How to Be More Skilful With People Without Compromising Who You Are (Leading With Honour IV)
Image by Vladislav83 from Pixabay
The principles of leadership with honour can be found in our old stories.
On some level, we all know what the honourable leader does: they do what the leaders we most admire do.
They tell the truth.
They don’t compromise who they are.
The have compassion and they are willing to do and say hard things.
They are skilful and wise.
They serve a greater purpose than profit… but they also create the important results in the day-to-day, including, when it matters, profit.
Becoming a leader like that might be why you’re here.
Or the reason you’re here might be simpler: the desire to be at peace with yourself at the end of each day.
The wish to stop these insidious regrets about the times you know you compromised who you really are, or behaved in a way that you wish you hadn’t.
But remember: that lack of peace at the end of the day, the insidious regrets about compromising who you are… they are about honour, too.
These attributes of an honourable leader are high ideals: if they were easy, everyone would already do them. With the leaders I coach, I see again and again that our ideals can fall by the wayside as we interact with the real world.
‘Everyone has a plan,’ Mike Tyson once said, ‘until you get hit.’
As I work with people who are trying to lead their teams, their organisations and themselves with honour (even if they don’t always call it that), the hits they face often come (metaphorically) in their interactions with other people.
That’s where we slip.
That’s where we find ourselves riddled with regret.
That’s where we lose our inner peace.
And yet no one creates meaningful work in isolation: all of us have colleagues, staff, customers, people around us. And frustrating as they often are, they are necessary for us to do work that really counts.
And a life without them isn’t much of a life.
The work of our life always requires interactions with others, and yet the words we use for those interactions are often loaded with connotations. They feel full of risk to someone striving for their ideal form of honourable leadership.
Words like influence, sales, persuasion.
We have stories in our culture about all of them; and mostly they aren’t stories of honour.
Instead, they are the sleezy, manipulative tools of the dishonourable character in our modern myths.
And yet.
One of the rules for operating in a complex world is – as the developmental psychologist Jennifer Garvey Berger might put it – to beware the traps of simple stories. We evolved for simpler times, when the simple story we first jump to might often have been true. But in the complexity of today’s world, we need a different way. We need to look for shades of grey.
The simple stories must be questioned. It can’t be that only the ‘baddies’ use influence, sales and persuasion. And it can’t be true that those words have to be how you think they have to be: you can transcend and include the stories you have about them as you design your own way of working with others, which leaves you more effective and more at peace at the end of each day. Which leaves you with more of a ‘shades of grey’ worldview.
You can find a way to be more skilful with the people around you, to take them with you on your journey (or not, if not taking them turns out to be the honourable path).
You can navigate the messy situations more like a ballet dancer and less like a bull in a china shop.
You can be honourable in even the most difficult conversations.
You can do sales, persuasion, influence and more while holding to your commitment to telling the truth, while maintaining your code.
You can reclaim the words and concepts that you shy away from and use them honourably.
In my work, the tools and mental models I have collected for working with others honourably have been invaluable as I have developed them, used them and shared them with clients.
My aim in this article is to be practical: to create a tactical handbook for leading others with honour.
Below, you’ll find seven key tools to help you do that.
Each is relatively simple but not necessarily easy.
Each can have an instant impact and be practised for a lifetime.
They fall broadly into two categories:
In Part I of this article, you’ll find tools and frameworks.
In Part II you’ll find mindsets and mental models.
To truly level up our interactions with our staff, colleagues, clients and stakeholders, we need both: we need the tools and frameworks that enable us to be technically more skilful, and we need the mindsets and mental models that facilitate the in-the-moment dynamic flexibility necessary for being a leader with honour.
Both are valuable, but together they can feel like a superpower.
Together, they represent what the leaders we most admire – the most honourable and skilful of leaders – do.
When they do it, they often look effortless, but these abilities are learnable and growable. When we practise them, everything begins to change.
Time to get practising.
Part I: Tools and Frameworks
The Three Steps of Honourable Influence (Sales With Honour)
Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve made it my business to be in rooms with the most interesting thinkers in the world. Occasionally, this shows me patterns, and sometimes they give me VERY STRONG signals on which books to read.
I’ve heard two of the world’s leading behavioural scientists give the same answer when asked a question that was essentially: how do you change someone’s mind?
The answer: read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
The first time I heard that answer was from Jonathan Haidt, whose work on everything from happiness to political polarisation to the teen mental health crisis makes him (for me) one of the most interesting thinkers in the world. But despite him saying that in answer to a question I asked him, I have to say I didn’t read the book.
But when I heard it the second time, I knew I needed to.
Cass Sunstein, a Professor at Harvard Law School who has served in two White House administrations and was the author of – among other things – the influential book Nudge, said that in How to Win Friends and Influence People Carnegie predicted everything they would find in behavioural science… but the book was written before behavioural science was even a thing.
How to Win Friends and Influence People is an incredible piece of work, written almost 100 years ago. It is punchy, short, easy to read and usually really cheap.
And when I read it I found what Sunstein had said to be true: pretty much everything that I had ever read about difficult conversations, persuasion, influence and sales seemed to be contained in this book.
And whilst the book is really worth reading in and of itself, giving far more texture than I will here, you’ll find this whole article grounded in the principles that Carnegie outlines and that behavioural science had subsequently found to be true.
More than that, boiling down that book to its key ideas is a powerful way to reframe influence, from something that you feel you have to compromise yourself to do into an act of generosity and care for someone else.
This is how you influence someone in three steps:
Understand what the other person really wants.
Work out how what you want that person to do gets them what they want.
Explain that to them so that they understand that by doing what you want, they get what they want.
Voila – they now want to do what you want them to do.
And you’ll see that rather than manipulating someone into something, what you are doing here is genuinely helpful to them: helping them get what they want. And so influence, rather than a tool for manipulation, can become a generous act.
This, too, is a framework for Sales With Honour.
Because just as influence is really selling someone an idea, sales is really influencing someone to buy something.
All of us know the archetypal sleezy sales person, and have been a victim of it at least once in our lives, ending up buying something we didn’t really want or need and feeling manipulated.
Great sales people – and Carnegie was undoubtedly one of these – know something different: that sales can be honourable, can be about helping people solve their problems and get what they want. And if you can find a way that your product or service gets them what they want, and explain it to them well enough, your sales are suddenly easy.
