Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (24 page)
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Authors: Adam Galinsky,Maurice Schweitzer
We have seen how ambitious first offers can help us gain a competitive advantage. But they can also be
too
ambitious and drive our counterparts away from the bargaining table.
We need to find a way to produce the right balance between being ambitious and appearing cooperative. There are two strategies that work, and they both involve the idea of dropping
multiple
anchors.
In keeping with the metaphor, Daniel Ames of Columbia University, a boater himself, notes that when the seas become particularly rough and unstable, boaters drop a second anchor, called a tandem anchor, to provide greater resistance to the turbulent seas. Applying this logic to negotiations, Daniel has explored the effect of presenting a second anchor. What he did was turn offers from a single value into a
range
of values.
Daniel has found that ranges can produce more attractive settlements, but
only
when they are ambitious. What you want to do is take your ideal number and produce a range whereby the lower bound is your ideal outcome. An ambitious range offer allows you to get a better deal but still seem reasonable; you can strike a balance between being competitive and cooperative.
Offering a range works especially well when there is only one issue on the table. But what should you do when you are dealing with multiple issues to capture both competitive
and
cooperative benefits?
You should make more than one offer. In a project led by Geoffrey Leonardelli of the University of Toronto, we have explored the benefits of giving the other side a
choice
among offers. By offering multiple options, negotiators combine aggressiveness with flexibility, competition with cooperation.
Imagine you are offering a job in your company to a new recruit, and your first offer includes a salary and a location: Let's say a salary of $86k in the Tucson office. With multiple offers, you could offer a choice among two or more packages. So your first offer is either a) $86k in the Tucson office or b) $87k in the Savannah office.
The key feature of making multiple offers is that each package has
the same overall value
to you, so you are happy with either outcome. But to the person on the other side of the negotiating table, one might be vastly more valuable. By letting
them
choose, you secure better economic
and
interpersonal outcomes. Why?
Recipients see the presentation of multiple packages as a signal of cooperation. People are less resistant and more accepting of the first offer because choice is involved. Psychologically, multiple offers are the opposite of an ultimatum.
We have empirically established that making multiple offers leads to better outcomes for oneself. However,
it does not lead to a worse outcome for the other side
. By making multiple offers, you walk away with a better deal for yourself but leave the other side just as well off as if you had made only one package offer. You expand the pie, but you also get most of that expanded part.
Multiple offers can also help you overcome the potential costs of being too ambitious when you lack power. When a low-power negotiator, someone without good alternatives, makes an aggressive first offer, their high-power counterparts often simply walk away from the table as Martin Schweinsberg of INSEAD has shown. But multiple offers allow low-power negotiators to obtain control over the process and accrue reasonable outcomes without this risk. They let low-power negotiators lean into the negotiation without getting pushed back.
Here we have emphasized when and how to start your engines as you enter into a competition or negotiation. We next turn to the importance of balancing cooperation and competition as you cross the finish line.
1
Name has been changed.
2
Incidentally, this event also contained a humorous example of cross-cultural miscommunication. When the first-class flight attendant asked Thomas, who is German, if he wanted the eggs with kielbasa or the Special K breakfast, he chose the “special” breakfast because, well, he thought it was special. He was severely disappointed when it was just cereal!
How to Cross the Finish Line
T
hey thought he had a bomb.
When the Miami SWAT team arrived, they were confronted by an unusual scene. At the top of a 400-foot radio tower was a 36-year-old man tossing leaflets to people below. The leaflets simply read,
LISTEN TO PARIS
.
Carlos Paris Alvarez had scaled the barbed wire fence and climbed hundreds of feet, carrying three suitcases with him. After securing the scene, the SWAT team had a decision to make. Should they act competitively and scale the tower and use tear gas to compel Paris to come down? Or, should they adopt a more cooperative approach and try to talk Paris down?
The SWAT team chose the latter and turned to their crisis negotiator, Angel Calzadilla. As Angel surveyed the bizarre scene, he encountered his first obstacle: How do you communicate with someone at the top of a radio towerâmore than a football field awayâwho has no cell phone?
It wasn't an elegant solution, but Angel had one. He boarded a helicopter with a giant pad of paper and a marker. Up in the helicopter, Angel would write words on large sheets of paper, press the paper against the helicopter window, and see if Paris nodded or shook his head.
As you might imagine, communication was slow. And Paris was in no hurry. In his three suitcases, which the SWAT team worried contained a bomb, Paris had packed a change of clothes and enough food to last him a week.
After seven hours, Angel finally convinced Paris to climb down by promising him that if he climbed down
now
, Angel would let him talk to the reporters who had gathered below. If Paris waited, however, the reporters might leave to deal with other stories, and Paris would miss his chance to spread his message.
