the start of a conflict.

But do you really have to do that? Aren’t there other chores in need of doing? In particular, isn’t Thomas always vacuuming up the cat hair on Saturday, complaining all the while about missing college football? And wait, doesn’t your schedule free up considerably on the weekend? What if you offered to take over the Saturday vacuuming while maintaining your current level of dishwashing?

Well, it’s no telling what Thomas will say (especially if he’s still brooding over the salary comment). But chances are, he’ll at least stop insisting on Thursday dishes. And he may even get so excited about college football that he forgets about Friday dishes.

What’s happened here? You initially faced a negative bargaining zone: four days of dishes demanded versus three days offered. But by introducing another issue (vacuuming), you’re now making an offer that exceeds his minimum demands (defined more broadly). You’ve turned the bargaining zone positive and, in the process, made housework negotiable.

So here’s the bottom line: Many of our conflicts only become conflicts because we fixate on one issue. By introducing another issue, we give ourselves at least a fighting chance of not fighting.

Have you ever split up the housework several chores at a time?

 

 

Friday night fights: Choosing negotiation instead of persuasion

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Where to go? What to do? Where to eat? At least once a weekend, most of us discuss at least one of these questions with someone else—a friend, a significant other, a spouse.

But what happens when we disagree? It’s difficult, but negotiable.

To make it negotiable, however, is to understand the difference between negotiation and persuasion. Specifically, it’s to treat differences of opinion as opportunities to negotiate, not invitations to persuade. This post will discuss why and how to do that.

To make this real, imagine it’s Friday night. You’re dead-set on visiting your favorite gastropub, but your significant other is just as dead-set on visiting her favorite Italian restaurant. Seeing a stalemate in the cards, what will you say next?

If you’re like most people, you’ll start to extoll the gastropub’s virtues (the beer selection! the TVs! the burgers!). If that doesn’t work, you’ll probably start to subtly trash the Italian restaurant (the grumpy waiters! the tiny bathroom! the runny sauce!). In short, if you’re like most people, you’ll start to persuade. But wait, “most other people” probably includes your significant other, right? What’s she likely to do? Seeing you start to persuade, chances are that she’ll do that too. Where’s this likely to lead? Another Friday night eating stale Trader Joe’s burritos in front of Dateline NBC.

But imagine for a moment that you instead saw the situation as a chance to negotiate. What would you say then? Well, you wouldn’t just drop your taste for the gastropub, developing a sudden interest in spaghetti. To clear up a basic misconception, negotiation does not mean surrender. No – what you’d do is share your fundamental reason for wanting to visit the gastropub, which often has surprisingly little to do with the arguments you would’ve used to persuade. Perhaps the real reason underlying your gastropub preference, for example, is its proximity to your house—you’ve had a rough week and want to walk somewhere close, not drive to the Italian place three suburbs away. Next, after sharing your fundamental reason, you’d ask hers: why do you want to go to that Italian place? “Because I want somewhere quiet so we can talk,” she might say, “and we always have to shout at that gastropub.”

Well now you’ve opened up a world of possibilities. You want somewhere close, and she wants somewhere quiet. There are about five quiet restaurants within walking distance. Just by negotiating rather than persuading, you’ve avoided a nasty dispute and all of its ramifications for your Friday night.

The critical point is that negotiation is not the same thing as persuasion. Negotiation may involve some element of persuasion—you may still have to persuade your significant other than one of the five restaurants is better than another. But negotiation is much broader than persuasion, and it starts much differently—with both parties sharing their fundamental reasons.

Have you ever selected a restaurant this way?

 

My family or yours? Using integrative negotiation to allocate holiday time

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With the holidays fast-approaching, many of us face a decision: my family or yours? As anyone who has made this decision can attest, its consequences often stretch far beyond December.

Dividing up family time can be contentious. But it’s negotiable!

For this post, imagine you’re married or in a serious-enough relationship to worry about the division of family time. Imagine, further, that both you and your partner have already insisted that, “It’s my family this year!” Having one family in Chicago and another in San Francisco, having one week of vacation, and having both refused to back down, you’re now on the brink of crisis. Specifically, you can only see three options:

  1. 50/50 time split: You both spend two days in Chicago, two days in San Francisco, and about 3 days flying Reunited Airlines. Obviously a bad option, and not just because you have to deal with Reunited. Two days with each family is not nearly enough: both will feel slighted, and you’re likely to feel unfulfilled if not exhausted.
  2. 50/50 person split: You spend the week with your family in Chicago, and your partner spends the week with his/her family in San Francisco. But that doesn’t sound so great either – who wants to remember 2015 as the year they spent the holidays apart?
  3. 50/50 relationship split: You could actually see this discussion getting so heated that—in combination with other various and sundry disputes over the years—it strains the relationship itself. Though that might facilitate the second option, it’s obviously not preferred.

In short, you’re stuck in a holiday pickle. But why? Because you’ve assumed that the pie is fixed—engaging in what negotiation researchers call distributive or win-lose negotiation. In other words, you’re trying to slice one fixed resource—the week of holiday vacation—rather than entertaining the possibility that you and your partner could discuss multiple resources. The latter would imply that the pie can grow, which researchers call integrative or win-win negotiation.

Integrative negotiation is a HUGE topic that many researchers have studied for many decades, and that I will write about for a long time to come. The current point is not to describe integrative negotiation in all of its glory, as that would be a 1,589,230-word posting. The point is to highlight the difference between distributive and integrative negotiation and mention some of the many solutions to the holiday pickle that become possible when we assume that the pie can grow:

  1. Trade the holidays: We spend Christmas (for example) in San Francisco and Easter (for example) in Chicago. Come to think of it, that sounds better, as only a masochist would try to fly Reunited into O’Hare in December.
  2. Trade this holiday: We spend this Christmas in San Francisco and explicitly agree to spend next Christmas in Chicago. In other words, we recognize that this is a repeated decision, bringing time into the equation to develop a schedule. Come to think of it, that sounds better, as your brother will probably be able to make it next year.
  3. Introduce a new issue: Suppose that you love extreme downhill skiing but rarely get to do it, tethered as you are to the rolling hills of the East Coast. The sounds utterly irrelevant to the holiday pickle until your partner suggests five days in San Francisco and two in the Sierras. Come to think of it, that sounds awesome.

These are not earth-shaking ideas, nor do they come close to exhausting the possibilities. The point is only to emphasize the power of integrative negotiations. By assuming that there are many possible resources to discuss—multiple holidays, multiple iterations of this holiday, an extreme skiing trip—the holiday season looks a lot rosier.

How have you resolved your own holiday pickles?