Knowing When to Pause

Your first practical opportunity to use the pause button arrives before you participate in the first session of a negotiation. Ask yourself whether you are as prepared as you need to be. Then, when the first sentence is uttered, you’re ready to listen because you have pushed that pause button. When you speak your first words, you are clearer for having taken that break. Use the pause button at each critical moment to review the negotiation or to decide when to close a deal. Definitely use the pause button whenever you are feeling pressured or under stress.
Of course, the pause you take is only as valuable as what you do during it. Ask yourself specific questions during these brief respites. Circumstances differ for every negotiation. Usually, you need to ponder a specific point. You may want to use the time to check over the other five essential skills in a negotiation:

• Prepare: Do you need any additional pieces of information?
• Set goals or limits: How close are you to your original goals? Is the shortfall acceptable? Are the limits you previously set still viable considering the additional information you have gained during the negotiation?
• Listen: Did you hear everything the other person said? Did it match up with the body language? Do you need to go back and ask any questions?
• Be clear: Do you wish you had expressed a point or an idea more clearly or directly? Try to answer this question from your counterpart’s point of view, not yours.
• Know when to close: Can any part of the negotiation be closed now? If it seems like everyone is in agreement, have you had plenty of time to live with the final proposal before accepting it?

When you become conscious of pushing the pause button and what to do during the pause, such a quick review as the preceding one is almost automatic. Sometimes you are just giving your mind a break. Sometimes you are pushing the pause button for everybody involved in the negotiation, especially if things have gotten a little heated.
Parties can get caught up in the emotions of a negotiation. They’re afraid to lose face. They become angry or distrustful of the other party. They fall in love with the deal and ignore facts that are important to decision making —especially if the decision ought to be to walk away. They let their own moods, or the moods of the other party, rule the negotiating sessions, causing the negotiations to wander off course. These problems disappear when you use a pause button.
If you want to watch a negotiator with his hand firmly on the pause button, see the HBO movie Barbarians at the Gate. This film, based on a true story, stars James Garner as the president of Nabisco and depicts his efforts to buy the company. Unfortunately for him, another buyer — played by Jonathan Pryce — is better prepared and carries a pause button with him everywhere. Watch him make millions of dollars by delaying a deal one hour. This movie is a fast-paced, exciting lesson in high-stakes negotiating. What separates the winner and the loser are preparation and the effective use of the pause button.

Telling the Other Person That You Need a Pause

Everyone has a different way of pushing the pause button. Sometimes, how you push pause depends on the situation. Here are some of the more common pause buttons you can use:

• Ask for a night to think the negotiation over. Most people will respect your request to “sleep on it.”
• Excuse yourself to the restroom. Who’s going to refuse that request?
• For a short break, just lean back in your chair and say, “Wait a minute, I have to take that in.” For a dramatic touch, try closing your eyes or rubbing your chin.
• In a business situation, having someone with whom you have to consult before giving a final answer is a convenient excuse for pressing pause.

Simply say, “I’ll have to run this by my partner (or family or consultants or whomever) and get back to you at 9 tomorrow morning.” So that’s the idea: Your pause button is anything you do to create a space so you can think over your next move. In chess, those breaks can take so long that competitive chess has rules about how long the thinking time can be. At the end of the time, a buzzer goes off. In a negotiation, nothing dictates the length of breaks. You have to fight to create the time instead of being forced out of time by an artificial time limit.

Checking with the boss: A classic that needs a little prep
If you plan to consult with your boss as a means of pushing pause in a negotiation, you should let the other party know that you don’t have final say. However, like everything else in a negotiation, don’t try to use this reason unless you have a boss whom you have to check with from time to time. Admitting early in the negotiation that you don’t have final authority is often beneficial. Make it clear that someone above you must approve the decision. That way, the other party won’t get angry with you. Working this information into the beginning of your negotiating formalizes the pause button and sets the tone for a thoughtful, considered negotiation.

