Welcome back to The Deep Dive. This week we revisit The Weekly Walkaway post, discussing the art and science of team-based negotiation.
If you’re interacting with people, you’re managing conflict and differences. So you need to bring your most disciplined self to it. But the difficulty is always that..
‘WE’ are the often the reason we fail in high-stakes situations.
Let that sink in for a moment…
The Problem: Controlling Lucy
Your ego and emotional responses are your biggest vulnerabilities. When that primal, non-rational part of your brain senses conflict, stress shoots up. You rush. You fill silences. You blurt out concessions you shouldn’t. You lose control.
The solution?
Don’t try to fight your emotional chimp head-on. Sideline it with teamwork.
The Solution: Four defined roles
A successful negotiating team isn’t about liking each other or hierarchy. It’s about complementary skills, a common goal, and mutual accountability. The team needs:
Technical expertise
Problem-solving skills
Interpersonal capabilities
But when you are ‘in the room’, that transforms into four distinct, disciplined roles:
Think S.M.A.L as your easy to remember acronym…
Speaker
Manager
Analyst
Listener
1. The Speaker (The Art)
Does 80-90% of talking, but is deliberately disempowered. Comfortable with silence, constantly defers to the manager. This isn’t weakness, it projects rigorous discipline and signals decisions are based on strategy, not ego.
2. The Manager (The Puppet Master)
Runs the room but speaks very little. Manages climate, relationships, and agenda. Translates the analyst’s science into the speaker’s art. Holds decision-making power while maintaining mystery.
3. The Analyst (The Brain)
Handles all numbers, checks data integrity, keeps the official log of every offer and concession. But crucially: they do not talk. No defending their analysis, no emotional debates. Pure discipline.
4. The Listener (The Intelligence)
Completely silent, all eyes and ears. Decodes body language, picks up on divisions in the other team, spots flinches and hesitations. They’re gathering intel everyone else, busy talking or calculating, might miss.
If you negotiate as an effective Team , it becomes a rigorous, structured system designed to manage your emotions, ensure all crucial skills are present, and project disciplined, unwavering power to the other side.
Simples.
As Henry Ford put it:
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
The team becomes your external prefrontal cortex, absorbing the emotional heat so logic can win out.
Thanks for joining us on The Deep Dive.