Great sales people also know that manipulation is a short game that will quickly put a customer off: make a quick sale now but ensure that person will never trust you again. Honourable influence, however, is a long game: by truly helping someone now, whether that’s by buying our product or not, we build a relationship which allows for more or deeper connection in the future: someone who will buy from us again and again when our product gets them what they want. Or, even if they don’t buy from us, we create someone who will talk about our work with others, building our business for the future.
That’s what is possible with honourable sales and influence: the creation of deep relationships that last over many years, supporting us in our leadership journeys as we support another person to get more of what they want in their life.
But only if it is honourable influence. As soon as we compromise who we are to make a sale, or to get a quick win, we risk the long-term potential of a relationship.
Like many of the ideas in this article, this framework looks simple. And it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy: each step can contain deep complexity. Let’s take them one by one.
1. Understand what the other person really wants.
Almost every book I’ve read about difficult conversations starts with a grounding section explaining that the most important thing you can do is listen. To understand what the other person really wants, we need to really listen.
That means asking open questions, and then staying silent. Not just waiting for our turn to speak, but truly listening to the other person: what they say, how they say it, what they don’t say.
This, in and of itself, is an act of care and generosity. It is a powerful way to build trust and a relationship that endures.
It is also the most useful tactic for changing someone’s mind: as I understand it, almost none of us ever change our minds based on rational disagreement or argument. Presented with evidence, our biases kick in and we simply dig our heels in and entrench our position (there is research that shows that whether we are shown evidence that supports our beliefs or even if we are shown evidence that contradicts them… our beliefs get more entrenched). The best way to get someone to change their mind – as Haidt and Sunstein hinted – is to do what Carnegie recommends in his book. To ask questions and listen. Far more likely than rational arguments to change someone’s mind is for them to be listened to, allowing them to set aside their defences and shift away from their threat state and into their social engagement state, where learning and connection is possible. Then, on their own as they talk through their beliefs, they may discover more shades of grey than they had previously assumed, and during or after the conversation, they have the space to reform their opinions and mental models based on that.
So, first: listen.
Go and meet the person – ask them what they want, learn about them. If you can’t listen directly to them right now, research them. Talk to people who know them.
But either way, find out what drives them, what they want, what keeps them up at night. Be listening for: how can I help them? And specifically, how might what I want them to do get them what they want?
2. Work out how what you want that person to do gets them what they want.
As we discover what the other person really wants, we begin part two of the process.
There’s something you want someone to do – that’s a huge part of the job of a leader: to get other people to do things.
But for each of us, this could look different. It might be: give you more budget, buy your product, talk to someone for you, finally do the thing you’ve been asking them to do for months that they always say they’ll do and never do.
But… why haven’t they been doing this thing? Why aren’t they doing it already? Why isn’t me asking them to do it enough?
Well, they have lots of other things to do, lots of other choices available to them, and the motivation to do this specific thing isn’t high enough… yet.
Many times in our lives we fall back on the tactics of reward, punishment or power: on some simple level, these sometimes work. And many times, the leadership role models we have learned about are based on these, from our parents, our teachers and the people who have led us in our careers.
But as a 21st century leader, we need more from our people than that: we can’t afford for them to only do things when we are there cracking the whip, guiding them step by step, or even enticing them with rewards.
We need instead to tap into their intrinsic (internal) motivation: we want the people who work for us to be working for us (and on the things we want them to work on) because they want to, because it’s the best thing to do for them.
We want that because it’s more effective. And we want that because it’s easier for us. And we want it because it’s more honourable.
And so we come to a question: can I find a way that it makes complete sense for this person to do this thing? In fact, can I think of a way in which actually if they don’t do this thing, it’s a bit silly? At this point we have to assume the other person is a good person, doing their best (more on that later), and we have to take this seriously and be full of care for them. Otherwise, we may find ourselves in the rational argument space again, with them just digging their heels in.
If we can find that story – why it makes complete sense for them to do this thing, given everything we know about what drives them, what they want, what keeps them up at night, then we’re ready to talk to them about it.
It’s worth specifying: this may all happen in one conversation. An honourable sales conversation, for example, or a one-to-one with one of your staff members. Or it may happen over several meetings, over days, weeks, months or even years.
And it’s worth answering the most common question I’ve had about this work: what if I can’t come up with a reason that them doing what I want gets them something they want?
Well, the truth is: you may not be able to influence them to do this thing. If you can’t create the internal reason to do it via influence, and the other reasons to do it (e.g. it’s your job to do this and if you don’t you may no longer have a job) don’t work, then there is genuinely no reason for them to do the thing. Honourably, we may need to let it go at this point (although they may have to face the consequences).
The honourable sales person knows to walk away, protecting the relationship for the future. The honourable leader learns when to use the stick with compassion - as a first resort or a last resort - and uses it only when they are willing to follow through.
The dishonourable sales person or leader aggressively pursues the lost cause. At best, they might make the sale (literally or figuratively) right now by force of will and manipulation leaving the buyer feeling frustrated and violated.
And, if you’re struggling to find the reason doing what you want them to do might get them what they want… sometimes outside perspectives can be useful. A third party – your manager, a colleague, a coach – may be able to find the reason the other person would want to do this thing for you even when you can’t.
3. Explain that to them so that they understand that by doing what you want, they get what they want.
Then you have to tell the story. Each story is different, but if you’ve done the work in steps one and two well, then this should come fairly easily to you. The most skilful people I’ve seen at this do it gently and compellingly, show the person they have been really heard and offer them a way to solve the problem that keeps them up at night, while also giving them the power to choose for themselves whether to take the next step.
They may still not take it, but the support, empathy and skill involved in influencing this way will usually deepen the relationship for the future even if the influencing in this moment is unsuccessful. Because the foundation here is generosity and empathy: ‘I’ve heard you, and I think I might have a way to solve this problem you have. Here it is. What do you think?’
And the influencer will remain at peace with themselves, whatever the outcome.
How to Make Every Meeting Better: The Mutually Beneficial Conversation
Whether we are using the tools of influence or having some other kind of meeting, everyone reading this will have experienced the slippery slope of human conversations. How even a meeting between well-meaning, skilled professionals can get off track and end feeling unsatisfying, and how no matter how you have planned for your one-to-one, sometimes you don’t end up talking about what you most wanted to talk about.
