Mixed emotions
April 22, 2002
From The Economist Global Executive
Kellogg’s Dispute Resolution Research Centre wants to teach
managers to become better negotiators—sometimes in spite of themselves
Better negotiators would make for a better world—fewer slammed
doors or half-done deals—and more and more managers realise they need
training to improve their negotiation skills. Negotiation courses are
now standard at American business schools, but the idea of studying
negotiation as part of a business education is relatively new. In
1981, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University
offered a negotiation course to its MBA students for the first time.
“I took the course from the law school and wrote out all the lawyers,”
recalls Jeanne Brett, who specialises in cross-cultural negotiation.
The first year had 17 students; the second saw a packed classroom. By
1986 demand had risen to the point that Ms Brett and other members of
Kellogg’s faculty had joined forces with other Northwestern teachers
to open the Dispute Resolution Research Centre.
The DRRC is now the source of Kellogg’s negotiation courses for
both MBA students and executives, the latter able to choose a
programme on campus, near Chicago, or at Kellogg’s Gleneagles facility
in Scotland. Ms Brett, now director of the DRRC and author of
“Negotiating Globally” (Jossey-Bass, 2001) says that many students in
the executive programmes aren’t necessarily anticipating a specific
negotiation; they’re often just as likely to seek advice on
negotiation “day in and day out,” within their own firm. Adds Leigh
Thompson, who co-teaches “Negotiating Strategies for Managers,” one of
Kellogg’s most popular executive programmes, with Ms Brett, “Students
are realising that negotiation is not just about making money, but is
a fundamental communication tool. We say you’re negotiating any time
you can’t achieve your objectives without the co-operation of someone
else.”
Ms Thompson, author of “The Mind and Heart of the
Negotiator”(Prentice Hall, 1997), describes the three-day programme as
a “wake-up call” to executives formerly confident of their ability to
negotiate successfully. Instead of working towards “win-win”, many
would-be negotiators end up “satisficing”, settling for a good
resolution instead of the best one. The programme has a heavy emphasis
on simulations, which start out as simple one-on-one negotiations and
become gradually more complex.
Ms Thompson notes that a “poker-faced”, emotionless style of
negotiating, or one that seeks resolution through encouragement and
positive reinforcement, usually seems more effective than one that
relies on threats and bullying. But cheer and smiles are not
significantly more effective than emotionless bargaining; sometimes,
moreover, a negative style can be useful. Executives in her class will
on occasion ask her to be more confrontational, presumably to steel
themselves against future bullies. She found in a recent class that
12% of her students were willing to walk away from what she thought of
as an easy deal.
Among the DRRC’s many research questions is why people have so much
trouble negotiating; even in a straightforward, and not always
necessarily emotional, transaction, such as an auction, often ends up
with dissatisfied parties. One reason, says Ms Thompson, is that
negotiators rarely get feedback, positive or negative, on their
skills, and end up relying on self-perception, which can be unduly
flattering. She also has a low opinion of case study teaching: “A lot
of times the critical information is cognitively stored alongside a
lot of junk.” She prefers to take two case studies on vastly different
subjects—a case on a pair of farmers, for example, paired with one on
merchants in Hong Kong—and asks students to extract the common thread.
But it is hard, in just three days, to get around all the potential
internal cues pointing the negotiator towards a less-than-optimal
outcome. The negotiator may feel pressure to give in to the other
party’s demands, or, conversely, become overconfident and ruin the
deal by insisting on a particular point. Unlike other aspects of
management, negotiation relies heavily on elusive “people skills.” Ms
Thompson, who also teaches courses on building and managing teams,
recommends that executives negotiate as a team if possible: one can
analyse the offer on the table and offer reasoned opinions while the
other does the actual negotiating.
Ms Thompson calls it “naïve” to look at negotiation as purely a
competitive, or purely a co-operative, enterprise. Every negotiation
is unique—which makes negotiation a subject difficult to teach; a
manager who performs with a level head one day might be upset by
developments the next. Small wonder the DRRC faculty, especially Ms
Thompson, plan to further research the role of emotions in the
negotiating process. Meanwhile, the centre’s programmes, if nothing
else, allow would-be negotiators to feel calm in their new
self-knowledge—and calm is a valuable skill.