Taking notes now for pauses later
Taking notes is helpful at many points in a negotiation, but note taking can also be a pause button. In fact, one of the best times to pull out your pen is when you need to pause. Writing down statements that confuse or upset you is an excellent way to push pause. Rather than blurting out an inappropriate or angry response, tell the speaker to hold on while you write down the statement. Asking the other party to check what you’ve written to be sure that you got it right can be enormously effective if the words upset you. The process of putting those words to paper almost always causes the other party to backtrack, amend, or better yet, erase the words altogether. You’ll find that most people don’t want their unreasonable statements on paper for all the world to see.

Defining the Pause Button

Pushing your pause button is the best way to keep some emotional distance during high-stress situations — at home, at work, anywhere you need a little space. I teach this method in my negotiation courses to explain the concept that waiting is good — that doing nothing is sometimes the right action. I tell students, “If you’re getting stressed out, don’t just do something . . . sit there.”
Pushing the pause button just means putting the negotiations on hold for a moment or an hour or an evening while you sort things out. Everyone owns a pause button, so to speak, and everyone pushes it in a different way. When you push the pause button, you freeze-frame the negotiation — much as you freeze-frame a movie on the television screen with your remote control or on your computer. You step away, physically or psychologically, to review the work you have done up to that point and check over your plan for the rest of the negotiation. You take a break. It may be purely mental; it may be imperceptible to the other side; but you give yourself whatever time it takes to review matters before you continue. This focused review is a separate activity from the other basic elements of negotiation. It gives you an opportunity to regroup, catch your breath, and be sure that you aren’t missing anything. The pause button gives you that little bit of emotional distance that allows you to make the decisions you want to make in your business and your life.
Pushing the pause button gives you the opportunity to review the entire process of negotiating and to make sure that you aren’t overlooking anything. It allows you to avoid getting boxed into a corner. By pushing the pause button, you keep your emotions from ruling (and ruining) the negotiation.

How to Really Garble Communication

Sometimes I can talk all day about how to improve communication and people never get it. In the spirit of fun, here are some handy tongue-in-cheek tips for people who strive to be bad communicators, to stay unclear, and to keep creating quagmires and confusion in their lives.
Use these six little secrets to keep your life in chaos. Use them in business and at home to keep things in turmoil. These are also handy ways to ensure a high employee turnover.

Raise your voice
If you really don’t want to get your point across, just begin shouting or scolding. Either response prevents any further intelligent discourse. This rule is particularly important when a language barrier prevents someone from understanding you. When someone doesn’t understand your language, just talk louder. Loud communicates the same message to people all around the world. Loud is disrespectful. Loud characterizes someone you don’t want to do business with.

Leave out details
Details let the other person know exactly what you want or need. Leave the message fuzzy if you want to continue having bad communication. Details take time. You can shave valuable minutes off the average communication by leaving out the details. After all, it only takes a few hours to clean up most messes created by such an omission.

Don’t check to see if you were understood
This rule is very important for would-be bad communicators. If you spend time checking to see whether you were understood, all the other efforts you make to be a bad communicator can be thrown out the window. Don’t give the other person a chance to say, “I didn’t understand xyz.” Otherwise, you’ll have to clarify. If you want to be unclear, do your deed and skedaddle before anybody can ask any questions.

Walk away and talk at the same time
Toss your request, instruction, or demand flippantly over your shoulder as you are walking away from the person to whom you are speaking. Preferably, avoid looking at the other person during conversation. This technique denies virtually any possibility of being understood. And you haven’t wasted those precious seconds required to face the person you are talking to and make eye contact.

Assume that everyone understands you
If you are a bad communicator, you already know about the dangers of assuming information, but we thought we would remind you anyway about the most popular tool of the unclarity trade. Just send an old-fashion telegram when a detailed letter is needed.