What I want to share with you now is a framework for meetings, that will make all your meetings better.
I learned about this from the consultant and author Fred Kofman. The way Kofman told the story, he was watching another professor’s lecture (at MIT, I think, when Kofman taught there), and the lecturer made a bold claim. Something like the one I’ve just made: this simple framework will improve every meeting.
Kofman thought: no chance. And yet… when he used it, he found it to be true.
And I have to say that when I heard Kofman tell this story I thought: no chance. And yet… when I use it, I find it to be true.
Here’s the framework that I learned from Kofman. It’s called a Mutually Beneficial Conversation:
Define a mutually beneficial purpose for the meeting.
Express your point of view.
Understand their point of view.
Negotiate a mutually beneficial strategy.
Commit to execution.
It’s incredible how many meetings don’t have a mutually beneficial purpose agreed explicitly at the start, don’t allow one or more people to express their point of view, don’t have a mutually beneficial strategy and/or don’t commit to execution at the end. If you can add even one or two more of these steps to your meetings, you’ll see them transform.
And if you can add them all… well, I use this every time I find myself worrying about a conversation. And every time it helps.
As with the influence framework, these steps are complex and not necessarily easy. Although there are some key steps that you can apply to any conversation that will improve it.
Again, let’s take the steps one by one:
1. Define a mutually beneficial purpose for the meeting.
If you can get this right, a lot of the work is done for you and everything else becomes easier.
When you don’t do this usually one of two things happens. Either the meeting just drifts, essentially wasting everyone’s time through its lack of focus.
Or, especially in charged conversations about difficult topics, members of the meeting enter into verbal pushing and shoving.
Our aim with the mutually beneficial purpose is to resolve those two issues at once: to bring focus to the meeting, and to shift the dynamic from two (or more) people shoving each other into two (or more) people looking together at a problem.
We want to be metaphorically (and sometimes literally) sitting next to each other focused on the same thing, not sitting across from each other and/or focused on different things.
Again: our aim is to define a mutually beneficial purpose, solving a problem or covering an issue that it is in everyone’s interest to solve or cover.
You can hear the echo of the influence framework here: we want to move from the natural (but not helpful) dynamics of ‘me against you’ or ‘us against them’ into collaboration and co-creation. This usually has a big impact on the dynamics of the conversation and – as I understand it – likely on the physiology of the two people in a way I already touched on: switching them into their social engagement state, from which they can collaborate and learn, and out of their threat state, where they are physiologically incapable of social engagement and learning. (This is called polyvagal theory, and you can read more about it in this article.)
In a difficult conversation with your manager, a subordinate or a colleague, you can usually start with this as a foundational mutually beneficial purpose: ‘I’d like to have a conversation about how we can succeed together even more,’ or ‘I’d like to have a conversation about how we can work together even better.’ These are undeniably mutually beneficial - it would be hard for someone to say no to them. If you can fine-tune it to make it even more enticing and even more mutually beneficial, go ahead. But remember these foundational ones work well for setting a mutually beneficial scene.
If you’re trying to sell something (metaphorically or literally), it could be: ‘I’ve got an idea that I think might be really helpful to you and your team – can we have a conversation about that?’
In my business, when I’m referred to a prospective client, I say something like: ‘Let’s meet. We’ll have a conversation and the aim of the meeting will be to find out if there’s a way we can work together that works really well for both of us. Sometimes we’ll talk in detail about working together at the end, but there’s no pressure to do that if one or both of us doesn’t think that’s the right way forward. How does that sound?’ When we meet, the mutually beneficial purpose is: let’s see if we can work out if there is work for us to do together here, where I as your coach can really support you in your leadership journey.
If the issue gets more complex it might require more thought, but even through these straightforward examples you can probably see how these meetings become easy for the other person to say ‘yes’ to (and a bit silly to say ‘no’ to), and how they open up the conversation between two collaborators rather than setting people on their guard or switching people off.
2. Express your point of view.
Steps Two and Three in this process don’t have to happen in this order, but if you’ve called the meeting, often it makes sense for you to go first. It also helps you keep the meeting on track for what you want it to be for.
If you’ve been working through the influence framework, here’s where you explain to them what you want them to do and how them doing it will get them what they want.
It’s as simple – and as complex – as that.
If you’re in disagreement, or struggling with someone, it’s powerful to speak in the first person and avoid blaming the other person, which tends to get their hackles up and leave them feeling under threat. The more undeniable you can be, the better. Some good phrases are: ‘I felt X because I…’ (never ‘because you’) or ‘When you said that, the story I’m telling myself is that you…’ (not ‘You thought…’). This is also part of you living your commitment to the transformational practice of telling the truth (because the reason we feel things is down to our interpretation as much as the other person’s action; and because we can never know what someone else is thinking). Frameworks like Non-Violent Communication can be useful here if you want to dive deeper.
As we’ll get to, practising this, potentially roleplaying it with another person, is a powerful way to increase your skill in this part of a conversation.
3. Understand their point of view.
After sharing your point of view, step into the role of listener again, and ask the question, ‘How are things for you?’
Here we need to come back to all the active listening that you’ll be practising for your influencing or sales. Imagine you’re putting some duct tape over your mouth until they are finished. When there’s a pause, look at them: are they now waiting for you to talk, or are they thinking?
If they’re waiting for you, or you’re not sure, ask ‘Is there anything else?’
And then again, listen, check, repeat.
Once they’re done, give them a playback of what you’ve heard: share in as much detail and with as much coherence as you can what you think they’ve just told you, assuming the best of them. You aren’t filtering or changing here, and you don’t have to agree with what they’ve said. You’re just sharing it back. Start with, ‘let me check with you what I think I’ve heard.’
This part has two roles:
1) It really checks that you’ve heard it right. It gives them a chance to say ‘No, it’s not like that, it’s like this…’ And be prepared for you to be 99.5% sure you’ve repeated what they said word for word, and they still tell you it’s wrong. That’s why this is important, we’re really clarifying what is being said and what they mean by that. Sometimes when we hear what we’ve said we realise it isn’t quite like that. That is what may be happening for someone else here - they are really hearing what they said for the first time. This is part of how people change their minds. So if they say ‘No’, listen to what it’s actually like and play that back until they say ‘Yes, that’s it.’
