In this interview, host Jeff Dudan explores Chris Voss’s perspective on negotiation, emphasizing tactical empathy as the cornerstone of effective communication and servant leadership. Voss critiques the common‑ground myth propagated by media, arguing that true empathy requires making the counterpart feel genuinely understood rather than solving their problem for them. They discuss the Discipline Listening Method, a loss‑prevention technique that achieves high confession rates by creating a sense of shared circumstance. Voss outlines the typical work of the Black Swan Group—coaching, mediation, and high‑stakes negotiations—highlighting how tactical empathy shortens disputes and can save millions. Practical anecdotes illustrate rapid rapport building, such as a seat‑swap negotiation on an airplane, and Voss shares specific disarming statements and the importance of tone (big smile, playful attitude, or strategic silence). The conversation shifts to common pitfalls like deal fixation, where negotiators anchor to a pre‑determined outcome, and Voss introduces a cognitive framework (Duration‑Path‑Outcome) to help negotiators slow down, avoid tunnel vision, and uncover hidden variables. Throughout, Voss stresses ethical positioning, the “karma bank,” and the need to remove oneself as an adversary to achieve collaborative outcomes.
Chapters
I look through the toolkit in the book, is tactical empathy really the center, really the core of it? And I say that, so I've built multiple franchise companies over the years and empathy was something like we, I talk about it in training because for us, the way I talk about it is we use it in inside of like our servant leadership. Value that we have. And, you know, you need to, you need to give people what they truly need, not what they say they want in the moment. So to do that, you've got to be in the pocket with people, like a boxing term, like you got to be close enough to them so that they trust you. They believe you understand what they're going against, even though in franchising we've done it like 500 times now and it's the same pattern of, of conversation back. Because what we're truly trying to do is make sure that we're working on the right problem. So for example, Somebody might say, well, you know, it's my market or it's the marketing or my staff. That's the problem with the business or competition or anything like that. But in the face of great validation, they're really holding themselves hostage. And, you know, and then you might dig behind and it might be like, well, I'm going through a divorce. So the real problem is their eye is off the ball because they're going through a divorce. It's not any of these other things that they kind of threw out as, as little landmines minds to not answer your question. So, the way I look at it is people are arguing with themselves for their self-limitations, things they're uncomfortable with. I don't like to do sales. I don't like to do this. I don't like to do this other thing. So, it's up to us to get close enough to them to really make them internalize and accept responsibility for the problem that they're really having. And I know you do a lot of business consulting, and I don't know if any of that resonates with the things that you come across in corporate America in your coaching today.
Yeah, it all does and it's very layered and grappling with it for you personally. I mean, everybody, they begin to understand it pretty much based on their experiences up to that point on being understood or genuinely understanding someone. And those instances tend to be so rare in everyday life that we don't have a lot of models around us. And, The vast majority of the models are really bad. The movies and TV are horrible. I mean, just absolutely horrible. And, one of the first commandments of negotiation that we're teaching now is thou shalt not focus on common ground. The movies teach us that common ground is the key to everything. And, a point of fact, it actually interferes with your ability to be empathic. Because if you share common ground with somebody and they're struggling with what you perceive to be the problem, it's one of the few Harvard studies that I ever agreed with. It said that if you solve the problem yourself, somebody else struggling with the same problem, you'll either more likely to look at them and go like, look, I solved this, pick yourself up off the ground, you know, stop being a crybaby and fix it because I fixed it. Or if you were defeated by that problem, your likely reaction is like, oh man, you're in trouble. I mean, yeah, it's, That's insurmountable. I mean, I came up against that and I couldn't solve it either. Neither one of those are empathy. But the feeling of being genuinely understood, if you're lucky, it's happened to you a couple times and you remember that moment. And it's transformative. And if you can't recall in a moment what was said, you might not have any idea what happened or how to duplicate it or how to do it again. So to one of your original points, servant leadership, you're kind of getting out of your own way to really genuinely make the other person feel understood, to serve them. You lose your agenda about moving forward. And in that mind frame, you're much more likely to be there for them, to nurture them, to coach them, to give them the coaching and the support that they need in that moment to sort of come to grips with whatever they're struggling with internally.
Look, I just did it. I just tripped on myself. I said, I've seen it 500 times before, but to this person, that's a unique situation.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's, you know, that's how hard it is to stay, is to stay in there with these people. We're training our coaches. We're doing the best we can. I've worked with a guy called Michael Reddington. He wrote a book called The Discipline Listening Method, and he was a loss prevention guy. Who would get confessions, you know, what, Zalewski, Wicklander out of Chicago, and they would 76% confession rate when they would find, you know, corporate theft or whatever it was. And, you know, he would say that, let's see, he would say encouraging people to share sensitive information under vulnerable circumstances in the face of consequences, and that a person will confess when they believe a reasonable person facing similar circumstances might have behaved behaved the same way. So that's basically saying we have to get, you have to get to a point of understanding where they, those people feel like maybe even this person faced with these circumstances, this opportunity to take something. When is the first time you took something? You know, I meant to bring it back when things were better. I was going to pay it back, but they never did. They never got caught. So it created this pattern of, you know, justification of continuing to take, you know, We, we, I enrolled all of my coaches into one of his classes because what I was trying to get at, and we haven't gotten there yet, is how can we be empathic inside of these conversations and very quickly help these business owners do what they need to do in, in the best way possible. So, and I don't know if it's, it is that the core of what you do? What's a typical assignment for the Black Swan Group when you go in?
