RECOGNIZING THE SHADOW NEGOTIATION

The alarm goes off at six. By six-thirty coffee is brewing along with an argument. The contractor has finally agreed to look at the storm damage. You cannot get away this afternoon. Besides, it's your husband's turn. You covered the last crisis. Do you risk delay and reschedule, come up with a workable alternative, or hold firm?

First on the agenda at the office is a meeting with your boss. As you suspected, she rejects the team's proposed media campaign. You think she's wrong. How can you convince her? Should you try? What happens to the team's morale if you don't?

Office space is being reorganized. Last time around you compromised. Everyone expects you to be equally amenable this year, but they're in for a surprise. Your department has run out of room for new hires.

At lunch you go over a new contract. Your client keeps making sly innuendoes while his lawyer ignores your suggestions on revisions that protect your firm's rights. What do you say? How do you get them to focus on the business issues? To take you and your demands seriously?

You get a late telephone call from your most important supplier. He's having second thoughts about those price revisions that the two of you talked about. Can you find a solution -- perhaps a slower schedule for the increases -- so that he's comfortable and you don't blow your budget projections?

You finally head home. You will tackle that one tomorrow.

Sound familiar? A day on the job seldom goes by without the need to negotiate cropping up. We routinely deal with conflicting priorities and conflicting demands on our energies. Our responsibilities often exceed the "official" authority we have to get things moving. We cannot tell people what to do. They are usually under no obligation to listen, let alone follow orders. In fact, whenever we need something from someone else -- a job, more cooperation, more time, or more money -- we negotiate.

Conflicts of any consequence between people must be worked out with people. Most of this bargaining plays out in the informal exchanges that are part of the warp and woof of daily life. We drop by a colleague's office for a chat or enlist a mentor's help over coffee. Circumstances are more likely to find us vying for a raise or trying to restore a fractious team to equilibrium than taking part in the public drama of a mega-merger or a UN peacekeeping effort. Yet we often let these visible high-stakes negotiations shape our notions about negotiation and, in turn, the abilities and skills needed for success.

Nightly, larger-than-life figures parade across our television screens, the charismatic leaders and brilliant tacticians who have just pulled off some negotiating wizardry. The news summary zeroes in on the unexpected coup or the adroit posturing. It is not surprising that along the way we elevate negotiation to an "art form" practiced by the innately talented. A real estate developer with the instincts of a street fighter attaches the article the to his first name and labels what he does The Art of the Deal. We watch Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shuttle between capital cities or trade representative Charlene Barshefsky hammer out a tough agreement with the Chinese government and can be silently pleased at her success. But conscious of the distance between this rarefied world and our own more mundane concerns and less stellar achievements, we mythologize the negotiation process and the people who negotiate.

The myths that have grown up around skillful negotiators need to be taken with a large grain of salt. Exceptional bargainers seem to have the magic touch, but that touch comes from a lot of practice. By training and from taking some not-so-public knocks, they have become adept at figuring out how to navigate the thorny situations that demanding circumstances or taxing people can create.

There is nothing magical or mystical about negotiation. People get better at it with practice. Ordinary people. Yet the mythologized negotiator makes us doubt what we can accomplish. Suspecting that we are neither sufficiently artful nor naturally persuasive, we let opportunities to negotiate slip by us unclaimed or unnoticed. Cramped by circumstance, with no magic up our sleeve, we don't consider negotiation a possibility. We just make do and move on, not realizing that we might have bargained. Often, from lack of training or experience, we fail to recognize that we are in the midst of a negotiation until it is too late to change the outcome. Even when we are well aware that we are negotiating and we know the stakes involved, we might have trouble getting the person we're negotiating with to listen, much less cooperate with us.

