Dr. Heidi Grant

The Motivational Secret to Great Negotiating

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From my Fast Company blog:

Negotiating well is a powerful skill, and it doesn’t come naturally to most people. That’s because a negotiation is an experience that is rife with conflicting motivations.  When two parties haggle over price, the buyer needs to somehow reconcile his desire to pay the lowest possible price, with the knowledge that if he bids too low, the negotiation may break down and the seller could walk away.

These concerns are equally present when it comes to negotiations over salary – managers want to keep costs down, without losing their best people to better paying jobs.  And employees want to get the highest possible salary, without overplaying their hand and getting canned, or simply humiliated, in the process.

The key to a good outcome in any negotiation is a strong opening bid, since that bid is the jumping off point, as well as the frame of reference, for the negotiation that follows.  You are never going to end up paying less than your initial offer when purchasing a car, or making a bigger salary than you asked for when starting your new job. But a strong opening bid takes a certain amount of gutsiness – you need to overcome all those perfectly rational concerns you may have about taking things too far, only to end up embarrassing yourself and failing completely.

So how can you embrace risk, particularly when risk-taking doesn’t come to you naturally?  The answer is simple:  when you think about an upcoming negotiation, focus only on what you have to gain, and banish all thoughts of what you might lose.

Psychologists call this adopting a promotion focus.  When we think about our goals in terms of potential gains, we automatically (often without realizing it) become more comfortable with risk, and less sensitive to concerns about what could go wrong.  When we adopt a prevention focus, on the other hand, and think about our goals in terms of what we could lose if we don’t succeed, we become much more conservative and risk-averse.

These different ways of looking at the same goal (e.g., to pay the lowest price, to get the biggest raise) have profound effects on the way we approach negotiation.

In one study, psychologist Adam Galinksy and his colleagues divided 54 MBA students into pairs, and asked them to take part in a mock negotiation involving the sale of a pharmaceutical plant.  One student was assigned the role of “seller” and the other “buyer,” and both were given detailed information about the circumstances of the sale, including the fact that the “bargaining zone” would range from $17-25 million dollars.

Galinsky then manipulated the goal focus of the buyers.  Before the negotiation began, half were told to take a couple of minutes and write down “the negotiation behaviors and outcomes you hope to achieve… think about how you could promote these behaviors and outcomes,” giving the buyers a promotion focus.  The other half were told to write down the behaviors and outcomes “you seek to avoid” and how they “could prevent” them, giving those buyers a prevention focus.

Each pair began their negotiation with an opening bid from the buyer.  Promotion-minded buyers opened with a bid an average of nearly $4 million dollars less than prevention-minded buyers.  They were willing to take the greater risk and bid aggressively low, and it paid off in a big way.  In the end, promotion buyers purchased the plant for an average of $21.24 million, while prevention buyers paid $24.07 million.

Why? It turns out that approaching a goal with a promotion mindset helps a negotiator to stay focused on their (ideal) price target.   A prevention mindset, however, leads to too much worrying about a negotiation failure or impasse, leaving the buyer more susceptible to less advantageous agreements.

This is one of those things that’s worth taking a moment to think about – two negotiators, each armed with identical information, facing similar opponents, and yet one overpays by nearly $4 million dollars.  The only difference was that one negotiator was thinking about all that he could gain, while the other focused too much on what he had to lose.

So when you are preparing for your next negotiation, take a few moments to list all the ways in which you will benefit if you are successful.   Repeat them to yourself just before the negotiation begins.  Most importantly, shut out any thoughts about what could go wrong – just refuse to give them your attention.  With practice, this thought-training will become easier, and eventually automatic.  Risk-taking, believe it or not, can become second nature to you, if you think about your goals in the right way.

Four Reasons Why Power Enhances Performance

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From my Fast Company Blog:

The people with power in any organization are usually its top performers.  (Not always, I know, but that’s a topic for another post).  It’s natural to assume that the reason they’ve ended up with so much power is precisely because they are top performers.  But in many cases, it’s the other way around – power creates peak performance.

Studies show that powerful people, even when working alone, work differently than those with less power.  Often, their work is simply better.  This is true regardless of how long the person in question has been powerful – in fact, you can bring people into a room, assign one of them at random to be the “leader,” and immediately begin to see the difference.

Psychologists find that power leads to better performance, particularly on complex or difficult tasks that require effort and persistence, for four reasons:

1.     Leaders feel responsible to the group they are leading, and to its goals.  This is an added motivation that followers often lack.

2.     All eyes are on them.  Leaders feel more individually identified and therefore more accountable for their own work.  Because they expect to be noticed by others, they feel pressured to set a good example.

