Ask for More

And so I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I signed up and I learned that in this class, in the Mediation Clinic, I could – even as a law student – help people work out their problems. And the first time I walked into New York City Civil Court, and I sat down in kind of a dingy conference room at the back of the court, and I helped two people resolve a conflict, I came out of that room thinking, "This is it. I have found the thing that I want to do with the rest of my life."

It occurred to me then that I now had a set of tools that could be profoundly helpful to people in all kinds of situations. And the idea that I could help empower people to reach their own settlement to a difficult situation was incredibly inspiring.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. What place does mediation have in the legal world?

Alexandra Carter: It's a tremendous place. You know, Rachel, I do a lot of teaching to both lawyers and business executives all over the globe, and sometimes still people are shocked when I tell them this statistic: in the United States, the percentage of civil cases that go to trial is about two percent – two percent of cases going to trial!

So where are those cases going? By and large, they are being settled. Either by people negotiating, or negotiating with the help of a mediator. And so I tell students when they graduate, "If within five years you haven't experienced mediation, come back and I'm going to treat you to lunch on me."

And I have never yet had a student in any field come back to me and say, "You know what? You win, Professor. It's been five years and I've never encountered mediation." Because the fact is so many people across the world are turning to mediation as the number one way to resolve difficult conflicts.

Rachel Salaman: Well, it makes so much sense in so many situations. So, in your view, why don't more people try it, at home and at work?

Alexandra Carter: I think a lot of times people are still unaware. I would say particularly in the U.S. people think, "I have a dispute – you resolve disputes in the court."

And it's interesting, Rachel, because my students at Columbia and I are often stationed in the court, where we're referred cases to mediation on the spot. And what will happen is sometimes the judge, or the judge's staff, will take a look through their cases for the day and they'll pick some out that they think will be particularly good for mediation. And then, all of a sudden, people who thought they were coming to see the judge are instead going down the hall with us to try to work the case out. And the first question is, "Well, what is this?"

I mean, I often tell my students it's as though somebody's on line for – let's take a wonderful New York restaurant, Shake Shack, right – for an incredible hamburger, and all of a sudden they've been pulled out of line and told we're actually going to give you a great Starbucks frappuccino instead.

And it takes them a minute to kind of readjust to the idea that they're getting something different than what they thought. But once people get in the room and they experience actually being able to tell their story, actually having a say, having control over the outcome, once they realize they have more freedom and creativity on what they want for a solution (rather than just an all or nothing in front of the court) they say to us, "I can't believe more people don't do this."

Rachel Salaman: As I mentioned in the introduction, you train negotiators for the United Nations. How did you get involved with that work?

Alexandra Carter: So, the United Nations first called me back in 2012. And they really wanted a conflict resolution professor to come in and teach women, as part of the first ever skills building summit for female diplomats. It was called Women Negotiating Peace.

And, to be honest, I was still a junior professor at Columbia at that time, and when they called me, I thought, "What an incredible opportunity."

And so I worked really hard to create not just a presentation where I would stand up and show a PowerPoint, but something where I would give those women tools that they could walk out and use immediately – not just if they were resolving a transnational mediation, but tools to help them advocate within their own countries, within their own missions.

You know, how do I get more responsibility? How do I get myself to the point where I'm going to be that woman at the table? And, over and over, I'd have the women call me after that event and say what a difference it had made for them.

From there, we just expanded our partnership. And so in 2016, actually, I signed a partnership between the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the Columbia Law School, by which my Columbia students and I – many of them also women – are the exclusive provider of conflict resolution training for the New York Diplomatic Corps. And so these days we are training hundreds of diplomats from more than 80 nations, and it's been incredibly rewarding.

Rachel Salaman: So, what do those U.N. clients find most useful about your approach?

Alexandra Carter: So, what our U.N. clients overwhelmingly said at the beginning was: they were used to lectures. They were used to people coming in and presenting research and not giving them a way to access that research.

And so when we came in to teach, we focused really on running workshops where they wouldn't just hear about negotiation theory and concepts, we would teach them how to operationalize that – we put them in the chair, we helped coach them through different interventions they could make, or try different approaches.

And so, when they came out of the workshops, they felt immediately equipped to take on leadership roles. In fact, one diplomat, Julia from Paraguay, told me that when she first came to take our workshops, she didn't think of herself as a great negotiator. Several years later, having taken a number of different workshops around negotiation, she called to tell me that she had just been elected the Vice-Chair of an extremely important committee at the United Nations and she was the first woman ever to hold that position in the entire history of the U.N.