For the last several years we have been talking to women about what happens when they negotiate. Some of them buy into the mythology of the great negotiator and naturally assume their innate abilities come up short. Others have taken some hard knocks at the negotiating table and have become discouraged or disillusioned. Remembering what occurred the last time they asked for a raise or their running battles with another department for staff support, they find negotiation an unpleasant experience. They much prefer to avoid difficult situations altogether than get into heated disputes. If they cannot figure a way to sidestep the problem, they approach negotiation with sweaty palms and a high level of anxiety.

This wariness is not groundless. Despite the tremendous successes individual women have achieved, as a group we have not fared well when we must bargain hard. We pay more for our cars, new and used, and come out of salary talks with less in our pockets than men do. Although the vast majority of households depend on two paychecks, men make more of the money and women do more of the chores. With the odds stacked against us, it is only human to avoid negotiation on occasion. When you calculate the chances for success and find them slim, you settle for what is offered rather than negotiate for what you can legitimately demand.

Avoidance or acquiescence only seems to be an easy way out. In the long run, bit by bit, it silences you. The happy fact is that effective negotiators are made, not born. Even professional negotiators learn their trade. And success feeds success.

The Problem Is Only Part of the Story

Most popular advice on negotiation recommends that you focus on solving the problem and provides a blueprint for attacking it. Rather than wage a battle over a single issue, the advice suggests, think of the problem as a series of trade-offs among many issues. With a single issue at stake, any negotiation lurches toward a win-lose proposition. Someone is going to come out on top. If, however, you can break down a monolithic problem, discover it is actually made up of many different issues, those differences give you room to find a compromise. No one wins everything, but no one loses everything either.

This advice is useful. A realistic assessment of the problem always helps you formulate your strategic options. An emphasis on problem solving often leads to an agreement that produces some benefit for everyone. The fable of the two oranges bears out what these mutual gain or win-win solutions can offer. At the same time, it brings into sharp focus what the problem-solving orientation leaves out.

The fable takes place at Christmastime and involves two sisters. One plans to bake a chiffon cake for the festivities; the other, a fruitcake. Both recipes call for two oranges. But when the sisters check the larder, they find only two, not the four they need. An argument immediately erupts over who gets the oranges. One sister complains that chiffon cake is wrong for the season. The other retorts that fruitcake may be traditional, but nobody likes it. Obvious solutions are out of the question. It being a holiday, they cannot borrow from the very neighbors who will later be their guests, and the stores are closed. The sisters, unwilling to compromise and bake only half a recipe, become more and more entrenched in defending their rights. It is an all-or-nothing contest. They cannot both get what they want. Or can they?

Preoccupied with winning, each overlooks the actual ingredients specified in the recipes. Amid the heat in the kitchen some pertinent facts emerge. The traditional fruitcake requires only the rind, while the delicate chiffon cake uses just the juice. If one or the other sister was to prevail, either the rind or the juice would go to waste. By focusing not on who wins but on the problem itself, both sisters can get what they want. One sister carefully grates the rind off the two oranges, then hands them over to her sibling for squeezing.

What a great solution, you think. If you just adopt this problem- solving approach, you can instantly become an effective negotiator. You have only to look at the problem -- for differences in needs and interests -- and propose solutions that play on those differences. The techniques are seductive in their promise of success. But consider what is slighted or missing in the orange story. The dispute might mask resentments that have nothing to do with oranges. Our sisters might have other issues on their agendas. The older sister might be fed up with always having to accommodate a younger sibling. She might not want to make any deal that works for her sister. The younger sister, on the other hand, might not be willing to give an inch just because she really hates fruitcake. Then, too, the solution is almost mythic in its symmetry. There is no overlap in the sisters' needs. Neither one's interest in the oranges impinges on the other's. What happens if the problem is not quite so tidy? The easy win-win solution vanishes if one recipe calls for both rind and juice. One of the sisters would be forced to give up something she wants. The negotiation suddenly begins to look a lot more complicated, and agreement requires another level of communication.

Make no mistake. Focusing on the problem can take you further than adv...