3.     Power stimulates the brain – specifically, what psychologists refer to as the brain’s executive function, which is instrumental when it comes to achieving goals.  When participants in the laboratory are given power over the outcomes of others, we find that they are better able to control their attention, plan future behavior, and take goal-directed actions, all hallmarks of superior executive function.

4.     Power keeps you going. A recent set of studies show that powerful people not only outperform the less powerful, but that they continue to be able to do so even when their energy and willpower has been seriously depleted.

Self-control is a limited resource – like a muscle in your body, it gets tired when you’ve given it a good workout.   Typically, when you’ve depleted your self-control by working on something really challenging, your performance on subsequent tasks suffers.  Powerful people, however, are slower to show signs of depletion – they can keep up their A-game longer, thanks in part to their strong motivation and heightened executive functioning.

It’s worth noting that powerful people don’t always outperform the less powerful. After all, leaders have a lot on their plates – they can’t possibly bring their best to everything.  This raises the question of delegation.  How do they (and should they) decide where to put their effort?

The short and unsurprising answer is that they generally withhold effort when the task in question is unworthy of a powerful person.  In other words, when it seems like the kind of thing an underling would do.  This attitude can and does affect performance. For example, in the studies I mentioned earlier, when the participants were given boring, repetitive tasks like filling out multiplication tables, those assigned to a leadership role performed worse than nonleaders, and complained that they didn’t think it was the sort of task a leader should have to do.

Arrogant as this may seem at times, you have to admit that this attitude makes some sense.  Powerful people approach tasks with greater energy and intensity, but their well of energy and intensity isn’t bottomless.  They need to be selective.

Unfortunately, they don’t always pull it off, which brings us to the serious weakness that comes with power.  Making decisions about what is and isn’t worthy of a leader’s limited resources actually requires resources – when you are overworked, tired, or otherwise depleted, you have a hard time appraising a situation correctly.

Overworked leaders often don’t realize that a particular task is really more appropriate for a subordinate to perform – they end up trying to bring their A-game to everything.  They make bad choices, burn out, and their performance suffers.

So if you are fortunate enough to be given a position of power, it’s quite possible that your best performances lie ahead of you.  Even your brain is primed to rise to the challenge.  But beware of the leader’s Achilles heel – if you are too burned out to make good decisions about what to delegate, you’ll end up squandering many of the performance advantages that your power has given you.

Feeling Timid and Powerless? Maybe It’s How You’re Sitting.

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In the animal kingdom, the alphas often convey their dominant status through posture.  They rise to their full height, stick out their chests and fan their tail feathers, all to take up as much space as possible and establish their powerful presence.  The weaker omegas, on the other hand, bow down low, tucking in their limbs and tails and signaling their submission.

Human beings are no different.  The most powerful guy in the room is usually the one whose physical movements are most expansive – legs apart, leaning forward, arms spread wide while he gestures.  He’s the CEO who isn’t afraid to swing his feet up onto the conference room table, hands behind his head and elbows jutting outward, confident in his power to spread himself out however he damn well pleases.

The nervous, powerless person holds himself very differently – he makes himself physically as small as possible: shoulders hunched, feet together, hands in his lap or arms wrapped protectively across his chest.  He’s the guy in the corner who is hoping he won’t be called on, and often is barely noticed.

Psychologists have known for some time that powerful and powerless individuals adopt these poses unconsciously, and that the poses themselves are in fact perceived (also unconsciously) by others as indictors of status.  Your posture, like it or not, tells people a lot about you.

But more recent research reveals a new, far more surprising relationship between power and posing – that their influence works in both directions.  In other words, holding powerful poses can actually make you more powerful.

Researchers Dana Carney, Amy Cuddy, and Andy Yap asked male and female participants to hold two poses, each for one minute.  The poses were either high power (the CEO feet-up-on-the-table pose with hands behind head; standing feet apart while leaning over a table, supported by one hand resting on the table) or low power (sitting with shoulders slumped forward and hands in lap; standing with feet together and arms folded tightly across chest.)

After holding the high power poses, participants not only reported that they felt significantly more “powerful” and “in charge”, but were also more willing to take a   risk when offered the chance to gamble their study earnings for double the money.

The high power posers also experienced significant increases in testosterone and decreases in cortisol (measured by saliva), a neuroendocrine profile that has been linked in past research to dominance, competitiveness, adaptive responding to challenges, disease resistance, and leadership ability.  So not only did high power posing create psychological and behavioral changes typically associated with powerful people, it created physiological changes characteristic of the powerful as well.

Low power posers, on the other hand, experienced significantly drops in testosterone and increases in cortisol – giving them the typical physiological profile of the nervous and risk-averse omega, and leaving them feeling less powerful and less willing to take a chance on a big win.

