I've noticed that people generally seem to have one of three responses to failure in negotiation when it happens. Recall the famous children's fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, written by Robert Southey. As the story goes, Goldilocks finds an empty house in the woods after getting lost. She's very hungry, and when she enters the house, she notices three bowls of porridge. The first bowl of porridge is too hot, and the second is too cold, but the third is just right. We can draw an analogy to the three types of responses to failure in negotiation.
The first response, what I would deem one that is "too hot," is denial and rationalization. From this perspective, a negotiator says to themselves, "Yes, I failed to meet my objectives, but it wasn't my fault. The other person is to blame; if they had just done X, Y, or Z, we wouldn't have ended up here." The negotiator with this narrative does not take anything away from their failure because they are too busy trying to protect their reputation and blaming the failure on the other negotiator or circumstances out of their control. When they go back to the table, they do so with overconfidence and are likely to make the same mistakes, having learned very little from their previous experiences.
The second response, what I would deem "too cold," is for the negotiator to put all the onus on themselves for the failure. The experience is so debilitating and, frankly, humiliating that they really don't want to negotiate again. If they do go back to the negotiation table, they do so with tremendous anxiety and a lack of confidence in their ability. Typically, this response leads to a destructive cycle of failure, fear/anxiety, more failure, and so on.
The third response, which is the "just right" approach, lies at the heart of this book. What does the just right approach look like? In general, a negotiator understands and accepts that failure is a possible outcome of negotiation. Then, when failure happens, they face that cold, hard reality and begin to deal with it. After coping with the failure, they move into a process of trying to understand what happened. This means thinking about the lessons they can learn, the mistakes they may have made that contributed to the failure, and why they made those mistakes in the first place. Inevitably, this leads to the idea of thinking about what they can unlearn so they don't make the same errors again. And finally, they pick up their seat at the table that had fallen over due to their failure, stand it upright, sit back down, and get back to negotiating. All of this requires resilience and a recognition that being a great negotiator is a journey of continual learning.
BECOMING A RESILIENT NEGOTIATOR
I mentioned earlier that I failed in a particular negotiation, and the experience stuck with me. It was really at that point that I learned the value of becoming a resilient negotiator, able to get back up, dust myself off, learn from my failure, and get back to the table, having taken away something important for the future. But it was that idea of learning from my failure that I kept returning to. How do we, in the field of negotiation, really learn when we fail to meet our objectives? And what is really needed in this most difficult of undertakings to do so effectively?
It's all well and good to want to be a resilient negotiator and to be able to get back to the table, but if you lack the right mindset, knowledge, skills, and confidence, you won't get there. Let me unpack these dimensions of resilience as a precursor to our discussion of negotiation failure and how to learn from it.
It is imperative to begin with our mindset, because that is where so much of our resilience and ability to deal with failure comes from. Let's start with the idea of "fixed" and "growth" mindsets. When I first learned of this concept it was an epiphany for me, and it helped me to articulate to people the downside of a fixed view of our abilities and the upside of a growth outlook. Briefly, the progenitor of the idea, Carol Dweck, explains the distinction this way: "Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and put more energy into learning." It should be fairly evident why this is so critical when it comes to failure, resilience, and negotiation.
The growth mindset connects directly to our ability to be resilient by helping us convince ourselves that with enough knowledge, skill development, and ability, we can ultimately succeed. We then focus on what we need to do to improve instead of on blaming the other or thinking we can't do something because, well, we're just not good at it and never will be. Our mindset becomes, "If I work hard enough, I can do things I never imagined were possible."
