Pressure changes how people negotiate. A deadline lands, tempers rise, and the person across the table starts to look like an opponent. Terms usually get settled one way or another, but the relationship behind the deal often takes the damage. Leaders who handle that pressure well protect both.
On today’s episode of Business Trends Today, Bob Bordone, Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, Founder of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program and Co-Author of Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In, joins us to explain when an aggressive deadline builds momentum and when it wrecks credibility.
When a deadline builds momentum
Deadlines are among the most powerful tools in a negotiation and among the fastest ways to lose credibility. A deadline earns its power from timing, according to Bordone. The right moment comes when substantial progress already sits on the table. One side is holding out for another concession or two, and the date pushes both parties across the line.
"Deadlines and negotiation can be incredibly useful and powerful tools to get things done, and they can also be ways to completely ruin your credibility."
Bordone calls that move an action-forcing event, and its value depends on being credible. An arbitrary date attached to unresolved issues leaves two options. The date keeps moving until nobody takes it seriously. Or the threat gets carried out, and the highest costs land on the party that made it.
Deadlines work best saved for the moment when the parties can genuinely be driven toward agreement, he said.
Sitting with disagreement
Being resilient in conflict means staying with the discomfort of a disagreement rather than escaping it, Bordone said. Most people default to one of two escapes. They retreat to the people who already agree with them, or they lash out and fight.
Resilience looks like telling someone directly that you see the issues differently. You explain why, then work through them together. Some of those differences will not get resolved, and his model accounts for that.
Two parties can settle several issues and still hold opposing views on the rest. The skill is sitting with those unresolved items without treating them as a reason to walk away.
Firm on the terms, steady on the relationship
The same tension comes up again and again among business leaders. They need to hold firm on terms while keeping an important relationship intact. The instinct is to give ground on substance to keep things friendly. That trade-off tends to surface later, when margins tighten and the terms no longer work.
"The error is to say, to preserve the relationship, I'll give something up on the substance."
Being firm has nothing to do with volume. Research on histrionics and table-pounding shows they almost never work. People are good at telling performance apart from real anger. In heated moments, chemicals overrun the cognitive part of the brain. Pausing to breathe and name the feeling shortens the recovery.
Emotions do not need to be suppressed, only understood. Ignoring them does not make them go away, and they end up running the negotiation instead.
Conflict as a learning opportunity
Most people read conflict as a problem. Bordone works to help business leaders see it as an opportunity. Handled well, he said, a disagreement becomes a chance to learn something and think more creatively. It also builds a more authentic professional relationship.
Working through a first real disagreement is evidence that a relationship can hold weight. A partnership with no friction after a year is usually one where something is going unsaid. Leaders who expect something useful from conflict can enter it without the fight-or-flight reflex taking over.
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