Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

Negotiating: Seeking Advice in the Shadow of a Doubt
In 2007, a Fortune 500 company closed a plant in the Midwest United States.
One of the people to lose her position was an effervescent
research scientist
named Annie. The company offered Annie a transfer to the East Coast, but it
would require her to give up on her education. While working full time, Annie
was enrolled in a nighttime MBA program. She couldn’t afford to quit her job,
and if she did, the company would no longer pay for her degree. Yet if she
accepted the transfer, she wouldn’t be able to continue studying. She was in a
bind, with little time and few options.
Two weeks later, something extraordinary happened: she was offered a seat
on the company’s private jet, which was normally available only to top
executives, with unlimited access until she finished her MBA. She accepted the
transfer and spent the next nine months riding the corporate jet back and forth,
twice a week, until she finished her degree. The company also paid for her rental
car every week and commercial plane tickets when the corporate jet wasn’t
running. How did she get the company to make such a big investment in her?
Annie landed all of these perks without ever negotiating. Instead, she used a
form of powerless communication that’s quite familiar to givers.
Entering negotiations, takers typically work to establish a dominant position.
Had Annie been a taker, she might have compiled a list of all of her merits and
attracted counteroffers from rival companies to strengthen her position. Matchers
are more inclined to see negotiating as an opportunity for quid pro quo. If Annie
were a matcher, she would have gone to a senior leader who owed her a favor
and asked for reciprocity. But Annie is a giver: she mentors dozens of
colleagues, volunteers for the United Way, and visits elementary school classes
to interest students in science. When her colleagues make a mistake, she’s
regularly the one to take responsibility, shielding them from the blame at the
expense of her own performance. She once withdrew a job application when she
learned that a friend was applying for the same position.
As a giver, Annie wasn’t comfortable bargaining like a taker or a matcher, so
she chose an entirely different strategy. She reached out to a human resources
manager and asked for advice. “If you were in my shoes, what would you do?”
The manager became Annie’s advocate. She reached out to the heads of
Annie’s department and site, and started to lobby on Annie’s behalf. The
department head, in turn, called Annie and asked what he could do to keep her.

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Annie mentioned that she wanted to finish her MBA, but couldn’t afford to fly
back and forth. In response, the department head offered her a seat on the jet.
New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy
for
exercising influence when we lack authority
. In one experiment, researcher
Katie Liljenquist had people negotiate the possible sale of commercial property.
When the sellers focused on their goal of getting the highest possible price, only
8 percent reached a successful agreement. When the sellers asked the buyers for
advice on how to meet their goals, 42 percent reached a successful agreement.
Asking for advice encouraged greater cooperation and information sharing,
turning a potentially contentious negotiation into a win-win deal. Studies
demonstrate that across the manufacturing, financial services, insurance, and
pharmaceuticals industries, seeking advice is among the most
effective ways to
influence
peers, superiors, and subordinates. Advice seeking tends to be
significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressuring
subordinates and ingratiating superiors. Advice seeking is also consistently more
influential than the matcher’s default approach of trading favors.
This is true even in the upper echelons of major corporations. Recently,
strategy professors Ithai Stern and James Westphal studied executives at 350
large U.S. industrial and service firms, hoping to find out how executives land
seats on boards of directors.
Board seats
are coveted by executives, as they often
pay six-figure salaries, send clear status signals, and enrich networks by granting
access to the corporate elite.
Takers assume that the best path to a board seat is ingratiation. They flatter a
director with compliments, or track down his friends to praise him indirectly. Yet
Stern and Westphal found that flattery only worked when it was coupled with
advice seeking. Instead of just complimenting a director, executives who got
board seats were more likely to seek advice along with the compliment. When
praising a director’s skill, the advice-seeking executives asked how she mastered
it. When extolling a director’s success in a task, these executives asked for
recommendations about how to replicate his success. When executives asked a
director for advice in this manner, that director was significantly more likely to
recommend them for a board appointment—and they landed more board seats as
a result.
Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines
expressing vulnerability, asking questions, and talking tentatively. When we ask
others for advice, we’re posing a question that conveys uncertainty and makes us
vulnerable. Instead of confidently projecting that we have all the answers, we’re

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admitting that others might have superior knowledge. As a result, takers and
matchers tend to shy away from advice seeking. From a taker’s perspective,
asking for advice means acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers.
Takers may fear that seeking advice might make them look weak, dependent, or
incompetent. They’re wrong: research shows that people who
regularly seek
advice and help
from knowledgeable colleagues are actually rated more
favorably by supervisors than those who never seek advice and help.
Appearing vulnerable doesn’t bother givers, who worry far less about
protecting their egos and projecting certainty. When givers ask for advice, it’s
because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others. Matchers hold back
on advice seeking for a different reason: they might owe something in return.
According to Liljenquist, advice seeking has four benefits: learning,
perspective taking, commitment, and flattery. When Annie asked for advice, she
discovered something she didn’t know before: the company’s jet had extra seats,
and it traveled back and forth between her two key locations. Had she lobbied
more assertively instead of seeking advice, she might never have gained this
information. In fact, Annie had several previous conversations in which no one
mentioned the jet.
This brings us to the second benefit of advice seeking: encouraging others to
take our perspectives. In Annie’s previous conversations, where she didn’t ask
for advice, the department head focused on the company’s interest in transferring
her while saving as much money as possible. The advice request changed the
conversation. When we ask for advice, in order to give us a recommendation,
advisers have to look at the problem or dilemma from our point of view. It was
only when Annie sought guidance that the department head ended up
considering the problem from her perspective, at which point the corporate jet
dawned on him as a solution.
Once the department head proposed this solution, the third benefit of advice
seeking kicked in: commitment. The department head played a key role in
generating the jet solution. Since it was his idea and he had already invested
some time and energy in trying to help Annie, he was highly motivated to help
her further. He ended up paying for the rental car that she used in the Midwest
and agreeing to fund commercial flights if the corporate jet was not running.
There’s no doubt that Annie earned these privileges through a combination
of hard work, talent, and generosity. But a clever study sheds further light on
why the department head was so motivated to offer Annie more than just the
corporate jet. Half a century ago, the psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy

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paid people for succeeding on a geometry task. In the control group, the