All right. Well, we're ready to get started. So first of all, thank you so
much for joining us. My name is Matthew Monagle, and I'm the CRM Web Manager here at Columbia
Business School Executive Education. We're going to be having about 15
to 20 minutes of lecture today, as well as some time at the very end for
Q&A. So just one note about
how to ask questions. We'd encourage you at any point throughout
today's presentation to ask a question. It doesn't matter if it's something
that just comes to mind, or something you wanna address at the end. Professor Bontempo will make
sure that he circles around and addresses that at the very
end of the webinar. So just a few common questions, a recording will be
available after the webinar. We usually have those up in about
three to five business days. Again, if you do have any questions, use
the Q and A box to go ahead and ask them. And if you are on social media, we'll be following along with everyone
else on Twitter using the #CBSExecEd. So it's my great privilege today
to introduce Professor Bob Tempo. Bob is a Professor of Management
at Columbia Business School, and teaches both in our MBA programs
as well as in executive education. He's an expert in managerial negotiations,
and has been consulting for over 25 years. He currently serves as advisor to
a senior group at the United Nations as well as the Federal Reserve. And he also consults for various
early stage investors and startups. But before we actually even
get started with his talk, we've got just a short video presentation
we wanna do, which kind of gives you an overview of what he'll be addressing
today, persuasion versus negotiation. [MUSIC] >> It's not obvious, but
I've come to believe that negotiation and persuasion are opposite
psychological processes. Negotiation is the mutual exchange
of resources for a mutual benefit. Persuasion is the skill of changing
what somebody believes about the value of a resource or an outcome and therefore
they require a different set of behaviors. Negotiation is fast,
persuasion is very slow. Negotiation is expensive,
persuasion is free. Negotiation can be explicit. You can say to somebody,
hey look we have to work this out. What do you need from me
to get what you want? Persuasion has to be subtle. Nobody likes you to walk
into a meeting and say, hi, I'm here to change what you
believe about X, Y, and Z. So they're extremely different. They're complementary, but they are both
based on specific teachable behaviors. [MUSIC] >> So that's a little bit of an overview
of what we will be talking about today and for some more specific information, we're going to actually jump right into
Professor Van Tempo's presentation. Bob thank you so much for
joining us today. >> Thank you Matthew and
welcome to everybody who is checking in, I am very pleased that people
have made time to listen. I am going to briefly say hello to anybody
who is a former student of mine and I'm very flattered that folks have
made the time on this busy day. I'm gonna try in this brief time we have,
maybe 15 to 20 minutes to give some practical and specific advice so that you
get a return on the investment you're making and get some very practical
benefit out of our discussion today. First, I'd like to start with a very
simple point, though, about ethics and specifically I'm going to be talking
about ways to influence other folks, how to change their behavior,
how to change their minds. And we have to address the fact that
there are always ethical concerns when we deal with these issues. I'd like to start with a simple
point that these skills are tools. And at the Columbia Business School,
we give our participants and our students, practical tools to
help them in their daily work. Tools are not good things and
tools are not bad things. A hammer can be used to build a hospital. A hammer can be used to smash a window and
rob a store. A hammer's not a good thing and
a hammer's not a bad thing. So, I don't have any qualms about
helping folks get better at the skills. And it's partly because I see
leadership as a manipulative act. I think leaders have to get
comfortable with the fact that part of their job is to manipulate
people to do things. As a parent, I'm trying to manipulate
my kids to not take drugs, and to study and get good grades. As a leader of an organization, we're
trying to manipulate people to learn new skills, or collaborate across functional
lines, or acquire new habits. So I don't have any problem with the ethics of becoming more effective
at influencing other people. And now let's turn to something
that I hope is useful. I'm often surprised when
I'm working with folks and they're sharing their leadership
challenges with me, that they don't seem to have a clear sense of this very simple
question of, what am I trying to do? And what I mean by that is we often
go into very high stakes meetings or important conversations
without a real clear sense of what we're trying to achieve. And I find people would immediately more
effective if they would simply start. Maybe on the elevator ride on
the way up to the meeting or maybe on the cab on the way over to
the office, just simply asking themselves, what am I trying to
achieve in this meeting? And if you start thinking about it, you can realize that many of the meetings
we have are actually negotiations. Many of the interactions we have with
other folks we don't think of as negotiations. Because when I use the term negotiation,
people often think of a transaction, M&A, or some sort of formal political or
business negotiation. But the fact is if you're trying
to build consensus for an idea, get people to buy in on a team,
those are typically negotiations. I have an objective,
I have a set of resources, I'm willing to exchange them to get
other folks to buy into my idea. On the other hand, many of our meetings
are actually about persuasion. I'm trying to change how
people view the riskiness or the relative reward or