And she said, "I thought I was learning how to negotiate, but I was also learning how to be a leader." And so, it's feedback like that and seeing people's progress, that makes it incredibly rewarding.

Rachel Salaman: And how has your work at the U.N. informed your work elsewhere?

Alexandra Carter: Well, you know, great question. I think the U.N. has really been a place where we could see that the approach we were teaching worked across cultures. And I think that's in part because the way I think about negotiation, and the way I teach negotiation, is a lot about asking questions and listening.

Those really are the skills you need to create much, much better deals, not just once but to create relationships that produce great deals over time, again and again. And so, seeing how this worked across so many different nations and cultures, really helped inform how I teach now – both at home in the U.S. but really all over the globe.

I think it gave me a laboratory to see what are some ways that I might need to adjust this approach, if I'm teaching in different places around the world, and what are some ways in which a particular skill is going to work across cultures.

Rachel Salaman: You talk about the importance of asking questions and your book is called "Ask for More," subtitled "10 Questions to Negotiate Anything." Why did you choose to focus on negotiating rather than mediating in this book?

Alexandra Carter: You know, as a mediator you're seeing people once things are pretty far along, right – there's a conflict that's landed people in court, business partnerships may be too far gone to save, personal relationships can be pretty damaged – and over time, I started to think, "Wouldn't it be great if I could give people tools to help them so they didn't need to get to me as a mediator, so that they could negotiate better, and maybe save themselves from having to go to court?"

And so I wrote a book about negotiating because I wanted to help the widest number of people. And over time, as a mediator, I saw that there were certain mediation skills I had that worked really, really well for people who were negotiating for themselves, and I wanted to give them those tools, whether in their home or at work.

Rachel Salaman: There are a lot of how-to books on negotiating out there. What gap do you think yours fills?

Alexandra Carter: It fills several gaps. The first is that this is the only negotiation book that focuses exclusively on questions. And questions are, I think, the most underutilized negotiation tool.

In fact, there was a study done out of the Kellogg's School of Management at Northwestern, here in the U.S., that found that 93 percent of us are not asking the questions we need to in negotiation in order to improve our outcomes. And I'm not just talking about improving trust across the table, I'm talking about improving financial outcomes.

Having seen now many, many hundreds of cases – every single type of dispute – and seeing how well certain types of questions worked (to just break open the dispute and create a solution), I knew that I needed to write a book on questions.

I think the second thing that this book does that I haven't seen any other book out there do – and this goes back to your intro to this podcast – is really redefine what negotiation is. I grew up, like a lot of people, thinking that negotiation was just a back and forth with somebody else over money. And over time I started to see what a narrow and limited and reactive way that was to think about negotiating.

When I teach it, I teach that negotiation is steering relationships. What that means is it's not just the money conversation – it means that you are teaching somebody how to value you, how to think about your business or how to think about you personally, from the very moment of first interaction, or even before.

And it means that you are continuing to steer that relationship, long after the contract or the deal or the salary negotiation. So, the last thing I would say about this book is, it deals with questions, it talks about steering relationships, and it gives you tools to steer that relationship with yourself. Because I find that one of the main sources of… When people come into a negotiation and they don't have confidence or they don't have clarity, they lack that because they haven't spent a little bit of time steering that internal conversation, so that they can avoid what I call a "one-car accident," right!

The problem with the negotiation comes well before the other person; it starts with you.

Rachel Salaman: So, who do you see it being most useful for and why, your book?

Alexandra Carter: You know, when I said "10 Questions to Negotiate Anything," I meant it. I know that people can use this for family conflicts, and for marital or spousal conflicts, as well as workplace deals.

In the end, I think the people who will read and benefit from "Ask for More," [are] professional people who are interested in really taking the reins and steering themselves, steering their careers toward greater success and happiness.

And while they're reading it, they're also going to have ideas for how they can bring these tools into the home. And, in fact, I give stories about how I personally have used these questions, not just in my work life, but with my nine-year-old daughter or with my spouse, and so my hope was to give professionals tools that would help them in every area of their lives.

Rachel Salaman: Your book has a clear and simple structure. The content is split in two: part one is about what you call "The Mirror," and part two is about "The Window." Could you explain what you mean by the mirror and the window?