2) It helps the other person relax and meets their needs for respect, empathy and more. Most conversations don’t go like this, instead people don’t feel heard, are worried they won’t get all the things they want to say out, and so they don’t really listen to you. They’re just worrying and waiting to talk. Listening to them and checking back that you’ve really heard them often shifts people out of ‘me vs you’ and back to ‘this is two people looking at a problem together’.
Once you’ve done that, and they’ve said, ‘Yes, that’s it’ when you gave a playback, we are in a place where the two of you actually know each other’s points of view. It’s likely there’s a lot more overlap than you thought, but also possible you’re miles apart. Hopefully you’ve both learned about each other and the problem from hearing each other’s perspectives: that’s why it’s important to have multiple people looking at a problem. One eye sees almost as well as two, but doesn’t have any depth perception. Add another eye in – or even better, an ear – and suddenly we have a far greater sense of what reality is actually like.
4. Negotiate a mutually beneficial strategy.
Often, after all that, this one is easy. You can now, together, look at the situation: what is the best thing for us to do here? If you try and plan a conversation like this, often the way forward gets a huge amount of thinking and the idea of getting the other person to agree fills you with stress. But once you’ve really been in the situation from two people’s perspectives it often looks clear, and is easy to get the other person’s buy-in.
‘If this is what’s important to you, and this is what’s important to me, then how about we do X?’
When I use this framework in a conversation I’ve been full of stress about, often it’s as simple as that.
And sometimes it won’t be, and this will become a negotiation. In that case, stay with the principles: listen really well, make sure both of you get a say, check your understanding of what they are saying and remain two people looking at a problem together as long as possible.
Beware: if we get too attached to a particular idea of how we should move forward (we may have thought about it a lot before the conversation), the meeting can get derailed at this point. What has been two people looking at the problem together now becomes a fight over whether I (or you) am willing to let go of how we thought it should be. To invite other people to be open to changing their minds, we have to be open to changing our mind, and that is as important here as anywhere else. It can help to come to a conversation with ideas, of course, but we have to beware of being too attached to one particular way forward.
Remember the mutually beneficial purpose of the conversation. Look for the strategy that helps both people and is coherent with the rest of the conversation: the win-win where everyone gets (at least part of) what they want.
5. Commit to execution.
I’ve spent 10 years coaching leaders and entrepreneurs (and many other people besides), and coaching isn’t coaching without action. So it is always a real shock to me to be part of a meeting that doesn’t end with ‘And what are we going to do as a result of this conversation?’
Clear commitment to action makes everything different. If you can, you want to know who will do what, exactly what they will do and by when. Leave no room for grey areas in the commitments: when I don’t really know if I have or haven’t done it, or if it was even my task to do, there’s all kinds of reasons for me to not do it. Especially if I have loads of other stuff to do, which of course everyone does. And it’s almost impossible to hold me to account: did I really say I’d do it? And if I said I’d do it but not by when, how do you know if you’re being reasonable when you chase me?
Remember: it’s better to be really clear and have someone say ‘No’ to taking on an action now than it is to wait for six months for them to do it, only for them to say ‘No’ later. Get the actions clear and get a clear commitment.
That’s in service of everyone. And remember: this is a mutually beneficial strategy. It’s in everyone’s interests to get this right.
The texture of the Mutually Beneficial Conversation could be even greater than the 1,700 or so words I’ve just written about it. You can practise it to become a master but let’s be clear: even if you just get the purpose clear at the start, make sure both people get a chance to talk about their point of view and then commit to action that you both agree on, every meeting will be better.
And once you start to see that, you can practice and dial up the skill in each stage.
But that of course gets to the question: what if, even after all this, you still can’t agree.
Conflicts and Negotiation
I once heard Fred Kofman describe the following as Conflicts 101 (it also features in Kofman’s book, Conscious Business).
Conflicts 101:
For a conflict to exist you need these three things:
Disagreement: if you both agree, clearly there is no conflict.
Scarcity: that is, both people can’t have what they want. If they can, then there isn’t a conflict.
Disputed Property Rights: this is probably the economist in Kofman using language like this. The phrasing that makes the meaning clear is probably: it’s not clear who has the right to make the ultimate decision.
To resolve a conflict, therefore, you need to either 1) agree, 2) make it possible for both people to get what they want or 3) agree or work out who has the final say.
Most of this article so far has been concerned with 1: removing the disagreement.
Can we work out how what I want gets them what they want? If we can, then we agree and there’s no conflict.
Can we both really hear each other and agree a mutually beneficial strategy? If we can, then we agree and there’s no conflict.
But what if that doesn’t work?
Then we have to look at 2 and 3 in more detail and see where we get to.
A powerful strategy for removing Scarcity in a negotiation is to dig deeper into people’s wants.
Let’s say my wife and I disagree about what we want from our holiday (I heard Kofman use a similar example, and it’s too good to bother coming up with a different one). I want to go hiking in the Scottish highlands, she wants to go to the beach in Southern Europe (disagreement). We don’t have the budget or time to do both (scarcity) and it’s not clear who gets to pick our family holiday (disputed property rights).
One way to move through this is to dig into our wants.
For me, we could ask: if you get to go hiking in Scotland, what do you get that’s even more important than going hiking in Scotland?
I might answer: I get to be active in nature.
For her, we could ask: if you get to go to a Greek beach, what do you get that’s even more important than going to the beach?
She might answer: I get to be warm and relax.
And then already it looks easier to remove the scarcity and do both: maybe I go snorkelling somewhere in the mediterranean while she gets her sun and sea. Or maybe she gets her warmth relaxing by a fire in a luxurious Scottish cabin or hotel while I get to hike.
Sometimes it doesn’t come out clearly at that point, and we might need to go another level down.
If you get to be active in nature, what do you get that’s even more important than that?
If you get to be warm and relax, what do you get that’s even more important than that?
And as you dig down, sometimes the scarcity will just drop away. That’s what you’re looking for: to get deep enough into people’s wants and needs that it’s possible to fulfil both.
But what if you don’t?
Well, at that point we may be down to 3: is there someone who does have the ultimate say? It may be that one of us actually does have the final say but we don’t want to use it: as we’ve already discussed, finding intrinsic reasons for doing things usually often trumps going by force. But if it is your call, then you have the option to exercise that power.