value of an outcome. I'm trying to change what they believe or how they perceive
the consequences of something. That's a very different
thing than in negotiation. And what I'd like to try to cover in just
a few minutes today is that negotiation and persuasion as we'd mentioned in
the video, are distinctly different psychological processes and therefore
as managers of other people, we need to consider having a repertoire of different
skills for these different choices. So if you think about negotiation,
it's very expensive. You have to make concessions,
you have to give people things, you have to make sacrifices,
hopefully in return for getting benefits that
outweigh those costs. Persuasion doesn't cost anything,
it's just words, it's just language. They both are hard work and
they both take preparation. But, negotiation requires concessions or
giving things up. Persuasion is really just language. Negotiation is also explicit, you can
walk into a meeting and say, look you and I have a different point
of view on this issue. I recognize that we might have different
underlying interests or preferences. Let's work together to see if we can
come to an outcome of mutual benefit. It's perfectly appropriate to discuss
negotiation as a positive collaborative way to resolve a problem. Persuasion on the hand, has to be subtle. Nobody likes it when you walk in and
say, hi your existing political views are wrong and I'm here to
change your mind about who to vote for. Or how you've been looking at this
strategic initiative where thinking about or this managerial challenge
is short sighted or ill informed and I'm here to change your view. It's just not effective and
it makes actually people more resistant. In addition, negotiation is very fast. You can do it in a meeting. You can negotiate something
complex in an hour. Especially if well compared, negotiation
is a very efficient way to resolve conflict with and build contenders. But be realistic, think about the last time you changed
your mind about an important issue. Persuasion is very slow. Most of the people listening in on
the call today could probably think about a specific example where
they've dramatically changed their opinion on maybe something
that mattered to them. Whether smoking should be
banned in public places, or whether homosexuals should have
the right to be married or maybe who you are willing to vote for
in our current political situation. My guess is a lot of folks
have changed their minds, but it's rarely a sudden cataclysmic event,
it's usually a slow process. It's a very different thing. Now, because I wanna give people some
practical and useful information, I'd like to pick one issue, which is time, to show how the use of time differs when
we're negotiating versus persuading. There's a couple of observations I've
made in my work at the United Nations or various investment banks around the world. I've invited the State Department,
who uses time very carefully. And there's an observation
I've made which is for most folks,
90% of the actual concessions in a negotiation are made in the last
10% of the time spent negotiating. Now this is not a trivial observation like you always find your keys in the last
place you're looking for them. This is actually a pretty important point. You gotta realize that sooner or
later this negotiation's gonna end. And it's only going to end
when one of the two parties runs up against a real time deadline. Therefore, one of your first priorities
is to figure out what that is. It follows that there's another
sort of related issue here. Which is one of the two people at
the table almost always has a different time deadline. Sometimes it's imposed by
the industry they're in. For example, American businesses largely driven by Wall
Street's quarterly earnings estimates. Sometimes it's an organizational level
issue like car dealers have month end or quarter end quotas that
they're trying to fix. Or maybe you have a performance appraisal
metric that you need to work up against. The point is somebody's got a deadline,
and if it's you, you're automatically in a weaker position because
you're under greater time pressure. And the longer this thing drags out the
more desperate you become to wrap it up and the more willing you
are to make concessions. If it's the other person, you're gonna notice by simply slowing
things down, building the relationship. You're gonna increase in power because
they're running up against their deadline. Now, let's consider
instead of negotiations, how does time effect
the persuasion process? The first point I wanna make, is that when I work with people who
are trying to change attitudes. For example, marketing professionals or at the state department we're trying to
influence perceptions around the world. There's a mistake in
belief that the brilliant ideas led me to my current opinion or
gonna work other folks. And we sometimes mistakenly look
back at our own evolution of our opinions and mistakenly believe
that they came in a flash of insight or in some critical, dramatic change. When in fact, most smart adults with
well informed opinions changed them, but only gradually and slowly over time. These flashes of insight are fascinating
and quite memorable, but they're actually quite rare. And so I'm asking folks to
think about the fact that, in the real world That smart adult across
the table from you, maybe your boss or maybe a key stakeholder,
has an existing point of view. And realistically, in this conversation,
the most you can hope for is to gradually move
them along a continuum. First, creating doubt or open mindedness
in their perception, and then creating a desire for more information and
then gently moving them along a continuum. It's quite different from
the process of negotiation. Now, another specific piece
of advice I can give folks, is that, really much of what we teach in
our various courses Is how to prepare. I think most people are overly confident