Alexandra Carter: Sure. So, part one, The Mirror, is five great questions that you ask yourself. Remember that negotiation doesn't start from the moment you sit down with the other side and start haggling over money – negotiation starts at home with you.

And so, in the mirror section I give you questions that you can ask yourself in order to be prepared, and have clarity and confidence, for any conversation.

The second part is The Window, as you said, and that's five great questions to give you perspective on somebody else. So, just as you looked in the mirror to see yourself more clearly, I'm now helping you open up a window between you and somebody else, in order to see them and the situation between you more clearly. And so this section gives you five great questions that you can ask of somebody else, in any situation, and a lot of examples of how each question can produce pretty profound benefits, not just for your negotiation but for the people involved.

You're listening to Mind Tools Expert Interviews from Emerald Works.

Rachel Salaman: The first question in the mirror section is, "What's the problem I want to solve?" And you offer lots of tips here, which are useful even for people who aren't negotiating anything. So could you talk us through this question, focusing on some of the things that people may not have thought of?

Alexandra Carter: Sure. A lot of times when people come in looking for negotiation help or coaching, I find they immediately want to jump to starting to talk about solutions.

And, in fact, if anybody listening to this has felt they went through a period in their life where they were just tossing out solution after solution, hoping that something stuck – you know, "I'm going to reach out to 30 people today to try to find more clients," or "I'm going to start posting a lot more on social media" – I find that when we are less than successful, it's often because we haven't started at the right place, we haven't taken the time to figure out what is the problem I want to solve?

You know, even if you're sitting down, Rachel, for a very simple negotiation – you're looking to do let's say a home renovation, you're trying to renovate your bathroom in your home – and you sit down with your contractor to start talking about the project. People say to me, "Well shouldn't I just start talking numbers?" No! What's the problem you're trying to solve?

If you are trying to renovate your bathroom so that you can sell your home, well, maybe then your strategy is going to be to design a bathroom that's roughly comparable to the homes in the neighborhood that have sold well. If you're renovating because you're going to live in that home for 30 years, well, you have a whole other set of priorities and choices.

And I find that it's the same thing. Whether you are going in to ask about a salary or a promotion, whether you are approaching potential clients, the place you want to start is thinking about what problem you want to solve.

If I can give one additional tip that I think people don't often consider. They may start with something really small – and let me just say especially in a time of greater stress, or a time of crisis, people tend to focus narrowly on the thing that's right in front of them and say, "Well, I need to land this client today." So, what I do is I challenge people to step back and take what I call the "bigger picture perspective."

So, if you're focused on something you need to solve today, I would want you to ask yourself this follow-up question: what would happen if I achieved that? What would happen if you landed that client today? What would happen if you got a 10 percent raise today at work? Because I want people to connect the thing they are trying to do today with a larger problem, a longer-term problem that they are trying to solve.

Because when you step back and take that bigger picture perspective, you're going to be able to negotiate a more complete solution – you know, maybe it's not just a 10 percent raise at work, maybe you also want to be set up with a mentoring relationship, because your goal isn't just to get a raise, your goal is to end up at the top of the company.

So, that's just a tip for people when they are thinking about defining the problem that they want to solve.

Rachel Salaman: Absolutely, and it is linked I think to your second question, which is, "What do I need?" Which also requires us to go beyond the obvious. I wonder if you could share an example from your work that shows us how our needs might not be exactly what we think they are?

Alexandra Carter: You know, last year I was training a bunch of television executives out in Los Angeles, and I invited them to go through the questions in this book and one of them – when I was walking around to see what people had written – wrote, "I need us to use my couch in the living room."

And I looked at him and said, "Can you tell me more about what you've written here?"

And he said, "Yes, I need my couch in the living room. I just moved in with my partner, we've been together for three years. We moved in together and at the beginning we talked about how this was going to be an equal partnership and we both would have equal say about chores and décor in the home, and all of the decisions we made in our relationship. And gradually, all of my furniture that I had brought in got sold off and so the couch is the only thing that's left, so I need my couch in the living room."

We looked at each other, and I said, "Are we really talking about a couch?"

Oftentimes, I think when people are focusing what they need, they focus on something tangible that is just a symbol for something much, much larger.

And so – to use this somewhat humorous but very realistic example – this executive, what he needed was not a couch. What he needed was fairness, he needed respect, he needed acknowledgment for his place in this relationship.

