Another help Negotiation book I’ve gone through in the last few weeks is Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro’s Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. This isn’t the most dynamic of books content-wise, but there’s tons of gold throughout that is extremely useful.
It’s common knowledge that emotional dynamics present some of the biggest challenges to negotiation, including conflicted negotiations. This book focuses less on the substantive dimensions of negotiation and instead tries to unpack how to use emotion in positive ways – but really it’s just a framework for being civil, encouraging, and good to others in the context of negotiation.
Shapiro is the founder or head of Harvard’s Negotiation Project and Fisher was the author of Getting to Yes and is pretty influential in the field. Shapiro provides the book content while Fisher provides a lot of examples and anecdotes from his career as a negotiator and mediator.
The book addresses 5 core areas: appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role.
I’m looking at affiliation and autonomy as complementary concepts that might complement some of what I’m researching for my dissertation. But there’s also tons of honor and shame embedded in these categories. In the west, a lot of people still are ignorant of honor and shame dynamics but it really does impact the emotional landscape of a lot of conflict and negotiation.
What I appreciated about this book is that the spirit of it is not manipulation, but on shifting mindsets so that there can be productive conversation in which relationships are being nurtured and not destroyed.
The five categories I think are helpful beyond negotiation into the realm of leadership and supervision. I think all five of those categories are important pieces of an employee’s relationship in their organization and with their team or supervisor. So these elements are pretty significant to increasing organizational health.
People on a team need to be appreciated, need to feel like they are a part of something and that they aren’t alone, they need to be empowered with a defined scope of authority and responsibility, they need to have appropriate status and honor in their community and situation, and they need to have meaningful contributions and purpose (role). In that sense – this book isn’t just a negotiation resource, but a team leadership resource as well.
Both reasons are sufficient to spend some time with this book. It has an immense amount of wisdom and insight in the interpersonal level that can impact us wherever we might be seeing to influence.
