Is the negotiator in the mirror the real you?

What you end up with after a negotiation won’t tell you much about how well you performed. Seriously. It’s not like practicing free throws in basketball where there’s obvious feedback. If the ball goes in, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it. If the ball clanks off the rim, bend your knees or try a little more arc.

By contrast the linkage between actions and outcomes in negotiation is much hazier. There may have been times when you left the bargaining table empty-handed. Perhaps you blew it. Then again, your performance may have been flawless—there just wasn’t any room for agreement. Some other times you may have made deals that were even better than you had expected. Good for you, but were you super-smart, or simply lucky that your counterpart was desperate for agreement? You just can’t tell.

The lack of reliable feedback makes learning a special challenge in negotiation. There’s no way of knowing for sure how things would have turned out—for better or worse—had you acted differently. Obsessing about that is a dead end. To improve focus instead on what’s more knowable—your own skills, behavior, and style.

In my post two weeks ago I mentioned a self-assessment tool I use in my MBA course and in Negotiation Mastery, the new course on HBX, Harvard Business School’s digital learning platform. It’s designed to highlight your strengths and identify other areas where improvement would have the biggest payoff.

Download the form below, enter your responses, and see how your profile compares with thousands of other people who’ve completed the survey

People’s self-assessments fall into five buckets, representing five skill-based bargaining styles, if you will. I described two of them in the prior post: Empathetic value-creators (30% of respondents), as shown here:

and their stylistic opposites, Assertive value-claimers (10%):

Recent commentators asked about the other three categories. Here they are. I’ll save the most intriguing one for last. Twenty-five percent of respondents believe that there interpersonal skills (asserting their interests and understanding counterparts) are stronger than their problem-solving skills. These are the Relationally oriented negotiators

But another 15 percent flip that and rate themselves as better at dealing with the substance than they are at effectively engaging other parties. Call them Outcome-focused.

Maybe your profile locates you in one of those two buckets, but I find both of them kind of curious. Shouldn’t people who are good interpersonally be rewarded with good outcomes? And how can others who effectively expand the pie and secure a decent slice succeed without being as skillful relationally?

Logically there should be a connection between means (relations) and ends (who gets what). That’s the case with the empathetic value-creators and their opposites, the assertive value-claimers.

I think a clue lies in the fifth profile, the Assertive value-creators (15%) These are people who are confident about advocating for themselves, but unsure about getting good results.

My hunch is that at least some of these people are so-called “maximizers.” That’s the term the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz uses to describe people who have especially high expectations. No matter how well they do at anything, they second guess themselves and worry that they should have done even better.

That interpretation is borne out by the statistics I’ve gathered. Remember that you could give each particular skill only 1 point or as many as 7? On average people gave the lowest score—3 points—to “getting the maximum possible in the agreement.”

That loops us back to my earlier comment about the feedback problem in negotiation. None of the four skills in the survey is easy to measure precisely, but judging how you did substantively may be the hardest. So you may be better at this than you think.

On the other hand, respondents tend to be most confident about their ability to understand “the motivations and feelings of other parties” (giving themselves on average, 5 points). Now some people really do have impressive interpersonal skills, but others don't. As I noted in the earlier post, getting candid feedback from a friend or colleague can help you calibrate your own self-assessment.

In the end, of course, you want to improve your skills in all four directions and flex your profile in way that’s appropriate to whatever situation you face.

You don’t want to be rigid or locked into a particular style. When you go to buy a new car, for example, you may want to amp up your assertiveness side in order to get the best price. Years later, when you sell that same vehicle to a neighbor’s daughter, relational considerations may be much more important.

Professor Michael Wheeler’s Negotiation Mastery course on Harvard Business School’s HBX platform is launching February 2017. Applications are currently being accepted. Version 1.4 of his Negotiation 360 self-assessment/best practice app is now is available for both Apple and Android devices. It includes coaching videos and a new tactics exercise.