And, sometimes, between you you can find someone who literally has the responsibility to make the decision, or an arbiter you can agree between both parties. In a company, that might look like: we can’t agree on the strategy for this product launch. We can’t do both things and we can’t find our way through it by digging into our wants. It’s our job as a team to agree it, but we are struggling. We can, however, agree that as the Head of Sales has some skin in the game about selling this product, and we both like her, we could ask her to make the decision.
Ideally, you can go together, present her with both sides of the story and the work you’ve done already in understanding what’s behind what you each want, and trust in her decision-making.
Of course, it’s also possible that in the end, there’s no agreement, too much scarcity and someone other than you has the ultimate say.
It’s possible you won’t get what you want through this kind of negotiation.
I’ve heard reflections on this kind of situation many times from groups of staff I’ve worked with. Times when they aren’t going to get what they want and they don’t have the ultimate say. Maybe they are unhappy about the stress they are under, and believe that a small (in the scheme of the organisation) budgetary increase would solve a lot of problems. But they don’t have the property rights and the leadership disagree with them.
At that stage, they have a choice.
Sometimes, they can find peace even without getting what they want. If you are in a situation like this, ask yourself The Honour Question: what would I have to do so that, regardless of the outcome, I can be at peace with yourself?
Perhaps the answer is: understand that I’ve been through the process of trying to negotiate with the Director of my business unit and done it well and honourably. I’ve used good practice and good techniques (like the ones in this article).
If that’s the answer that you get, then maybe you can let it lie.
I’ve certainly seen that happen.
Or, it’s possible there’s a further push that needs to be made before you can be at peace with yourself.
The BATNA
The most useful piece of negotiation theory that I have ever hard of is the BATNA. That is: the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement, which features in Roger Fisher and William Ury’s book, Getting to Yes.
The theory would go something like this: ideally in a negotiation two or more parties would find a way that by working together they are both better off: a negotiated agreement. That’s the point of a negotiation – if both parties are worse off working together than just working separately, why are they in conversation? At least at the start, for both to show up, there’s likely hope on both sides that we can be better off through negotiation.
The techniques in Kofman’s Conflicts 101 will help you here: try to solve the disagreement and scarcity in a negotiation in the kinds of ways I’ve outlined above.
But, there’s always a possibility that – for one of the three reasons laid out in Conflicts 101 – it isn’t possible to reach a negotiated agreement. Including that you’re negotiating with someone more senior than you and they have the final say.
And that’s why before you enter any negotiation you should know your BATNA. Your Best Alternative if you can’t come To a Negotiated Agreement.
Play out the thought experiment: if you assume that despite your best efforts you can’t reach a negotiated agreement, what is the best option for you to choose that gets you as close as possible to what you want?
If we don’t consider this then we run the risk of making choices that look unwise in retrospect, jumping to an alternative to negotiation which is not the BATNA. For example, in a salary or promotion negotiation, most of us have had a feeling something like this: if they don’t give me what I want, I quit.
But it doesn’t take long to imagine the person for whom that might not be the best alternative to a negotiated promotion or pay rise.
Perhaps, for example, you have bills to pay and it would be better to find a new job before telling your boss where to go.
Or perhaps you know there isn’t anything out there in this economy and your best alternative to getting a salary increase is to work hard and wait until next year’s pay review.
Or perhaps somewhere in what your boss is saying there’s a good reason for you to not get the promotion now, and actually the best alternative is to find out from your boss when they would promote you and work to that.
Or perhaps you’re so frustrated and stressed and undervalued in your current role that your BATNA actually is to walk away.
Each of these different BATNAs will change the tone of the conversation and change your answer to the Honour Question. Knowing your BATNA leaves you feeling more in control and simultaneously makes it more likely to get what you actually want.
Once you can see your BATNA clearly and you’re satisfied that it actually is the best alternative, the next question to ask is: is there any way to improve your BATNA before you enter the negotiation? The stronger the BATNA, the stronger your position and the more likely you are to get what you want.
For example, entering a salary negotiation with another job offer as part of a different team in the company (or a different company) changes the conversation significantly, as most people know.
More than that, getting clear on and improving your BATNA makes it more likely you feel at peace with yourself at the end of the negotiation: firstly because you have negotiated more strongly (rather than being pushed over). Secondly, because you won’t have the regret that all of us have had of pushing too far and getting something you didn’t want or giving an ultimatum which you don’t want to follow through on. When we do that, we get stuck in the unfortunate bind: break my word, or do something that is clearly not in my best interests. Overall, understanding our BATNA insulates us from the possibility that somehow in the negotiation we compromise ourselves, signing up to something which is not in our best interests.
Once we know our BATNA, and we have done what we can to improve it, we can see much more clearly the best way forwards for us in the face of an unresolved conflict or negotiation. We can stay more in control of our work and life, we can be more in alignment with our values and we can be more confident that – at the end of it all – we will be at peace with ourselves.
The Difficult Conversation Cheat Code: Roleplay
Here’s the thing you REALLY don’t want to hear: the best way to be more skilful and honourable in your interactions with others is to roleplay them in advance.
Think about it like this: the only way we ever get better at things is to practise. We accept this pretty much everywhere: from music to sport and beyond. But how often do we practise for those most crucial things in our lives: our relationships?
If the only time we practise how to relate to others is when the stakes are high, this isn’t smart. Just like if you’re a band, it’s best not to have the only time you play together be when you have a crowd of 500 people there. Just like it’s worth running your presentation through out loud (and with others) before you go up in front of the CEO.
What tends to happen when we’re under pressure is we revert to the ways we have always done things – the things we have practised the most. If we want to behave in new ways – more skilfully, perhaps, or less reactively, or less angrily, or more confidently – it’s good to help our brains with that.
Neuroplasticity is one of the most important scientific discoveries for thinking about how humans can fulfil our potential. Essentially: the literal structures of our brains can change. The most useful metaphor I have heard for neuroplasticity is this: that we can think of our brains like a neighbourhood after a very heavy snowfall. Since the snowfall, people have worn paths but they don’t necessarily take the most direct route to where we want to go. If I want to get from House A to House B, I will take the easiest route: the most worn (neural) pathway. I’ll think in the ways that have been thought most often.