in their ability to just wing it. Or walk into a meeting and
use their skill. If the meeting has real consequences, if
it's important enough to have the meeting, it's important enough to prepare for
the meeting. If you've decided that it's gonna be
a negotiation and not a persuasion, there are couple of specific things you
can do to make sure you have the best odds working your favor. The first thing that skilled
negotiators do is do their homework. You need to be able to say, what are the issues that are gonna
come up in this conversation? A simple way to say this is, for most of the folks listening in on
the call at your level of your career, the idea that you would have
a meeting without a written agenda, which is distributed a head of time,
doesn't strike me as very professional. For most of the folks on the call today, if you're gonna have a meeting, circulate
an agenda, define and control the agenda. That allows you to do the first stage
in preparing for the negotiation. Which is to anticipate, what are the issues that have
come up in this discussion? What's the feasible range over which
we might discuss these issues? And then finally, you really have
to know your own preferences, because you're gonna have to
make some hard trade-offs. When you go to buy a car, of course
the first issue is going to be price, and that's maybe the top priority. But another issue might
be the delivery date. And you need to be able
to explain to yourself, am I willing to bump up the price a little
bit, if I can speed up the delivery date? Or would I be willing
to take a lower price, if I could wait an extended
period of time to get the car? Knowing your own preferences and where you can make trade offs,
is absolutely essential. Because as we like to say, the car
dealership is a very expensive place to be sorting through
what you really want. Another set of issues which
folks have probably heard about before is that there's this
very important idea called BATNA. And the BATNA is an acronym which
means the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And the reason this is so important is
because it's really the difference between the best United Nations Diplomat and
unsophisticated negotiators. The best United Nations Diplomats
do not answer the phone. They do not allow somebody
to come into their office. Until they can say,
what's the worst case scenario. What's my best alternative
to dealing with this person? If it all goes wrong, what am I gonna do? I know that seems defeatist, but unsophisticated negotiators tend
to focus on best case scenario. They fantasize about everything working
out smoothly and they're very optimistic. Sophisticated negotiators prepare by
anticipating the worst case scenario. What if the person's emotionally
unstable or extremely aggressive or views the world very
differently than I do? What am I gonna do? And by preparing and
understanding what your BATNA is, you protect yourself from emotion. You protect yourself from intimidation and all sorts of other tactics
that people can use on you. On the other hand, if you've decided that
the conversation you're about to have is a persuasion,
you need to prepare very differently. When I help people prepare for important
persuasions, we prepare a script for that conversation. We think about what are some statements
that the target in my persuasion is ready to hear? What are things they would accept or
agree with? And more importantly, what are some things that the target
of my persuasion is not ready to hear? What are some things that they
would disagree with, or reject, what would cause them emotional distress? The research on this is pretty clear that
most people that have an existing point of view and are deeply entrenched to
leave are likely to have an epiphany. They're not likely to have
a shocking realization. What we've got to do is be realistic and
gradually move them along and continue to get them where we wanna be. But whereas with negotiation, we can realistically use an hour reach
agreement shake hands at the end of it. Persuasion is unlikely to
be successfully in an hour. And again,
be realistic about your own life. When was the last time you changed
your mind in a short conversation? Now, that's 20 minutes and to summarize, I hope I've given you
some useful information. Negotiation and
persuasion are different things. You need to prepare very differently. You need to think about
how time affects them. And you need to do your homework. And now I see that we've got quite
a few questions coming in, and I thank you for those. The very common question has been
asked by somebody which I appreciate, regarding salary. And when you go into get a bump in your
salary, you wanna think about it as, am I trying to negotiate with this person,
or am I trying to persuade? It's a choice. Now, let's describe it. If you're negotiating a salary raise,
what you're gonna try to do is say to your boss or the decision maker, what do I
have to do to get the salary that I want? What performance objectives
do I have to achieve? What can I give you in terms of
commitments or quality standards or new skills learned. And in return, if I do those things,
you'll give me the raise that I want. That's a negotiation. On the other hand, if it's a persuasion,
you've gotta ask yourself, what do I need to do or say to get
that key decision maker to think that it's their idea that I
need to have a big raise? Do they need to believe that
they might lose me, for example, to another organization? But the difference is, persuasion requires
that we get them to think it's their idea. Negotiation is an explicit discussion
of what do I need to give you to get the outcome that I want? Now, there's several more
really good questions. Some of them are rather sophisticated and
difficult to answer very brief. But somebody has asked me about the power
of story telling and personal narrative. And here,
you're asking a great question but the answer is more detailed than I
