Engaging and Negotiating with Empathy
This article highlights how empathy is used to influence people in your daily life. Specifically, how to engage with those around you through demonstrating understanding and how to negotiate with empathy; an important element to developing influence and leadership ability.
In our personal and professional lives, we will face countless situations, conversations, and engagements that are often responded to naturally or impulsively. And when these moments are reacted in such a way, was the desired outcome achieved? Even so, were any relationships strained in the process?
Folding to impulses is the easiest default and the baseline we naturally gravitate towards; the comments and remarks that potentially create misalignment and misunderstandings. Moreover, we are all capable of inducing fear, anxiety, and harm to achieve our goals as well.
The real test is to first control those emotions and channel that energy into a more productive way of reasoning and influencing. To channel that energy into empathy in order to understand the counterpart’s upbringing, culture, religion, and world.
After all, If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.
Empathy is the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart. When it comes to influencing and negotiating, it’s the vocalization of that recognition. It’s the way our understanding and influence is communicated that lets both parties achieve a mutual goal.
The goal of influencing and negotiating is not to overpower the other side. Instead it’s the inward desire to discover more about your counterpart. It’s to be interested, not interesting.
In order to do this, the questions meant to probe and discover more must be directed in such a way that the delivery is calm and non-accusational or threatening. These are calibrated questions that start with “how” and “what”, and very rarely “why” (“why” may seem defensive and threatening). Calibrated questions give your counterpart room to fly, sharing more about their perspectives, beliefs, and more.
“If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.”
Questions we think on the fly will generally yield the “yes” or “no” answers. These give us information but calibrated questions are opportunities to understand more about the other side. Once more information has been discovered, it can be labeled in such a way to create and show empathy.
Let’s take a look.
Empathy is a feeling of connected understanding of the otherside. What many people struggle with is communicating that feeling and showing that they understand.
One way to show our understanding of a situation is to label it.
Statements starting with “it seems like…” or “it looks like…”, followed by mirroring a portion of what your counterpart said, creates a label to how they may be feeling. This labeling strategy is crucial in making sure the other party feels heard.
“It seems like you’re understaffed/under-resourced which is causing backlogs.”
“It looks like this time won’t work; how about next week?”
If understanding truly has not been reached yet, ask more calibrated questions.
“I see, and how did you overcome that?”
“I see, and how am I supposed to do that?”
“What would make this more fair for you?”
We may default in sharing our own wants and desires, but hold back. Let the other side do the greater deal of talking. Questions starting with “how” are a bit of an empathy hack because it forces the other side to take a look at your side, which gives the feeling that they are in control of the situation.
There are other ways of labeling that demonstrate empathy throughout an engagement. One such example is doing an accusation audit, which is listing every terrible thing your counterpart could say about you.
Defense lawyers do this properly by mentioning everything their client is accused of, and all the weaknesses of their case, in the opening statement. They call this technique “taking the sting out.”
Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root.
For example, if you are late to a meeting or have received negative review, those can be immediately labeled, giving your counterpart less factors to bring you down in a negotiation.
Diplomatically starting with your own mistakes or negative factors makes hearing them not so harsh and adds humility and empathy to both sides. Labeling any negative factors in a negotiation or engagement outright will turn your counterpart’s worry into optimism.
Empathy truly is a mood enhancer. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn’t demand that you agree with the other person’s ideas. But by acknowledging the other person’s situation, you immediately convey that you are listening.
In conclusion, empathy is the ability to recognize the perspective of a counterpart as well as the ability to vocalize and demonstrate that recognition. With mastering or improving everything in life, practice is the key for success. Understand what works best and naturally for you, then work towards delivering tailor calibrated questions, labels, and accusation audits to your own flavor.