And if I’m under pressure, then I will definitely go the way I’ve always gone.
And that may not be the best way to go.
If we want to change how we do things, we have to force a new path through the deep snow. We have to tread new ground.
And so if I want things to be different – to be more direct in my next conversation with my boss, or to finally give the hard feedback to my direct report or colleague – then if I’m not careful, my subconscious will try to take me down the well-worn paths (of being undirect or avoiding hard conversations). It is possible to force new neural pathways in those conversations, but, instead, why not prepare them in advance by playing out the conversation with someone else?
Each time we roleplay a conversation, it is like walking a new path through the snow in advance of the real thing: forcing new neural pathways. And then when we’re under pressure, we will have a much better chance of using that new path.
I have found this to be incredibly useful for coaching clients. And the shift from ‘we’re talking about a hard conversation you’re going to have’ to ‘we’re practising it’ is profound. Remember this with your direct reports, as well as for yourself.
There are three levels of roleplays, sometimes briefed explicitly as a roleplay, sometimes not. As with many parts of this article, I’m indebted to Fred Kofman for his clarity of thinking. I had never thought about roleplaying with this clarity (and importance) until I took some Conscious Business Coaching training created by Kofman and the coaching company BetterUp.
Three levels of roleplay are:
The thought experiment: this is the gentlest of the three, but still incredibly effective in shifting out of ‘talking about’ a conversation and into ‘getting into it’. You can get someone to coach you using it, or you can coach your report or colleague. Essentially, the coach asks: ‘What will you say?’ Then you tell them. Then they ask, ‘What do you notice about that?’ Then you reflect on what you said, beginning to encode the learning in your intuition, forcing new neural pathways, likely already improving the next time you’ll try it. Then they ask you, ‘What do you think they’ll say to that?’ (where ‘they’ is the person you’re going to have the difficult conversation with). Then you reflect, and they ask ‘What do you notice about that?’ Then they ask, ‘And what might you say to that?’ This can go on as long as you have time for, and the coach might layer in some feedback and reflections, too. But even the exchange above is likely to significantly upgrade the quality of your difficult conversation. You also have the chance to repeat openings, to run through the three steps of influence or the mutually beneficial purpose, to fine-tune and encode whatever it is that you want to do differently. And remember that isn’t just a metaphor: we’re talking about literally forcing new neural pathways as we practice.
The straightforward roleplay: you play you, the coach plays the person you’re going to speak to. You brief them a little on your colleague or boss, they do their best to bring out those qualities. You practise, they respond. After a few exchanges, you both reflect together. When I’m in this role as the coach, I love to give direct feedback on how I experience the other person: it’s so rare to get this, to know what it’s actually like for someone else in conversation with you. It’s a valuable gift to offer. Again, this kind of roleplay can be run as many times as you like and it’s still surprising to me how much insight can be taken from this process. It can be briefed and set up in advance, or done on the spur of the moment if you’re both willing to play.
The role switch. Sometimes, when it’s really tough, or you want to practise in new ways, it can be powerful to switch roles: the coach plays you, and you play the person you’re going to speak to. This allows you to really get into empathy with the person you’ll speak to (and really bring them into the roleplay as you know them best). And it allows the coach to demonstrate some techniques and get into empathy with you. Fred Kofman describes this as the Houdini Move, because when he’s in the role of ‘you’ he seems to be able to get out of any hard situation you find yourself in. I’ve found the same: that when I switch roles and speak as the client might to their boss or colleague, it seems so much easier to step skilfully through the minefield they see in front of them. After I’ve offered, say, an opening to a Mutually Beneficial Conversation, the client will often say, ‘Well, when you put it like that, they’re bound to say ‘yes’’. There are several things that are going on here: I’m not trapped in the dynamics that the client is trapped in – unwritten relationship rules which feel tightly binding. I’m not suffering under the pressure they are under, which limits what they can see and how they can be: it isn’t life and death for me, I’m not attached. I’m also not necessarily fighting to force new neural pathways through six-foot snowdrifts. I’m trusting that it is possible to tell the truth with courage, vulnerability and honour, and speaking to the best parts of the other person. Sometimes, in tough conversations, where you can’t see the wood for the trees, or the relationship dynamics are seriously tough, stepping out of your role and into someone else’s can make all the difference. Once things have been unlocked, you can switch back to being you, take what you’ve learned from your experience as the other person, and from the coach’s experience of you, and practise being you again.
Any of these can be done with a colleague or friend in place of a coach. You can offer them to friends, colleagues, staff members, even your boss.
They can be done alone, but I’ve personally found that the benefits of doing them with someone else are worth getting through your awkwardness for. The more you bring it to life ahead of time, the less likely you are to revert to your normal ways of being when the pressure is on.
I happen to love roleplay as the coach: it lets me practise all the things I did for thousands of hours in my youth as a passionate actor. Not everyone will as much as I do, but you will be able to find someone in your life to do this (and if you can’t, get in touch). And: it’s a powerful gift to offer to your colleagues and friends.
Interlude
There are the tools and frameworks. In terms of the resources I share with leaders, entrepreneurs and more when coaching them around people issues: it’s almost all in what you’ve read so far.
But that isn’t everything. And sometimes it isn’t even the most important thing.
Sometimes the most transformational things aren’t about tools or frameworks at all.
Because in relationships, when we change how we are, the world often changes around us in surprising and often astounding ways.
If you want to change how someone else is in a relationship, change how you are. You might be amazed by what happens.
That’s why for many leaders, Part II of this article is more important than Part I. In Part II, we’re going to be answering the question: what are the mindsets and mental models that will transform your interactions with people?
Some of these are about creating the conditions in your team or organisation for good things to happen in the interpersonal relationships. Some are about challenging yourself to step through your resistance and have the conflicts you are avoiding. And some are about choosing to see the world in ways that will transform your relationships with people before your very eyes.
Part II: The Mindsets and Mental Models
High Performing Teams: Hardware and Software
The Harvard Professor Amy Edmundson uses this analogy for high performing teams: it’s about both the hardware and the software. Neglect either and the performance of the team will suffer.
Hardware: this is the stuff we’re used to talking about. The goals, the strategies, the organisational charts and job descriptions.
Software: the is the relational. Edmundson’s work focuses on the idea of ‘psychological safety’, but even she admits that the term is slightly misleading. This isn’t about protecting people from any threat: this is about creating an environment where there is such high trust that there can also be very high challenge.