Well, wherever people need to communicate better to solve a problem that they're just really stuck on. Now, that sounds really vague, but we end up— we train and we coach. We do a lot of coaching, much more than I ever thought we would. And for everything other than divorces, we don't get in the middle of divorces just because we're a threat to your attorney. Your divorce attorney does not get paid to resolve if he resolves a problem. You know, attorneys don't get paid to resolve problems. They get paid to bill. They get paid to run the bill. And if somebody comes in who's going to shorten the process, which tactical empathy always does, always, always, always, we're the enemy of that attorney's livelihood. Right?
Exactly. Well, it's like Big Pharma. They don't really get paid to cure you. They just want to make sure you're healthy enough to continue to take the medicine.
Yeah. Big Pharma is a whole separate conversation. Yeah. But, yeah. So, we coach people settle in insurance claims on their own. We coach business partners. We coach one of our high-level coaching clients and we've got some, a few people that are extremely high level. He used the skills in the midst of a mediation through attorneys to the other side not that long ago. And he knows he saved himself $8 million on the application of the skills because they're invisible. If you're doing it really well, the other side just thinks you're in a conversation. And then if you're not out to cut their throat, if you're not out to cheat people, then they have no reason ever to feel otherwise because you remove yourself as an enemy. So, it could be anything. I negotiated a change in seats on the airplane just the other day. My girlfriend and I were separated on the plane. And, like you hear these, you know, would you swap with my husband or my wife or my girlfriend? And I see about 50% success rate. And, but then the issue is not what your success rate is. How does a person feel when it's done? And that's, that's a real critical issue. I don't, I don't want somebody to have swapped seats with my girlfriend to inconvenience us and have them be in a negative mood the entire airplane ride and get off the plane unhappy. Now, in some kind of way, that's going to come back on me. I'm a big believer in the karma bank, and I got the karma bank working in my direction on a regular basis. But we, we coach in every kind of negotiation there is. Anytime you want collaboration from somebody, you're in a negotiation.
A situation like that, you just met somebody, it's going to be a 30-second negotiation. What are some keys for quickly developing rapport and then maybe disarming, just some disarming statements that you can make?
Yeah, well, I'll tell you what I said to this guy.
Big smile, big smiles first.
Typically, a big smile makes a big difference, and it's a little bit situational. Like, you know, the playful attitude— being playful is a superpower. It's not what you want to go with all the time. And I did not go with playful with this guy. You know, same set of circumstances. Somebody's, you know, they got their luggage in your legroom, which happens on a regular basis. Being playful about it, that then is critical. Because you got to sit next to this person the whole time. But actually what I said to this guy, and I'm in a bulkhead, we're both in bulkhead seats. He's got bulkhead aisle, I got bulkhead window, which means, you know, you can't put the bags in the seat in front of you because you got to go overhead, which is really inconvenient for some people. So I wait for this guy to finally show up. He's one of the last people on a plane in this section. And I just look at him and I go, I got a lousy proposition for you. And I was not playful. And his, his dude just—
yeah, you're not gonna like this.
Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm, you know, I gotta, I need what I want to be relief. And I don't, I don't want him to give it to me and be angry. And, you know, any of that stuff, plus he's less likely to give it to me. So he stares at me and this is a moment that we call dynamic silence. No matter what, I cannot break this silence. So he stares at me and he goes, I'm listening. And I go, my girlfriend is 4 rows back on a window. Would you swap seats? And before I finish my next sentence, he has grabbed his bags and is headed in her direction. Like, I had 3 or 4 more things I wanted to say. I want to be brilliant here. You know, I go— I've almost been like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not done yet. You know, I still want to work on this. But he is back and moving towards his seat before I have even finished. So, you know, I don't know what I— in hindsight, I got a pretty good idea what probably went through his mind. But, you know, I got it quickly. And there was one of the few times when being playful was not my approach. I think I'm probably playful about a good 90% of the time. And this one, I was—
people get in trouble when they let things go too fast. That's my problem when I like, I have deal fixation. So if I was going to be really self-critical, I would say I already know the deal that I want when I'm going into it. So now I've got deal fixation. I think it's a good deal for everybody, which is probably a bad way to go into it. So I'm not going to anchor somewhere I'm not going to anchor and then I'm not going to do the work to come up with why we're anchoring there. So now I'm already setting myself to leave something on the table and then I can't wait to get it done. And if you're in a hostage situation or a really important negotiation, that's probably the wrong approach, I would say. So how do you coach people to slow themselves down?
That's a hard one because what you talked about on deal fixation, that's what people do as human beings.
Compromise. We want compromise.
Or you get goal-focused and that gives you tunnel vision. You get blinders on. And I'm listening to— I'm a big fan of the Andrew Huberman podcast. And a couple of podcasts back, you know, he's talking to a neuroscientist and they say, this is how people think of things. And I call this DPO, duration, path, and outcome. You think about where you want to be, you think about how you're going to get there, and you think about how long it's going to take you to get there. Duration, path, and outcome. That is a tendency of just how we as human beings are wired. We pick out a target, we figure out how we're going to get there, we figure out how long it's going to take. And so that is one of the big challenges to teach people this stuff because you gotta let go of the target to start with. Because intellectually, I can explain to you why you don't have all the information. And by and large, as a human being, you're not gonna care. Like, I know where this is going. It is what it is. I think somebody wrote a book probably about 10 years ago, The Ten Commandments of Negotiation, which failed miserably. And one of this guy's commandments was, it is what it is. No, it's not. There are all sorts of variables here that you don't know, that the other side is intentionally holding back from you because they're important. And you're intentionally holding stuff back from them because it's important. So consequently, it can't be, it is what it is, because they're keeping you in the dark. No matter how smart you are. And if you're the smartest person on earth, you're keeping them in the dark, which has this, uh, the opposite of synergy. You know, you're losing synergy by keeping each other in the dark. So if you get deal-focused, which is hard not to be because you're wired to do that, you're leaving money on the table every time.
