When negotiating … look for similarities to find influence

By Sam Ardery

The natural tendency when we negotiate is to focus on what we want.  What we want, however, has no influence on the other person, who is also focusing on what he or she wants.  The focus on our own desires also takes on disproportionate weight, as Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize Winning economist, discussed in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow and Winifred Gallagher discusses in her book, Rapt.

When preparing to negotiate, we want to consider what we can do to make it as easy as possible for the other person to do what we want them to do.  Most of the time that involves finding a way to influence the other person, not to convince the other person.   Influence has many components, but the most powerful one is likeability.  If someone likes us, they are more likely to be influenced.

Fortunately, it does not take an in-depth personality analysis.  Likeability can be positively tweaked by something as seemingly insignificant as similarity—name, state of origin, age, school, nationality or even something as basic as gender.  Robert Cialdini, who is often considered the godfather of “influence”, has written a book on this very topic.

Take, for example, my friend, who is a Greek-American.  He bought an advance purchase, non-refundable plane ticket.  When he needed to cancel his flight, he went through the various levels of appeals trying to get his money back.  He was told “no” at every turn.  The final person he spoke with was Greek and from the same region of the country as where my friend’s family originated.  They talked about the Greek community, growing up Greek and Greek families.  At the end of the conversation, the airline, through his new Greek friend, refunded the money.

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