Don’t permit any objections or questions
Heck, don’t permit any response. The other person may be taking up your time to understand the niggling information. Toss out whatever you have to say and cut off the discussion. Anything further would just help clarify what you are saying.

A slur of any kind

We are well into the 21st century and, in the United States at least, negative comments about the race, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin of another person are no longer widely tolerated. Many people are concerned with being “politically correct.” There are those who are offended at any inquiry that could even identify these traits, such as “What kind of a name is that?” Unless you know differently for sure, steer clear of the most innocent of references unless they are relevant.
If the information is irrelevant, you should even avoid neutral statements such as, “The person was a woman” or “The man was from China.” You may receive an angry response, such as “Just what is that supposed to mean?” “Why did you mention that?” Worse yet, the person you are speaking to may think those thoughts without verbalizing them. This situation raises a barrier to communication that you won’t even know exists. Even if you are with a group that seems to be quite open about expressing whatever they happen to think or feel about another group, don’t join in. Be discreet. You never know who may be suffering in silence — feeling outnumbered and helpless.
Oh sure, you may be able to disparage all members of a certain group in the privacy of your own home with impunity. But even there, I urge you to curtail such comments. Those attitudes are too easily passed on to the young, and the slurs have a nasty way of showing up in conversation outside the home. The last thing you want in a tough negotiation is to let an offensive phrase slip out just when you want to close. You can lose the deal you are working on and the trust and confidence of your counterpart in the negotiation. Unwitting slurs can stop a negotiation in its tracks. You may be pegged forever as a bigot; and some people don’t negotiate with bigots. If you have some bad habits in this area, work on cleaning up your language.

“You’ll never work in this town again”

This is a bully’s threat. Everyone has observed this bullying behavior. Once is enough. Threats never win the hearts and minds of the person you are attempting to persuade. In today’s litigious society, threats are not smart. “You’ll never work in this town again” used to be a stock phrase in the entertainment industry, uttered furiously by the tirading studio executive dealing with a recalcitrant actor or writer. An executive at Twentieth Century Fox once issued this threat to an actor who refused to accept a lesser credit than his contract guaranteed for work on a television series. The series ultimately failed, and, guess what? The actor was unemployed for several years. The actor sued Twentieth Century Fox, attributing his long period of unemployment to the studio’s threat. Who knows, he may have been out of work anyway, but given the threat, the jury sided with the actor and awarded an enormous judgment.
People in positions of power often get frustrated when someone of lesser status refuses what they view as a simple and reasonable request. Usually, the next step is a plea to “play ball.” Then some avuncular advice follows, such as “You know, you really would be better off helping us out of this one,” or “We’ll make it up to you on the next one.” When the person isn’t persuaded, the power player often pops a cork.
Good manners, common sense, and the growing body of employment law all favor the threatened person. Don’t resort to this tactic. You could lose the farm.

“Take it or leave it”

Even when you are making your final offer, presenting the deal as a “take it or leave it” proposition is a mistake. Even if the other side accepts the offer, the deal leaves them feeling bad about the decision. Unbelievably, we have heard of people putting such an unpleasant tag on an offer that was otherwise okay. This label makes the offer sound bad even if the terms are reasonable. If you hear this phrase, evaluate the offer on the merits, not on the way it was delivered. Especially if you are a professional negotiator, figure out if the offer is acceptable based on what you want out of the negotiation. Don’t let a bad negotiating style confuse you. If you are negotiating for yourself, and you must continue working with your counterpart in this deal, you may want to consider whether you can maintain an ongoing relationship with a person who is bullying you with “take it or leave it” statements. If you are making a final offer, say so without using the antagonistic take-it-orleave-it phrase. If you are feeling frustrated and anticipating a refusal, push the pause button (see Chapter 12). When you are feeling that way, it is hard to calmly explain the reasons that this must be the final offer. You are likely to use this verboten phrase (“Take it or leave it”) or something similar. That approach hurts you in the long run because you look like a bully. And you don’t increase the chance of your proposal being accepted.