Losing Your Cool--and Your Credibility
Quick reminder1
Last week I posted a quick three-party negotiation exercise that offers key lessons about bargaining power in multi-party cases. You can do it remotely with colleagues and friends, or at the dinner table with family. There’s an anonymous poll for entering your results. In a post next week I’ll weigh in with my thoughts and recommendations. Looking forward to seeing your responses! Mike
How defending your integrity can backfire
This post is an epilogue to an article I put up in March, “Honing Lie Detection Skills-A Bit.” The gist of it was that most of us aren’t very good at spotting the difference between fact and fiction. We can improve our skills a bit, but still be a long way from omniscience. We must be careful not to jump to conclusions.
Sorry, but here’s more bad news that I just heard about. It’s important that you know it, too.
Say someone accuses you of lying even though you just told the gospel truth. So, you blew up in anger. Understandably. But you just made things worse.
My HBS colleague, Leslie John, working with other researchers, has done a series of studies documenting how the anger of people wrongly accused of lying makes them seem all the more guilty. (You can see a summary of that work here.)
That faulty impression is doubly unfair, according to Leslie, as anger is “actually more likely to be a sign of innocence than of guilt.”
Bad enough that someone’s feelings are hurt. Worse still that their reputation may be wrongly tarnished. And the consequences can be severe when an honest employee is falsely accused of fudging her sales numbers, or a job applicant is charged with padding his resume.
So, what to do?
It’s easy to say to say, “keep calm,” but such accusations often come out of the blue and trigger strongly felt defensive reactions. If possible, simply being silent for a few seconds may help you control your emotions. If the accusation came via a text or email, resist the impulse to fire right back. Before you compose an answer, you’ve got to compose yourself.
And what if you are the person across the table who suspects that someone else isn’t being honest with you?
Start with being modest about your impressions and watching your own emotions. Katherine DeCelles, one of Leslie’s co-authors, recommends that approaching possible problems about truthfulness “with curiosity, open mindedness, and concern, rather than with an outright accusation, might help elicit answers rather than anger.”
Housekeeping
The aim of Jazz of Negotiation is to make you a more effective negotiator. For details, click here. Just by signing up, you’ll get free access to a full article, plus a shorter post like this one, delivered by email 50 weeks a year. Paid subscribers get additional content: Q and A threads, videos, and from time to time short exercises, with more to come. Thanks! Mike