can get into in this brief webinar. In the persuasion course we actually
train people in a psychological profile. And we train them to understand that
they're different types of people. And different types of people
are differentially influenced by different kinds of information. So yes, there are some types of people
that finds storytelling very compelling. There are certain kinds of problems for which storytelling, vivid dramatic
imagery is the right approach. But there are other kinds of people
who find that to be for lightweights, or you actually lose credibility because
you're seen as a quote storyteller. And those kinds of people need data,
facts, evidence, bullet points. They're turned off by storytelling. And yes, there are types of
people that like narratives. A personal story or a meaningful relationship is
extremely persuasive for them. But not everybody. Some people find that's flakey or
inappropriate. So, there are a variety
of persuasive tactics. The most advanced skill is recognizing
what type of person's psychologically am I dealing with? And what type of Information can I
use to be differentially effective? Now, their questions about how to
deal with multiple parties and again there are tools that we can use. You can look come up on the Internet
actually on stakeholder analysis and stakeholder mapping. And there's no question that
many of the folks listening in, are dealing in very complex environments
where there just negotiating with one person, depress multiple
functions across an organization. And it's a very useful skill to
do a few minutes of homework and figure out who are the key
decision makers? Who are the influencers? Who are the gate keepers? Who are the champions? And we can go through a stakeholder map,
identify who the key players are and then come up with a negotiation and persuasion
strategy for each on the different groups. There's a couple of things to read and,
well I really appreciate all these questions that are coming and
I'm gonna try to answer a few more. The place to get started
is obviously with reading. There's an excellent book called,
Getting to Yes, it's by Roger Fisher. It's a classic. It's timeless. And if you haven't read Getting To Yes
it's really the place to start. Roger Fisher outlines several practical key behavioral
steps you can take to become better. When it comes to persuasion,
it's a little more diffuse but I would say the place to
start is an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review
called Change the Way You Persuade. And in their article, Change the Way You
Persuade, Williams and Miller outline that there are different types of
leaders who have different styles. And they are both effective at using and susceptible to different kinds
of persuasive information. So, our time is just about up. I wanna say thank you to
everybody who has checked in, and I hope to see some of you in
either the negotiation program or the persuasion program that we
offer here at the business school. And I thank you for your time today. >> One more question that I have for you. We had a few participants who really
appreciated what you had to say about BATNA, and asked in the questions if you
wouldn't mind just restating that, and kind of recapitulating what that means? I think they wanna make
sure they write it down and can refer back to it a little later. >> Well thanks Matthew. The BATNA is an acronym that stands for the Best Alternative to
a Negotiated Agreement. The reason that word is important
is because a lot of folks have the idea in their heads. The idea is my backup plan or the point
at which I'd walk away or plan b. Economists call it the reservation price. If you've ever sold anything on eBay,
there's a reservation price for goods. But the BATNA is a very important idea
because it's the thing you're gonna do if this negotiation doesn't work out. It's actually the worst case scenario. For example,
if you go into negotiate a raise, and you don't get one, it's the job
you would take if you get hired. Now, it sounds like it's
an unpleasant thing to do, but in my training I found a lot of people
find negotiations very stressful, it can be a very emotional thing,
especially if the stakes are high. And for that reason,
preparing ahead of time and identifying specifically what's my BATNA and what
am I gonna do if this doesn't work out, is a very effective way to manage
your own emotional stress. Now, that's about the level of detail
we can go into on this call, but I hope what folks are hearing is that we
have a variety of very practical tools. We can help people with
stakeholder analysis. We can help people with developing
scripts for important conversations. We can help people identify their
BATNA and develop their BATNA as part of the training that we do
in our executive programs. So, again I thank you for
all these great questions. I hope I have kept my promise that I
gave you some stimulating ideas and some practical advice. And I look forward to seeing
everybody on campus someday. >> Bob, thanks so much for
the great presentation today. I know we had a lot of questions that
we didn't get a chance to get to. And we're hoping that
we'll be able to answer some of them either in the programs,
if you attend, or if we can answer some of them either by
email, it's a follow up to the program. We might be able to curate
a few of those as well. So just one last question that I saw in a
lot of different places about the webinar recording, we will absolutely make
sure that you have a copy of that. We have a webinar archive on our
website that will include both this and any other webinar that we've
done over the last few years. So if you signed up for the webinar
attendance, you'll actually get a link to that webinar emailed directly to
you, so you don't need to worry about it. Again, I just wanna say thank you
to Bob and thank you to all of you. This is actually one of our most
highly attended webinars so obviously the subject
matter was of interest.
