Power-Up Your Stakeholder MGT: Negotiation Techniques with Lemont Chambliss & Julee Everett

6 Tips for Modern Stakeholder Negotiation This is Not Your Parent’s Negotiation Style. Tips for Modern Stakeholder Negotiation from FBI Hostage Negotiators.

We don’t negotiate enough when stakes are low, so when the stakes are high, we become wrapped up in our emotions.

All too often, people rely on typical negotiation approaches, like ultimatums, that work well in one set of circumstances but fall short in others. Why do these approaches fail when logic or past experience indicates they should prevail?

The answer lies in nearly two decades of Harvard Research and the Nobel Prize winner named Kahneman, who proved that all humans suffer from cognitive bias and that people are irrational beings. What that means is that Kahneman proved that feeling is a form of thinking. His research, outlined in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” illustrates how our emotional brain can take over our logical brain during decision making, with significant implications.

Around the same time, some high stake scenarios from real life were playing out that proved Kahneman’s theories — FBI Hostage negotiations. After failures like Ruby Ridge and Waco, the FBI knew they had to change how they approached negotiations.

A man named Chris Voss was finding success taking a different approach, for the same reasons Kahneman demonstrated through his body of work. In his book, “Never Split the Difference,” Voss wrote, “There was no denying that most hostage negotiations were anything but rational problem-solving situations.”

Voss’s work inspired this webinar.

“In my years as the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.” -Chris Voss

Voss’s work inspired this blog. From the vast topic of business transactions, we’ve narrowed it down to one practice that is a significant part of what thought workers do nearly every day, stakeholder management, and specifically, one considerable aspect: stakeholder negotiation.

We don’t mean to imply that stakeholder negotiation carries the same criticality of hostage negotiations. Still, many times the stakes are incredibly high when it comes to delivering high-impact initiatives. Not only are people’s jobs on the line, but there can be significant consequences to business success.

In this webinar, we review six concepts applied to stakeholder negotiation.