So, take a look at how you are sitting right now.  Take a moment to think about what you are typically doing with your body when you are at your desk, in a meeting, or simply socializing.  What message is your body language – your posture, your stance, your gesturing – sending to everyone in the room?  And more importantly, what message is it sending to your own brain?  If you sit all curled up in a ball, or stand with your arms wrapped around your chest like battle armor, you are going to end up feeling less powerful and less confident because your brain will assume that that’s what you are.

It’s up to you to make sure your brain is getting the right message.  If you want more power – not just the appearance of power, but the genuine feeling of power – then spread your limbs wide, stand up straight, and lean into the conversation.   Carry yourself like the guy in charge, and in a matter of minutes your body will start to feel it, and you will start to believe it.

Follow me on Twitter  @hghalvorson

Is Your Willpower Running Low? Only If You Believe It Is.

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A great deal of recent research (some of which I’ve written about in this blog) suggests that our capacity for self-control is much like a muscle.  Its strength varies from person to person, and also from moment to moment, depending on how recently and how hard it’s had to work.  (Think about how your legs can feel like jelly after a long run, and you get the idea.)

Just as our muscle strength is inherently limited, so too are our reserves of willpower.  Thus, self-control is often at its weakest immediately after we’ve had to use it – an effect demonstrated in dozens of published studies, and obvious to anyone who has every succumbed to the urge to drink, smoke, or eat a whole pint of ice cream at the end of very stressful day.

But what if you happened to be someone who believed that engaging in difficult tasks was energizing, rather than depleting?  What if you were convinced that using your willpower activates resources, rather than drains them?  What would happen?

You’d be right!  Thanks to a new set of studies by Veronika Job, Carol Dweck, and Gregory Walton, it’s become clear that people’s beliefs about the nature of self-control determine whether or not it is depleted by use.

The researchers distinguished between people who believed that willpower is a limited resource or a non-limited resource, and found that only those who believed in the limited-resource theory had less self-control (i.e., made lots of mistakes) after working on something very difficult.

How can this be? Both groups were equally exhausted by difficult task, so you might think they would be equally mistake-prone.  But it turns out that our theories about self-control determine how exhaustion affects us.

When people who hold the limited-resource view experience something as exhausting, they have less self-control and are more prone to errors because they see exhaustion as a sign to reduce effort, in order to rest and eventually replenish their self-control reserves.  In contrast, those with the non-limited resource view continue to put in effort despite their exhaustion, and make fewer errors because of it.

These beliefs, not surprisingly, predict how people handle the more stressful and demanding periods in their lives.  For instance, the researchers found that during the more stressful , exam-filled weeks in the academic semester, belief in the limited-resource theory of self-control predicted greater consumption of unhealthy junk foods, procrastination, and less effective study habits among college students.  Those who believed in limitless willpower, on the other hand, held up under stress just fine.

So, is self-control limited, or isn’t it?  The answer has become a lot less clear, and frankly, I’m no longer sure it matters.  What does matter is whether or not you believe that it’s limited.    And since you have some choice when it comes to your beliefs, I recommend going with the limitless willpower view.  Maybe in the end, all it takes to put down that pint of ice cream at the end of the day is believing that you actually can.

The Dark Side of Self-Control

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From my Psychology Today Blog:

Why do people drink too much, eat too much, smoke cigarettes, take drugs, or have sex with people they’ve just met?  What’s to blame for all this bad behavior?

Most people would say that, while these self-destructive acts can have many root causes, they all have one obvious thing in common: they are all examples of failures of self-control.  Each of us has desires that we know we shouldn’t give in to, but when faced with temptation, some of us lack the willpower to resist it.

A recent paper by psychologists Catherine Rawn and Kathleen Vohs, however, argues that if you really think about it, something about that simple answer doesn’t quite make sense.  In fact, it turns out that sometimes it’s having willpower that really gets you into trouble.

Think back to the time you took your very first sip of beer.  Disgusting, wasn’t it?  When my father gave me my first taste of beer as a teenager, I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would voluntarily drink the stuff.   The experience is similar for most of us when it comes to our first sips of wine, hard liquor, and coffee as well.  And smoking?  No one enjoys their first cigarette – it tastes awful, burns your throat, makes you cough, and is often nauseating.  So even though smoking, and drinking alcohol or coffee, can become temptations you need willpower to resist, they never, ever start out that way.

Just getting past those first horrible experiences actually requires a lot of self-control.  Ironically, only those individuals who can repeatedly override their impulses, rather than give in to them, can ever come to someday develop a “taste” for Budweiser, Marlboro Lights, or dark-roasted Starbucks coffee.

We automatically think of willpower as a resource we use to help us do the things we know we should do – the things that are good for us. So why then would anyone ever exert willpower in order to do something that isn’t good for them?

