Marble Falls I wasn’t familiar with the negotiating strategy being popularized by a guy named Chris Voss called “tactical empathy,” until reading an interview in Sunday Times from over a month ago. Turns out that Voss was a career FBI guy who went from being on SWAT teams to becoming their lead negotiator in 150 hostage negotiations. Who knows how popular or effective this tactical empathy thing is, but a book he wrote called “Never Split the Difference,” has sold millions of copies over the last decade and made a living for Voss in speaking about and teaching his negotiation skills.
So, what is “tactical empathy”? Voss claims its roots lie with an American psychologist named Carl Rogers active in the mid-20th century. Voss says Rogers…
…wrote that when someone feels thoroughly understood, you release potent forces for change within them. Not agreed with, but understood. When you feel thoroughly heard, you’re less adversarial. And, the articulation of the other side’s point of view – purely that, no agreement at all – that’s the application of empathy.
Well, yes, in negotiating you do need to understand the other side’s point of view, although whether that makes them less adversarial or, importantly, more likely to come to an agreement is less certain. Recently, I was the chief negotiator for our union on an agreement for workers employed by the City of Little Rock. Most of it was pleasant enough and fairly efficient, but there developed a huge stumbling block in looking at the way part-time workers were being managed. Although there was a definition of part-time at less than 30 hours per week, there were scores of workers who were regularly scheduled at 40 hours per week, yet never converted to full-time. This meant they were doing the same job over the same hours as other department workers, but paid significantly less and not enjoying the same treatment on benefits, holidays and the like. We understood the city’s position completely and were clear about it. They needed the workers, they argued, but didn’t have the money to convert them to full-time. The city council had lost two bond issues where the public rejected their efforts to raise more money. When asked whether our insistence at moving people to full-time wouldn’t cost some part-time workers their jobs, the union agreed that it might, but could not agree to being party to permanently exploiting these workers who were being misclassified. We both understood each other’s position fully. We empathized with their position, but were only minimally able to get them to empathize with ours, because we understood their hands were tried. In the end, we were surprised by some of their negotiating team’s rancor, as if they believed we should have agreed with them on how they were handling these workers. We won some improvements for part-timers, but narrowing this gap will mean making progress with the city directors.
Tactical empathy is a nice turn of phrase, but we don’t know how many hostages Voss got home or lost, especially since he’s right that it never makes sense to “split the difference.” We begin every negotiation telling our counterparts that we don’t do high-low bargaining, where we make proposals that are deliberately untenable, seeking to compromise. We say that we will bargain in good faith, and listen carefully to their arguments, but what we are going to put on the table is very, very close to where we will end up, if there’s an agreement. We believe it forces our proposals to be taken more seriously from the beginning, reduces the bargaining time, and creates more respect at the table for both sides.
Voss also claimed in making the case for his program that he doesn’t believe in compromise, calling it a “guarantee of mediocrity” because both sides diluted their positions. He may not believe in compromise, but if he’s been a successful negotiator he’s definitely made a ton of compromises, especially when he was involved in life-and-death negotiations. He was tasked with getting people home, and my bet is that he agreed to whatever was necessary to achieve that goal and made as many compromises as necessary to do so. In community and labor negotiations, we do the same on marginal issues in order to get to a successful final outcome. Often it doesn’t come down to either creating empathy or being willing to compromise, but to power and who brings what to the table. Voss doesn’t touch on this in the interview, but the strength of the US government, the FBI, and the huge tools and weapons at their disposal was the unseen party in his negotiations, making empathy something more like sugar in the coffee and more social than substantive.
Meanwhile, the rest of us do the best we can with what we have, no matter how much we understand and emphasize with the people on the other side of the table. We can deliver a contract, because that’s what’s important to the majority, but we still can’t sell out the part-timers, so to speak, which means every agreement simply means closing one chapter and going to the next, moving from one battleground to another, in order to win justice in workplaces and communities. There are no magic bullets or mind tricks that will get all of us there.