And over and over again, Rachel, I find the same thing – people say, "Well, I need this tangible thing at work, I need this role on this project, or I need this level of title." And really, what I want to help people do is connect that to something larger, to understand that, really, sometimes what they need are certain values, what I call intangibles.

They're the values that give our life meaning. And when we understand what it is we really need, then we can negotiate better because we can sit down and, instead of saying, "We're using my couch and that's it!" We can say, "Can we have a talk about our roles in this relationship and how decisions are going to get made between us?"

That's what you need in order to be able to ask for more from negotiation.

Rachel Salaman: Well, the next question is, "What do I feel?" Which again is somewhat related. What role do feelings play in negotiations and mediations?

Alexandra Carter: Feelings play a tremendous role. And in fact I've counseled and interviewed a lot of high-ranking diplomats at the U.N., and one of them told me he really believed strongly in the role of feelings in a negotiation, because he said, "When I'm negotiating, I'm considering not only what I want but how strongly I feel about a variety of different things."

And feelings, in fact, Rachel, are how we make decisions in negotiation. I talk in my book about a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, who was studying people whose brains were completely intact except for the part that processed emotions.

And what happened? In those patients, they could endlessly talk about their priorities, but they could not make decisions. And I'm not just talking about big life decisions, Rachel, like, "What career path should I pursue?" I'm talking like, these folks could not decide whether to have Indian food or Italian food for dinner.

Feelings are how we evaluate and make decisions. And so I find that when we spend a little bit of time thinking about our own feelings negotiation, it not just helps us feel less anxious when we go in to negotiate with somebody else, but it helps us set our priorities.

And similarly, when you're able to ask somebody else about their concerns, you're getting to not just how they value things, but any issues that might be blocking your deal. When you grapple with those emotions, you take down barriers to the deal, and you pave a path toward a solution.

Rachel Salaman: Now, the fourth and fifth questions are the same in both the mirror and in the window sections of the book. So let's talk about them, starting with, "How have I – or you – handled this successfully in the past?" What can we gain from asking this of ourselves or of the other person?

Alexandra Carter: So, for yourself, asking about a prior success yields two pretty profound benefits.

The first is that, oftentimes when we're facing a negotiation – especially if we feel it is a large or a challenging one, or we're having some anxiety – we can forget that we've had a lot of previous success.

I've counseled so many people who were negotiating for their dream job, or a large position, and at the beginning they say, "I don't know how I'm going to do this." And then I ask them about their prior job-negotiating success and inevitably, this is not their first job negotiation. When we talk about their prior success, it's like a data generator – we generate ideas that worked for them once, that really could work for them again.

The second reason to ask yourself this question, is that it acts as a power prime. And, in fact, researchers from Columbia Business School, and elsewhere, found that when people go into a negotiation, having thought about a prior success, they do better. And so it is really, really important to ask yourself this question – not just to put yourself in a better mind frame, but also to get concrete ideas for what you can use in this negotiation.

Now, I often get, Rachel, people saying to me, "Well, Alex, I get why you would ask yourself that question, but why I am going to go into a negotiation with somebody else and ask them how they've been successful before? How is that going to help me?" And in fact, it's a profound help.

For example, let's say that your business is struggling and you need to negotiate with your commercial landlord over… You've come in with some needs, either you need a lease extension or you need a rent reduction for the next few months, and you're struggling to make progress in that negotiation. A great question to ask is, "How have you handled this successfully with other tenants?"

If you are going in to ask for more salary, you are trying to negotiate for a new job, "What else have you done to close the gap with prior applicants? How else have you handled this problem successfully?"

It's actually in your interests to get another person to talk about how they have successfully solved a similar problem, because it compels them almost to participate in a productive search for a solution with you.

And remember, Rachel, that you don't have to accept whatever the other person says, you've already done your homework. You've looked in the mirror, you've got really concrete about your priorities, your needs and your goals, and so whatever the person suggests, you have a way to evaluate that against your own needs.

Rachel Salaman: The last question in both the mirror and the window, is "What's the first step?" We ask ourselves that and we ask the other person, but what if the two answers are poles apart?

Alexandra Carter: You know, I've counseled people through a lot of stuff like this and I will say, you ask people their idea for a first step, you are going to be surprised that you're not far apart. And I will say, I think this is people's fear, that they are going to ask the other person their ideas and immediately they are going to be at [an] impasse.

And remember, Rachel, I'm seeing people as a mediator when there has been often years of conflict. So I'm not getting them at the beginning when things are still rosy, and yet I find continually that asking people for their ideas produces many, many more agreements than you would think, just from that question.

