Your mindset about negotiation skill and mastery affects your negotiation outcomes.
One of the most pervasive myths of bargaining is that good negotiators are born that way. Like naive assumptions regarding the stability of human nature, conventional wisdom suggests that people either have the ability to negotiate effectively or do not. Skilled negotiators are imagined to be highly persuasive, rational beings who intuitively understand the negotiation “game” and thereby effortlessly succeed at maximizing their economic gains. Implicit in this belief is the assumption that no amount of effort or training will transform a frog of a negotiator into a prince. Yet over 20 years of research has made clear that this myth has no grounding in fact. Master negotiators are made, not born. Negotiation performance is now widely recognized as a skill that can be developed.
However, the myth persists, especially in legal negotiations. The insidious problem with this myth is that, if you buy into it, you are less likely to persevere in difficult negotiations.
Psychological research shows that negotiators come in two varieties. One variety of negotiator believes implicitly that negotiation is a skill to be learned and mastered, The second variety believes that negotiation is an inherent, native skill that might be improved on the margins, but is not susceptible to deep development.
As it turns out, those who believe that negotiation is a skill to be learned and mastered are better negotiators than those who believe that skilled negotiation is an inherent trait. In other words, mindset makes a big different in negotiation performance. If you believe in performance goals that make you look competent (e.g., I am a lawyer and therefore I must always show that I am a competent negotiator), you fall within the category who believe that negotiation skill is innate and not learned. If you believe that you can increase your knowledge and skill, you fall with the category of negotiators who see mastery as a learning curve.
These beliefs play out in very subtle and profound ways in settlement negotiations. The performance oriented lawyer wants to succeed, look competent, feel competent, and be recognized as competent. The learning oriented lawyer wants to learn from the experience and strives to do better next time. The performance goal lawyer is not so interested in learning; the learning goal lawyer is.
Here’s the dramatic difference: The research shows that the learning goal lawyer will generally out-negotiate the performance goal lawyer because of a more flexible mindset.
The performance goal lawyer will persist in the face challenges to achieve the goal of appearing competent. However, when faced with insurmountable obstacles, the performance goal lawyer will move into a hopeless response characterized by avoidance and deteriorating performance. When the goal of looking good appears out of reach, the unconscious response is to withdraw from the task at hand.
Learning goal lawyers, on the other hand, persist in the face of challenges even when the chance of success is small. Even if one might not look so good, learning-oriented individuals persevere if the opportunity to learn is still present.
What is really interesting is that these mindsets have nothing to do with actual negotiation skill or experience. The negotiation behaviors only emerge as challenging obstacles are confronted.
So what is your mindset? Are you more concerned with looking and being competent or are you driven to learn? The answer will tell you much about how well you negotiate.
If you want to read the research study that figured all of this out, check out “Implicit Negotiation Beliefs and Performance: Experimental and Longitudinal Evidence.”