For any negotiation to take place, there has to be motivation for the parties involved – putting it bluntly, everyone has to have an answer to the question “what’s in it for me?”. That motivation, broadly speaking, flows from two sources – incentives (the benefits of trading towards agreement) and sanctions (outcomes best avoided if we refuse to negotiate). For many negotiators, the natural tendency is to focus on incentives. After all, it’s a better story to tell if we’re talking about good news. “Carrot” feels like a more comfortable strategy than “stick”. However, if that preference comes at the expense of calculating and using power drawn from sanction, we risk minimising – or worse, losing – power we hold in a negotiation. And that is an avoidable situation.
Where in preparation it’s clear that we hold power through sanction, we should assess first and foremost whether that sanction is both clear to our counterparty and, crucially, whether it is credible (i.e. will we see it through?). If it’s not a sanction you’d be willing to put into operation, it gives you no power and you’d be best to avoid raising it – all it will do is undermine your credibility and weaken your position once it becomes clear that the sanction won’t happen. If that is the case, understand whether you can take the principle of a sanction that feels too harsh to implement (perhaps de-listing) and slice it into smaller, more implementable sanctions – could you de-list for a specified but limited time period? A proportion rather than all lines? And, so on. If the sanction is one you’d see through but there remains a degree of doubt whether it’s clear to your counterparty, you have a decision to make. Assuming they know and understand can be one approach – but that can be very risky and likely to backfire. Another strategy is to “keep it up our sleeve” – the idea that they probably know so that’s fine, but if we have to, we’ll bring it up when necessary. It’s a tempting strategy – after all, who wants to lead with bad news – but I think there’s a paradox. Driven by a desire to keep the conversation positive, we don’t mention the sanction. The problem with that is that the longer the negotiation continues, the longer our counterparty hasn’t been reminded of the sanction – and overwhelmingly, the less weight they will attach to it. As the sense that the sanction is unlikely to be raised (let alone enforced) increases, the behaviour is likely to change accordingly, and pushback will become more robust. Negotiators thinking they were being positive in not bringing forward their sanction power early are therefore often forced to introduce it in that context, at which point it’s incredibly hard to do so without being contentious, or appearing to issue threats.
For negotiators who can draw on power from sanctions, a far better strategy is to ensure that they are clear, and to share that as early as possible. A very useful frame for how that might best be done would be to consider the differences between presenting consequences (of inaction, the status quo) versus threats (results of non-compliance). Being clear about the inevitable consequences, and firm that those consequences are unavoidable without a negotiated settlement, means you can also be clear about your shared interest in wishing to avoid those consequences – without undermining their credibility. Rather than ignoring sanction, or keeping it up our sleeves, we should consider instead how best to frame it (and do so early on) in order to keep the negotiation collaborative – and, crucially, not cede the power we draw from our sanctions.