This argument convinced Paris to climb down. As he descended, the SWAT team looked on. After seven long hours of waiting, they wanted nothing more than to throw Paris into their police van and haul him away. Now that they had Paris just where they wanted him, the SWAT team was primed to pivot to competition.
But Angel didn't pivot. Instead, he insisted on maintaining his cooperative course and had the SWAT team stand down as he followed through on his promise. He asked the camera crews to do him a favor; even if they weren't interested in hearing what Paris had to say, would they at least turn on the camera lights and let him speak for a couple of minutes?
The media obliged, and what they heard was more interesting than they had expected. Paris believed he was a messenger from God, and that God wanted him to accomplish four goals for the planet: less asphalt, more horses, and more bicycles. The final demand was an end to Russian pornography. Not all pornography, just Russian pornography. This demand was particularly important to him. (This, by the way, is a true story.)
And then there was something Paris wanted for himself. Bob Dole had just won the Republican nomination for president of the United States, and Paris wanted to be Bob Dole's running mate for vice president of the United States.
After making his demands to the media, Paris was taken away and committed to a mental institution. But because Paris hadn't had an actual bomb, he was judged to be a low threat to the community and was soon released.
But the story doesn't end there.
Several months later, on Easter Sunday, Angel got a page from the police department. There was a crisis, and he was needed. The initial details were sparse. A man had climbed up a pylon and wanted to communicate a message. And strangely, this man wanted to talk to Angel in particular.
As Angel sifted through the initial pieces of information, he began to think. Could it be? No, he thought to himself, it couldn't. But it was. There at the top of the pylon was Carlos Paris Alvarez.
This time, however, there was no protracted negotiation. Angel had developed a foundation of trust with Paris by following through on his earlier promise to allow Paris to hold his press conference. As a result, this second negotiation ran smoothly and Angel and Paris reached a quick resolution.
Now, in Angel's line of work you generally
do not expect repeat business
, so it can be incredibly tempting to cut corners and break a commitment. And in this case, Angel had every reason to believe that his encounter with Paris was a one-time deal. Still, he followed through on his promise. As Angel learned firsthand, even the most unlikely of single-shot transactions can turn into repeat business, and how we resolve one encounter can profoundly influence our next one.
There are many things we can learn from Angel's experience, but here we highlight one key lesson: Endings matter. As we wrap things up, we might mistakenly assume that our hard work is done. It is not. To cooperate and compete effectively in the future, we need to take great care in how we make our last move.
Before we tackle specific strategies for managing the end of an interaction, it's useful to understand
why
endings matter so much. It turns out that how we end an interaction disproportionately influences how others judge the entire episode.
As we all know, our memories are far from perfect. One way in which our memories mislead us, however, has particular relevance for how we close. It turns out that when we recall past events, we are particularly influenced by how things end.
Research led by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman demonstrated this with an unusual experiment. His research team recruited participants to come to a lab, roll up their sleeves, and immerse one hand in very cold water: 57°F (14°C) to be exactâfor 60 seconds. After that, they took a short break and then submerged their other hand in 57°F water for 90 seconds. However, during the final 30 seconds the water warmed to 59°F (15°C), a temperature that was still unpleasant, but just a little less unpleasant than the 57°F water (the researchers varied the order of the two trials, and half the time people got the 90-second treatment first). The experimenter asked the participants which of the two trials they wanted to repeat and which had been more comfortable.
Surprisingly, not only did participants rate the longer trial (90 seconds) as
more
comfortable than the shorter trial (60 seconds), but even more shockingly, 69 percent wanted to repeat the longer trial! The longer trial was objectively worseâthey had endured pain for a longer periodâbut because it had ended a little better, the participants
remembered
it as more pleasant.
This finding was so surprising that Donald Redelmeier led a team in a follow-up experiment where pain really mattersâcolonoscopies. In fact, colonoscopies are so painful that doctors often give patients the drug Midazolam to erase their memory of the experience. In the colonoscopy study, Donald randomly assigned patients to one of two conditions. In one condition, patients had their normal colonoscopy. When the colonoscopy was done, Donald removed the colonoscope quickly. The experience was short, but the intensity of the pain at the end of the experience was great. In the other condition, after patients completed their normal colonoscopy, Donald removed the colonoscope slowly. This added to the experience and increased the duration of the pain, but it decreased the intensity of the pain at the very end.
What did he find? Just like the study with cold water, patients who had experienced the longer (and objectively worse) colonoscopyâbut had less intense pain at the endâremembered the entire experience as less painful and were more likely to
return for a follow-up colonoscopy
!
These studies hold an important lesson: How an experience ends profoundly influences how we remember it. Whether it is a family vacation, a corporate retreat, or a negotiation, it is important to end on a good note.
