Handling Betrayal in Negotiation
Negotiation can cause intense emotion, a high intensity affective episode. Negotiation is expression and reconciliation of caresakes, the things we care about. When the other party manifests willingness to extract value at your expense, it feels like betrayal... not for your sake.
Betrayal produces a jerk reaction: “Is this really happening?” — You can’t believe it but you prepare for the worst. It’s hardest in relationships where you care for the thriving and well-being of the other. The possibility of feeling used and discarded becomes tangible. Retraction, slam on breaks, a U-turn. Betrayal feels punishing and you feel like punishing back. Punition is acting against the interest of the other in tit-for-tat retaliation.
Emotional decisions happen in every human context, personal and professional, but you will find, at your own time, that punition is always miscalculation. A popular form of punition, soft in appearace, is that of mounting a wave of media condemnation, a mediatic campaign of reprehension, reputational attack or disrepute.
It backfires mostly for a single reason: It forecloses reconciliation, makes it less likely. Is there pretension in politeness? For sure. But the value of reconciliation bears complex potential that reveals itself with time. Higher purpose is forever harmonizing, it brings together. You may not see it now but it comes back, invariably, the moment when you wish those doors were open, now locked behind costly apology.
If you find yourself mid-betrayal, know there are better ways to handle:
- It probably makes sense to help the other party make sense of their misjudgment or miscalculation. What aren’t they seeing?
- Very powerful in negotiation: Luxury of time. If you can wait, betrayal can wait, frozen, unconsummated. Deploying luxury of time makes space for reflection. It’s highly poetic when you put bad faith hurry to wait.
- Never be the one to throw the gauntlet. It signals bad faith, desire to punish, to keep out, to push away, to bring apart.
- Smiling while negotiating, smiling while you’re being thrown weight on. It sets the right tone and mental attitude. Picture this:
A: “Why are you smiling? We’ve just cut your allocation by half.” B: “I don’t know sir, I don’t know why I’m smiling. Maybe I just found all of this entirely predictable.”
It’s an art, learning to cooperate with the many agencies of Reality. Learning to cooperate with the profit motive, in particular, can take you places; learning to enlist the profit motive for real purposes.
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