The short answer is, we do it in order to achieve some goal.  And more often than not, that goal has something to do with social acceptance.   We force ourselves to consume alcoholic beverages that taste awful, inhale cigarette smoke that gags us, and try to mask the taste of coffee with generous applications of milk and sugar, in order to seem sophisticated, grown-up, and cool.  We experiment with illegal drugs, even though we are terrified of the physical and legal consequences, in order to feel accepted.  We have sex with people when we feel no sexual desire whatsoever, hoping that they will like us and that maybe it will “go somewhere.”

When we use our willpower to overcome our healthy impulses, we are choosing interpersonal gains – like forming friendships and avoiding rejection – over personal well-being. These aren’t self-control failures – far from it.  They are deliberate choices, and they are in fact self-control successes.

So if you think that your child will grow to become a clean, sober, and abstinent teenager just because he has the willpower to hold out for two marshmallows later instead of one marshmallow now, think again.

Self-control is simply a tool to be put to some use, helpful or harmful.  To live happy and productive lives, we need to develop not only our self-control strength, but also the wisdom to make good decisions about when and where to apply it.

Follow me on Twitter @hghalvorson

Would You Be A Greedy CEO? Here’s How To Tell

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From my Fast Company Blog:

It’s difficult to open a paper these days (or, turn on your laptop or smartphone, if that’s how you get your news) without reading about a new and reprehensible instance of CEO greed.  Most are tales of golden parachutes received after nearly running a company into the ground, or huge bonuses paid out in a year when hundreds of employees lost their jobs.  Occasionally, there’s a real doozy – remember when John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, spent over a million dollars redecorating his office?  Or when former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski bought a gold-plated trashcan on the company’s dime?

Obviously, most CEO’s do not behave this badly.  But how can we understand the behavior of the ones who do, and anticipate when a leader might be particularly likely to go the Way of the Golden Trashcan?   In other words, when is a leader most likely to be self-serving, rather than focused on what’s best for the company (or, for more mid-level leaders, their group within the company)?  And how can each of us tell which type of leader we are, or might someday be?

The answer is an important one, since self-serving leaders are often ineffective leaders.  By allocating more resources to themselves (pay increases, bonuses, office space, credit and recognition, etc.) and less to their group, and by focusing on their own goals rather than group goals, greedy leaders undermine employee loyalty and motivation. Their self-serving ways have been known, on occasion, to bring an entire company to its knees.

You might think that power itself is to blame – that more powerful leaders are inherently more likely to hog resources than less powerful ones.  But it’s not that simple.  Recent research suggests that both low and high-powered leaders can make self-serving decisions, but that they do so for very different reasons.

High Power Leaders: Research shows that being in a position of power makes people generally less sensitive to what’s happening around them  (e.g., input from others, social norms) and more sensitive to their own internal states and feelings.

Powerful people care less about what others think of them, and become demonstrably less adept at correctly assessing other people’s feelings and perceptions.  (Interestingly, even people in very temporary positions of power show these same effects – there’s something about power that seems to immediately turn our vision inward).

In particular, research shows that very powerful leaders tend to be swayed by their personal beliefs about what an effective leader is like.

If your idea of an effective leader is someone who pursues their own goals and ambitions at the expense of the group, takes full advantage of their status and perks, and invests little of their personal time or effort into helping their employees, then being in a position of power is quite likely to turn you into self-serving leader.  If you’re fortunate enough to be made a CEO, there is probably some gilded office furniture in your future.  Good luck with that.

If, instead, your idea of an effective leader is someone who is more concerned with whether or not the group is effective, puts group goals ahead of their own, gives up perks, and invests time and effort in tasks that benefit their employees, then power won’t turn you greedy – in fact, you’ll probably be generous and attentive to others.  And the really good news is, your beliefs about effective leaders are correct – leaders who focus on their employees, rather than themselves, understand what leadership is all about and are more successful because of it.

Low Power Leaders: Mid-level leaders, on the other hand, are less likely to use their own beliefs about effective leadership as guides, and are more strongly influenced by external cues, like information about their own and their employees relative performance.  When low power leaders believe they have outperformed their employees, they feel entitled to more benefits, and make more self-serving decisions with regard to recognition, perks, and pay.  When their employees have superior performance, they spread the benefits around accordingly.

Often, it’s only when an individual is promoted from a position of relatively lower power to one of high power that we begin to see their true colors, so to speak.  Only then does their mental image of an ideal leader begin to influence their own leadership behavior in tangible ways.  Corporate Boards would be very wise to try get a sense of a CEO candidate’s beliefs about great leaders, because the behavior the candidate admires is exactly what the Board, and the employees, are going to get.

Rus, D., et al., Leader power and leader self-serving behavior: The role of effective leadership beliefs and performance information, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2010), doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.06.007