I have lived through multiple sessions with federal court magistrate judges who sought to remove civil litigation cases from their dockets via the settlement process. I am well aware of how reasonable it sounds when a neutral—in this case, a federal—judge suggests the parties (and their attorneys) “just split the difference.”
But Voss, who often dealt with life-or-death situations (the book’s subtitle is Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It) says to resist such pressure by employing certain strategies he calls “tactical empathy.”
The crux of Voss’s bravado (and demonstrated success) lies in how he defines “empathy.” It’s not about being nice or agreeing with the other side, but about understanding why their actions, or their position, makes sense to them. It gets to the point where you, as the adversary, can clearly articulate their point of view.
It’s all about the words you use to respond. One of Voss’s favorites is, “How am I supposed to do that?” Using the classic example of a boss and subordinate negotiating a raise, he cites the knee-jerk, perhaps silent, employee hurl, “You’re screwing me out of money, and it has to stop,” versus a more thoughtful and practical straightforward question, “How am I supposed to … (pay back my college loans, provide for my family, and deal with my rent increase)?”
As Voss told the Times, he put the word “tactical” in front of the word “empathy,” because a Navy Seal, for example, would be less inclined to adopt the practice of “yoga breathing,” whereas “tactical breathing” would seem doable and smart.
A particularly successful negotiation Voss recounts involved an FBI crisis negotiation in a Harlem doorway on a kidnapping. Three heavily armed fugitives holed up with a hostage on the 27th floor of an apartment building with no phone service (it was the late 1990s).
Contrary to standard FBI practice, which counseled strict avoidance of emotions to separate “the people from the problem,” Voss and two agents spoke to the escaped prisoners through a door about what they were feeling. He didn’t give them orders or ask what they wanted, but instead “imagined myself in their place.”
For six straight hours, in the soothing tones of what he calls his late-night FM DJ voice, he repeatedly used these lines: “It looks like you don’t want to come out. It seems like you worry that if you open the door, we’ll come in with guns blazing. It looks like you don’t want to go back to jail.”
For hours, no response came from the other side of the door, and Voss became convinced he was failing, until an FBI sniper on an adjacent building saw curtains in the apartment move. The hostage came out first, followed by the three fugitives, who told Voss they finally gave in because “We didn’t want to get caught or shot, but you calmed us down. We finally believed you wouldn’t go away, so we just came out.”
Phrases such as “it looks like” or “it seems like” give the negotiator a shortcut to intimacy, or what Voss calls “labeling.” Rather than the standard tough-guy threat, Voss went right to what the cornered gunmen were feeling and repeated their simple (and human) feelings back to them.
In addition to calling compromise a “lose-lose” in any negotiation, Voss claims that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” When asked, “Even in a kidnapping?” His answer is “Yes. A bad deal in a kidnapping is where someone pays, and no one comes out.” Hard to argue with that.