In a high performing team, everyone must be pulling in the same direction; working towards the same goals (hardware). And there must be space for people to challenge each other, to share ideas even (especially!) when they are disruptive, and more (software).
If you slow down to think about the highest performing teams you have ever been a part of, you will almost certainly notice that they shared these qualities.
We can use Edmundson’s ideas to think about any group of two or more people who have to work together.
We can ask ourselves: do we have the shared purpose? And: do we have the psychological safety and trust to challenge each other?
When I saw the developmental psychologist Jennifer Garvey Berger speak last year, she shared that these days, she designs her interventions for connection first, and content second (whether a talk at a conference or a workshop for the C-Suite of a world-famous organisation). That is, she aims first to make sure that everyone likes each other better at the end than they did at the start. And second, to make sure they take away the messages that they have hired her to deliver.
This is because she knows that in a complex system (and a group of people is definitely a complex system), the health of the system doesn’t come from the strength of the individual nodes, but from the number and nature of the connections between those nodes. As she writes in Unleashing Your Complexity Genius, ‘imagine the absurdity of believing that what would make a healthy forest ecosystem was the most beautiful sort of tree’. And yet with our teams, so often that’s the attitude we take: can we replace some people? Can this new amazing leader save us all?
But it isn’t about the best tree; it’s about the strength and nature of the connections.
It's something hard to say this in a corporate environment, but when I spoke to Garvey Berger after her talk, she told me, ‘I feel like I’ve built up a lot of social capital over the years, and I’ve decided to spend it all on love.’
And so: if you want to create a higher performing team: how can you create more connection, more love, so that there can be high enough trust for the high challenge that you need to perform at your best?
By doing that, you will create the strength of connections to ensure the health, resilience and high performance of your team, whether that is a team of two or two hundred.
Remember: it’s not just about hardware; it’s about the software too. It’s time to make sure you are developing that software. As a start, how can you begin to like each other better?
How Can This Conflict Deepen This Relationship?
In Garvey Berger’s 2019 book, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, she shares a fundamental insight for anyone seeking to fulfil their potential as a leader in the 21st Century: we evolved for simpler times, and in the complexity of today’s workplaces, our minds fall foul of that complexity. In her language, we slip into traps, defaulting to attitudes and behaviours which don’t serve our intentions given the complexity of what we face today.
When we think about being more skilful with others, perhaps the most important of Garvey Berger’s mindtraps for us to consider is becoming ‘Trapped by Agreement’. Humans evolved for connection – our ability to collaborate is fundamental to what has enabled fairly weak, defenceless animals to take over a whole planet. And as the neuroscientist Mark Lieberman’s research shows: this is deeply embedded in how we function. He found that we feel social pain in exactly the same way we feel physical pain. In Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Garvey Berger says that thinking your work friends are leaving you out or talking behind your back can create a similar level of pain experience to breaking your ankle.
If high trust and high challenge create high performing teams, this really matters. Indeed, if you want to take any of the tools or frameworks from this article and put them into practice, you are going to be taking a social risk.
One of Garvey Berger’s mental models for people who find themselves trapped by agreement, avoiding the risk of social pain by avoiding the potential for challenge and conflict, is to ask this: could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?
Check the wisdom of this: do you have evidence in your life of a time when a conflict served to deepen a relationship?
How did it feel when you came back together with a childhood friend after a big falling out?
What about with your spouse? What is it like to repair together after a rupture in your relationship emerges in an argument?
And at work: if you went head-to-head with a senior leader on an issue you really care about, what happened afterwards?
If you’re like me, then there are mixed responses here: there are fights from which the relationship was never the same again. But there is also evidence – in childhood, in romantic relationships, in work conflict – of times when relationships deepened.
We have to be careful and skilful, but we also have to remember that this is possible - that conflict can deepend relationship - and that submission to the trap of agreement is not virtuous. It may be protecting us in the moment, but it may also be holding us back from our goals and from the possibility in our relationship.
Humans, it is important to remember, are antifragile. This idea, which I learned from the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is that certain things with the property of antifragility increase in capability or strength as a result of stressors, failures or faults. This is different from fragility, where things break under stress, but also from qualities like robustness or resilience, where they may stay the same.
We are antifragile: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And relationships are antifragile, too: once you have been into disagreement with someone and come out with respect intact, then the strength of the relationship is palpably different.
As a young leader in my first job after graduation, I had to go head-to-head with one of the most senior executives in the university I was working in. I held my nerve and afterwards was told that that leader really valued someone willing to hold their ground with him. I could sense afterwards that our relationship had changed for the better. Contrary to the spiky, disruptive leader others sometimes found him to be, I enjoyed jokes in the corridor and - more importantly - fruitful collaboration from that moment onwards.
Not every situation is like that: that’s why we need to ask the question, how could this conflict serve to deepen a relationship?
In the last few months I’ve had a chance to test this in my personal life. I am afraid of conflicts. My patterns in my family of origin are to avoid conflicts (and I’m not the only one). I didn’t feel I had personal evidence for this idea in my most high-stakes relationships.
I didn’t have the embodied confidence that this could be true. But I did remember that courage comes first, confidence comes after.
Having leant into that courage, felt the terror of risk to the relationship that might come from disagreement, through sharing how I actually saw things, I began to see what is possible even when the stakes are highest. Not without pain or tears, but, leaning into this idea in two of the most important relationships in my life, I can’t look at them without seeing the frustrating truth of Garvey Berger’s implication: conflict can deepen relationships.
I wish it wasn’t true: then I could safely stay avoiding conflict for the rest of my life.
But it is.
And so, we have to take a breath, feel the fear, plan and roleplay our conversations carefully, and then step in.
What If This Person is Doing Their Best?
In more than 10 years of coaching leaders and entrepreneurs around their business relationships and reading the most interesting thinkers on how to increase effectiveness with other people, there is no more powerful mental model I have found than this:
Assume that the other person is a good person doing their best.
If you can hold that mental model in place, then each of the tools, techniques and frameworks identified above will go better for you.
More than that, you will create more psychological safety, and be able to deepen your relationships more through conflict.
You will be able to challenge, push, question, influence and reject people more skilfully if you hold this idea in mind.