But, let's say we're in that situation where the answers are pretty far apart, OK? If somebody gives me a solution, and this is not where I want to be, what I do is I simply ask more questions. I would say, "Tell me more about what that offer represents for you?"

Because, for example, if they tell me, "Well, this offer really gives me security." Then bam! I know what they need – they need security. And so now I need to find a way to pitch what I'm looking for in a way that is going to satisfy that need, right? If they give an answer and they say, "Well here's what I need because you haven't shown that you can meet the demands of this contract." I ask another question. I flip it around and say, "Great, what would you need me to show, to have that security and that confidence?"

What I do if I get an answer is I simply ask more questions. And I find that when I continue to ask really good open questions, inevitably I hear something that I think, "That's it, that's how I'm going to close this deal."

Rachel Salaman: So, in general, how do you envisage people using this mirror and window framework?

For example, do we work through the mirror ahead of the negotiation, which is what you've implied earlier, and then work through the window during the negotiation when the other person is there in front of us?

Alexandra Carter: Sure, OK. Well, first, if I could make a slight tweak to the language, remember that the mirror is not ahead of the negotiation, the mirror is part of the negotiation. You are negotiating with yourself before you sit down with somebody else, right?

And, in fact, in the mirror section I talk about how one of the main sources of inaction, if you can't seem to make a decision on something, if you can't seem to get clarity on how to move forward, that's because you have an internal negotiation. You have a potential conflict and that's why you can't move.

So, I would say you work through the mirror before, in the first part of the negotiation, before you sit down with somebody else. And then I think there are two ways to use the window section – and that's why this is a great question, Rachel.

If you want to be extra prepared for that conversation with somebody, what I would do is I would go through the window section quickly and write down, "What do I think the other person's answer to this question will be?" And just think about that, because I find then that gives you a little bit of extra preparation.

Now, the key is, we're not always right – in fact, we're frequently not right. And so we may think the person is going to answer something and then they come in and they don't, they give a completely different answer. We need to have the flexibility on the spot to say, "Ah, OK, so here's what I thought this was going to be, I've got new information, I'm going to take that in and use that to create my solution."

So yes, you ask yourself questions first and then you go in and you ask somebody else questions – that's the framework for the book!

Rachel Salaman: I wonder if I could finally ask you to talk us through a specific example of how you used the mirror and the window to conduct or coach someone through a successful negotiation?

Alexandra Carter: Absolutely. I was coaching a start-up company, recently in fact. So this is a company that is in the wellness space, and a lot of wellness products in the United States do really well on that we call the coasts – so they sell extremely well in New York and Los Angeles, and then the real test if your product is going to be viable is how well does it sell in the rest of the country.

They have gone in twice to a distributor in the Midwest, and they went in, they pitched their product, they thought they were getting the deal, and two times they did not get the deal. Then they got a third call.

So before this negotiation we sat down and we worked through the questions. We figured out what was the problem they were trying to solve through this particular negotiation. We talked through their needs and then we developed an action plan for once they sat down in the room, and this was where I counseled them to change their approach.

I said, "So, this time you're not going in and leading with your PowerPoint deck and your pitch. This time you are going to go in and you're going to ask a question first." And they were nervous but they did, they went in, they sat down and said, "Well, we've met twice before and we're happy to be here again and this time we'd simply like to ask you to tell us what you're seeing in the sector, what you've been seeing these last two years."

And then, silence. And what happened in that meeting was incredible. The person sat back in surprise, I think she was ready for a PowerPoint presentation, but instead she opened up and she said, "OK, you want to know why you didn't get the deal these last two times? You have a premium product. I couldn't really see how it was going to sell to my consumers in this particular market. Recently, I've seen some data indicate that maybe it's time, but I'm still not quite sure."

Bingo! They now had a target to aim at. And so they were able to go in and candidly say, "Do you know what, two years ago you were probably right. And in fact, we went and we ran our own numbers on this because we weren't sure that we were ready for the Midwest. But here, at this point in time, we have so much data to show you, let us skip right to that portion of the presentation."

They focused the conversation there and they walked out with a six-figure deal.

Rachel Salaman: Well, your book is full of fantastic anecdotes and tips like that. Alexandra Carter, thanks very much for joining us today.

Alexandra Carter: It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

The name of Alex's book again is "Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Mind Tools Expert Interview from Emerald Works.

Until then, goodbye.