The One-Minute Trick to Negotiating Like a Boss

The One-Minute Trick to Negotiating Like a Boss

By Heidi Grant Halvorson  |   10:00 AM June 11, 2013

Life is full of negotiations, big and small. We negotiate for raises, we negotiate with clients and providers over prices, and we negotiate for more staff, the best projects, and flex time. (Then we go home and negotiate with our kids about how old you have to be to get your own smartphone.)

To be successful, you really need to know how to negotiate well. But the truth is, this particular skill doesn’t come naturally to many people. This is because a negotiation is an experience that is rife with conflicting motivations. When you haggle with another party over price, you need to somehow reconcile your desire to pay (or be paid) your target amount with your fear that if you push too hard, the negotiation may break down. You might end up empty-handed, humiliated, or out of a job. Negotiations are always gambles, and there is always risk.

Who Keeps Their Eyes on The Prize?

One quality that great negotiators possess is the ability to stay focused on their ideal target, despite the risks they are facing. As research conducted by Columbia’s Adam Galinsky and his collegues shows, those most able to do it have what’s called a promotion focus.

Promotion-focused people think about their goals as opportunities to gain — to advance or achieve, to end up better off than they are now. Whenever we think about our goals in terms of potential gains, we automatically (often without realizing it) become more comfortable with risk and less sensitive to concerns about what could go wrong. Prevention-focused people, on the other hand, think about their goals in terms of what they could lose if they don’t succeed — they want to stay safe and keep things running smoothly. Consequently, when we are prevention-focused, we become much more conservative and risk-averse.

As Tory Higgins and I describe in Focus and in our recent HBR article, these different ways of looking at the same goal impact everything about us — our strengths and weaknesses, the strategies we use, and what motivates us. When the goal in question is to pay the lowest price or to get the biggest raise, our focus has profound effects on the way we negotiate.

In one of Galinsky’s studies, MBA students performed the role of a job recruiter, whose goal was to hire a desired candidate (played by another MBA student) while paying the lowest possible signing bonus. Before beginning the negotiation, the recruiters completed an assessment of their dominant focus. (Want to try it? You can here.) The researchers found that the more promotion-focused a recruiter was, the less money they ended up doling out in the final agreement. Promotion focus and money paid were correlated an impressive -0.40.

Why were they so successful? Galinsky found that more promotion-focused a recruiter was, the more likely they were to report having kept their target

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