It really landed for me when I it from the sociologist Brené Brown in a talk she gave in London in 2015, where she discussed the results of her research that were published in the book Rising Strong, about what is different about the people who recover from adversity effectively. The interviewer asked her, ‘What’s the question you have been asked the most about this book?’.
Brown replied with something like: ‘Well, it’s about “What if everyone is doing their best?” People say. “Do you really mean everyone? Even this jerk I work with?”’
You may be having similar thoughts about this idea now.
As Brown said this, the crowd laughed. The interviewer delved further and Brown relayed the story, which she also tells in Rising Strong, about how people who rise strong from adversity have something in common regarding their attitude to other people. In short, they live through the assumption that everyone is a good person just doing their best. In testing this (while internally thinking it was nonsense), Brown spoke to her husband Steve, a paediatrician. He, it turned out, was among the strange group of people who held that view.
‘Do you really think they are all doing their best? Really? Everyone?’ asked Brené.
Steve said: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.’
Steve’s words (quoted here directly from Rising Strong), give us one of the fundamental ways to be more skilful and honourable in dealing with people, to stay at peace with ourselves in our roles, to say what needs to be said for our team or organisation, and to not shy away from what we know needs to be done.
That is: we get out of judgment, out of our patterns and assumptions, and into a greater sense of what actually is, not what we believe it could or should be.
When we really understand what someone else wants, so that we can influence them, we see more clearly what is. And that will be easier with this assumption than without.
When we really listen to someone in a mutually beneficial conversation, we see more clearly what is. They feel heard and respected, and we can stay as two people looking at a problem together, instead of slipping into a shoving match. And that will be easier with this assumption than without.
When we come into a conflict assuming someone else is doing their best, then it is much more likely the conflict will deepen the relationship.
Crucially: this assumption doesn’t mean shying away. Just because someone is a human doing their best doesn’t mean everything they do is acceptable.
But neither does it mean they are a fundamentally bad person: this is a simple story, as we discussed earlier. And with simple stories, we need more shades of grey.
We can take this idea and have the hard conversations, and – more than that – if we take this idea into the hard conversations, they will always (in my experience) turn out better.
Susan Ní Chríodáin, author of Leading Beyond the Numbers, told me how in her corporate life, she got really good at having the conversations where people are fired or let go.
She learned that she had to ignore the data from her nervous system that was warning her to avoid the conversations (the part of her that was ‘Trapped by Agreement’ in Garvey Berger’s words). Instead, she had to focus on the other person. When she did that, and acted from compassion, things seemed to go differently. In a story she recounts in Leading Beyond the Numbers, the last person Ní Chríodáin ever let go was crying as she stood with them and they cleared their desk. And, as they left the building, they stopped, gave Ní Chríodáin their personal email, phone number and a hug, and thanked her for handling the situation they way that she did. How about that for a conflict deepening a relationship?
This idea isn’t just in Brené Brown’s work. It is core in all the best ideas and frameworks I have read around transforming our interactions with others, from authors like Jennifer Garvey Berger, Ros and Ben Zander, Tim Ferriss and Marshall Rosenberg.
Cynicism isn’t smart, and it can be poison to our interactions with others at work. Like anything, it has a healthy side – protecting us from naivety – but too often in our relationships and our difficult conversations, all it does is stop us making real progress, limit our ability to form strong relationships and hold back our collaborations from developing psychological safety.
In no myth or legend does the hero vindictively enjoy causing pain to the others. They know the costs and the risks of letting their codes slip and taking the first step on the slippery slope. The honourable path includes times when we have to wield the sword, but when we do we wield it with respect for the other person, knowing that with some twists of fate, we could have been – or could soon be – where they are.
Shifting the dial towards ‘what if this person is doing their best?’ often has swift impacts, changing dynamics, moving people into a dance instead of a shoving match and sometimes revealing truly extraordinary motivations that we would never have imagined were behind someone’s seemingly acrimonious behaviour.
I’ve seen this with train conductors, neighbours, collaborators and clients. When we use this assumption to shift out of what ‘should be’ and see the world more as it is, amazing things happen.
Human relationships and teams are complex systems with many dynamics. Often simply taking a breath and reminding yourself that the other person is the hero of their story, behaving in ways that are completely reasonable to them, will defuse the situation (Remembering that everyone is the hero of their own story is Jennifer Garvey Berger’s version of ‘what if this person is doing their best?’).
And when you find your cynical or stressed side creating lengthy stories about another’s motivation, it’s time to slow it down and search for the way this might be happening if this other person is – in fact – a good person just doing their best.
Leading With Honour
My work on Leading With Honour is idealistic: it is about imagining a better world, where we hold the complexities of business and organisational life, the dynamics of a 21st century workplace, and the possibilities for leadership from humans who are ready to ride all of that like a wild stallion.
And it is spiritual: the idea I explored in the first article in this series is that leading with honour is leading in a way that doesn’t require you to compromise who you are. It is about doing what is necessary so we leave our day and, ultimately, our lives at peace with the impact we have had and the person we have been and become.
But in each stage it is also practical: none of this works if it doesn’t also allow you to create the results that your organisation, your ambition and the world require of you.
The heroes – the ones who dare to dream that the world can be more than it currently is – can’t always lose.
We have to be able to win, using all the tools available to us, at least enough so that we keep going, keep striving for a better world.
That’s what this article is about, really.
We all know that it’s possible to be honourable in our interactions with others. We just worry that if we do that, we’ll lose.
But the ideas in this article – the tools, the frameworks, the mindsets and the mental models – have enabled me, my clients and many others to win more.
That’s what I wish for you: to win more, whatever that means for you, without having to compromise who you are.
The world needs people who will hold to their codes in the moments when it matters.
And it rarely matters more than in our conversations with others, when the temptations we feel, the patterns we have learned, and sometimes the other person too, all seem set to drag us off our path, letting ripples of fear and resentment spread out into the world.
If we lead with honour, then we can avoid that.
The fear and resentment can stop rippling with us.
And perhaps the love can ripple out instead.
Good luck.
It matters to me that you’re doing this.
And if you want some help, let’s talk.
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Read the first blog in this series - Leading With Honour - here.
Read the second blog in the series - The Transformational Practice of Telling the Truth - here.
Read the third blog in this series - A Man Got to Have a Code - here.