For Angel, ensuring that his first encounter with Paris ended with a happy Paris made his second negotiation with him go far smoother. And this isn't just true for crisis negotiations. When we agree on a starting salary, reach a deal with a client, or arrange for a neighbor's child to mow our lawn, there is a good chance that we will need to work with our counterpart in the future. If the other party feels that they got a bad deal, they may be reticent to work with us again. But if we end on a cooperative note instead, they will be more likely to transact with usâand maybe even give us a better dealâthe next time around.
A friendly ending can also give us great opportunities in the future. Just as a satisfied customer returns, a satisfied negotiation partner also returns. In addition, a satisfied counterpart can spread the word, bolstering our reputation and building a network of people eager to work with us. By reaching an agreement on terms that leave our counterpart happy, we increase our chances of having successful outcomes not just with him or her but with others in the future.
Moreover, our counterpart's satisfaction today makes it far easier to gain concessions tomorrow. “
Remember how I gave you that great deal last time? Well, I'm going to need a little help from you this time
.” And the converse is certainly true. If our counterpart felt that they got a bad deal the last time, they will be looking to make up for it the next time. A feeling of lingering injustice, in other words, can transform a friend into a foe.
So what can we do to make sure that our counterparts walk away happy? One strategy relates to an idea we developed at the very outset of this book: social comparisons. Remember, social comparisons help us make sense of where we stand in the worldâwhether it's in regard to our salary, our weight, or our relationships. And equally important, social comparisons can affect how satisfied we are with our outcomes.
When we reach an agreement,
we
become our counterpart's first source of social information. And what is the first clue they will look for to find out whether or not they got a good deal?
Our
expression. If we hang our heads a little, we might send the message that this was a tough agreement for usâand that the other side ended up with the better bargain. If we break into a broad smile, we send a very different message; we are very happy with this agreementâ¦and our counterpart might worry that they got taken to the cleaners. In fact, Leigh Thompson of Northwestern University has shown that expressing too much joy as a contract is being signed can signal to the other side that they got a bad deal. You can express satisfaction that a deal has been reached, but be sure not to look so happy that the other side believes that you took them for a ride.
Experienced politicians recognize this principle. Consider the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over decades, the two foes spent trillions of dollars competing with each other for dominance around the globe and in space. One of the most intense flashpoints of the conflict was the division of Germany: East versus West. As the Soviet Union began to lose influence over Eastern Europe, there was one particularly dramatic moment that drew the Cold War to a close: the fall of the Berlin Wall. With hammers and even bare hands, euphoric Germans smashed the wall to pieces.
For Americans, after decades of conflict with few clear victories, here at last was something to cheer. So how did the American president, George H. W. Bush, react to this news? So unremarkablyâa flat “I'm very pleased”âthat he had to defend his reaction later by explaining, “I'm not an emotional kind of guy.” But there may have been much more to it than that. As his secretary of state, James Baker, recalled, “Bush refused to gloat.” Bush knew that he still needed to work with Soviet leaders, and that gloating would have made future deals far more difficult.
And there is something else we need to do to ensure that we don't upset our counterpart as we reach a deal: take our time. To understand this point, consider a common experience many of us have had in our foreign travels. You visit a local market filled with stalls selling similar merchandise. You stop in one, and a decorative vase catches your eye. You pick up the vase to take a closer look, and the merchant invites you to make an offer. You think back to other vases you have seen and make your opening offer, “I'll pay you $40 for this vase.” The shopkeeper immediately accepts your offer and begins to wrap the vase.
How would you feel in this situation?
Now, imagine that instead, the shopkeeper shakes his head, and demands $60. You hold your ground, and after a protracted and difficult negotiation the shopkeeper finally agrees to a price of $50. Now, how would you feel?
Of course, you
should
feel better in the first case. You saved $10 and 20 minutes of your time. But according to our research with Victoria Medvec of Northwestern University, when someone immediately accepts our first offer, we are instantly racked by remorse: “I offered too much!” Even though you may be getting a good deal, this quick acceptance leaves you dissatisfied.
When we consider the other side's perspective, we realize that we should never immediately accept someone's first offer. By asking the other side to raise their price and make concessions, we can get a better deal
and
leave them feeling more satisfied.
As we draw this book to a close, we have learned that even as we seal a deal, we still need to navigate the tension between cooperation and competition. And we need to focus on the future.
The term “commencement” helps us understand this idea. Typically, when we hear the word commencement we think of an event that signifies an ending, like a graduation ceremony from high school or college. But the word “commence” means to start. So a commencement is really about a new beginning. Just as graduates set out for fresh opportunities, how we end one interaction or close a deal sets the stage for everything that comes next.
And remember that what comes next will not take the shape of cooperation
or
competition, but rather a shifting dynamic between the two. As we compete for scarce resources in our unstable social world, it's not enough to be prepared to cooperate
or
compete. We must be prepared to do both.
