Do nice guys finish last in negotiation?

People often ask me if it pays to be a nice person in negotiations. Honestly, it’s neither here nor there. You might as well ask if it pays to be a nice person in competitive athletics. It’s never useful to be unpleasant in Negotiation, because you don’t want people’s negative feelings about you to affect a deal, but if you’re hoping that you’ll get better deals if people like you, you may end up sorely disappointed.

Back in my days as a management consultant in a big firm, I got a lesson in what happens when you’re a nice guy. I worked on a project with a colleague who I’ll call Bob. We were both Senior Consultants, chasing promotion to the Manager grade, when we were assigned to work on a project that never really got off the ground. We’ll call it “Project Purple”.

Bob and I sat in a project “clean room” (isolated from the rest of the firm, so as to not prejudice the project) for several weeks with nothing to do, waiting for the client to decide whether to proceed with Project Purple or not. In all of that time, we were called upon to produce one PowerPoint deck describing the approach we planned to take to do the work, if and when the go-ahead was given. Other than that, we did no productive work at all. But the client was happy to pay to keep us on standby for almost five weeks until the whole thing was called off. Bob and I went our separate ways to work on different projects.

At the end of the year, as is the way in consulting firms, we were both preparing our promotion cases. This process involved gathering feedback from all the project leads we had worked for over the previous year. When I called the director who had been in charge of Project Purple, I didn’t want to be penalised for spending five weeks of my performance year twiddling my thumbs on Project Purple, so I made my pitch;

“Look I spent five weeks on Project Purple waiting for something to happen, but it never really got off the ground. I did make that one presentation though, so can we just agree I met expectations so I can put that on my performance summary?”

When the director agreed without any push-back. I was relieved, but not surprised. I worked in a different practice area to the director so it made little difference to him.

The year ended and I missed out on the promotion. I needed to have spent more of the year “Exceeding” or “Substantially Exceeding” expectations. It had been close, but I had narrowly missed the cut. Here’s the thing though; Bob made the cut. Worse than that, the decisive factor separating me from Bob was our performance on Project Purple!

“How could that be?”, I asked myself. We had done the exact same thing! We’d co-produced the sole deliverable and done nothing else! I complained bitterly to my performance manager in the firm, who I held in very high regard, and he agreed to do a little digging for me. He learned that the difference between me and Bob came down to the phone calls we made to the director of Project Purple. Bob’s pitch was subtly different. Bob had said something like this;

“Look I spent five weeks on Project Purple waiting for something to happen, but it never really got off the ground. I did make that one presentation though, so can we just agree I substantially exceeded expectations so I can put that on my performance summary?”

The director had pushed back on “…substantially exceeded…” but agreed to “…exceeded…” and, as a result, Bob’s record for the year showed that he had spent more than 10% of the year delivering at a higher level than me.

I was furious. I was mad at Bob for the sheer cheek of it. I was mad at the director for agreeing to the lie and I was mad at the firm for creating a system that could be gamed so easily. My performance manager bought me a coffee and listened to my gripes for a full half hour. When I was done complaining, he explained who I should really be frustrated with; myself.

Bob hadn’t done anything wrong. He recognised that Project Purple could derail his promotion year if he didn’t do something about it, and he predicted (correctly) that the project director wouldn’t push back too hard on giving him a decent performance grade for the project because doing so cost the director nothing and, if the shoe had been on the other foot, he’d have tried to do exactly what Bob was doing. In negotiation terms, Bob had recognised that he was in a simple, low-dependency negotiation and adopted the appropriate tactics to maximise his chances of success. I had negotiated from a position of fear, fixated on loss aversion (the fear of getting a “failed to meet expectations” grade) and thus opened my negotiation with a proposal that compromised my own objectives.  

It took me weeks to get past my anger and for the lesson to sink in. When it did, I began to question what had led me to fail in that negotiation. The first thing I noted was that it hadn’t even occurred to me to try for a better performance grade. My innate sense of “fairness” had led me to target an outcome that I was comfortable with on an emotional level, without even considering whether it would meet my practical needs. My next challenge was to question what it said about the business I was in, that would promote someone based on this sort of behaviour? I asked my performance manager (who was a partner in the business) for his views.

Again, he bought me a coffee. And a slice of cake, this time. The lesson he gave me, which was not easy to hear, was this; I needed to be a bit more like Bob. Bob didn’t set out to hurt me, he set out to give himself the best chance of success. If I had spoken to Bob before calling the director, it’s very likely that Bob would have suggested I adopt the same approach in my call. There are two reasons for this;

1. Bob was quite a decent guy; and

2. If the two of us had both told the director our work (which he barely remembered) had substantially exceeded expectations, there would have been an even greater chance of him agreeing to that grade.

Indeed, when you think about it, me telling the director that the work Bob and I did was “…just ok...” might be the reason he pushed back on Bob trying for a “substantially exceeded expectations” grade.

It could be argued that by being a “nice guy”, I finished last on this occasion. Certainly that’s how I thought about it immediately after the event. In truth, it had nothing to do with being nice or nasty. I finished last because I was so concerned with avoiding a tricky conversation, I prioritised avoiding an uncomfortable conversation over being effective (and meeting my own objectives). If I wanted to succeed and reach the next level in the consulting business, I needed to less naive.

Be wary of the effects your own subjective standards on questions like “niceness” and “fairness” can have on your framing of Negotiation challenges. Focus on being effective and achieving your goals.

In my next blog post, I’ll tell you all about how I learned to be an unprincipled negotiator, and why you should too!