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Who we're following
The author of this week's article - Dr. Julie Silver, MD (@JulieSilverMD) - is the PM&R Department Chair as well as the Leadership CME Director at Harvard, with a fascinating career that's spanned business, medicine, diversity & inclusion efforts, and seemingly everything in between. Give her a follow to stay up to date with what she's doing!
BBMD tip of the week
While this whole article is spectacular, one of the things that most stood out to us about it was the early focus on the importance of emotion in negotiations. Dr. Silver hit the nail on the head when she wrote:
"current leaders may feel defensive about their decisions and actions involving paying people who work for them, and workers may feel angry or upset if they know or perceive that they are not being paid fairly."
And that's what our tip of the week is all about - defensiveness - the single most important emotion to avoid during a negotiation (or really any conversation you want to have go well).
That's it, that's our TED talk.
Avoid defensiveness in yourself and your counterpart at almost all costs. If you only have bandwidth to focus on a few key things during a negotiation, that should definitely be one of them.
How do we avoid defensiveness? Well, thinking about doing so explicitly is 80% of the battle, and once you know that's the target for which you're aiming, you'll naturally adjust your approach. But here are a few of the tactics we've taught over the years that work for our clients:
- "Assume best intent" - Pretty self-explanatory (we like to add the assumption of intelligence, as well)
- "Invite the elephant into the room" - A tactic we teach of saying the worst thing that could be in your counterpart's mind, the worst possible interpretation of your own actions, so that you can openly address it and signal that you're not defensive
- "Preemptively save their face" - Paint your counterpart's actions in the best possible light, out loud, preemptively, and you'll give them a positive vision of themselves to live up to
This is only a small set of examples, but the core message of avoiding defensiveness will serve you well in just about any conversation we can think of.
Quote we're contemplating
"...during this time when misinformation and disinformation is common, good health care leaders can distinguish themselves by educating others about what is known to be true. Great leaders, regardless of their gender, will be ethical (Silver, 2018) and use science and facts to drive change--even when they encounter resistance--to ensure that women are paid fairly." - Dr. Julie Silver, MD
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