How to Save Face in a Negotiation with Michael Macchiarelli

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for spending time with us today. It's listeners like you in 181 different countries that have made Negotiate Anything the most popular negotiation and conflict resolution podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, professor, and the director of the American Negotiation Institute. Before we get started, I have two quick questions for you. Is negotiation a critical part of what you do? Do you need to resolve conflict and persuade at? If you answered yes to both of those questions, visit our website to learn more about our negotiation workshops. We've traveled the country working with professionals just like you, and we'd love to have the opportunity to work with you, too. Check out the link in the description to learn more. Mike, thanks for joining us today.

Hey, Kwame, thanks for having me. Very happy to be here.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. So how about you start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Absolutely. So, again, my name is Mike. I've been in retail and B2C sales for the past 13 or so years and I am currently a regional sales manager for Equinox. I coach and manage high performing sales teams in Westchester, Connecticut and Long island, based out of New York. Got into negotiation after I became a sales manager and I found that when I was reading about negotiation there were many, many similarities between what I learned in sales and what I was learning about negotiation. So there are a lot of, again, similar themes, but really the one that piqued my interest the most was this whole concept called saving faith. And this was actually familiar to me from my time in college as a history major. And I read a lot about U.S. history and foreign policy and especially the Cuban Missile Crisis is definitely probably one of the best examples of when this came into play. And many people could even argue that John F. Kennedy and his administration, their ability to help the Soviet leaders find a way to save face during the Cuban Missile Crisis, save the world. So when I started seeing this in negotiation literature and the sales literature, it was definitely a little bit familiar but also still very interesting to me to learn more about. But my struggle kind of in that was, you know, every, even though you could find this topic everywhere, you never can really find any detail. I had a very hard time finding, like exactly what it meant. I'm kind of a very curious person and when I get into things, I want to know every single facet, but there was really nowhere to find every single facet. So I started Reading more into social psychology and sociology, and I finally did find specific information and description of what the whole theory of faith is. And basically, after reading more about that and other topics in social influence psychology, I started a blog called Saving Face to share the insights that I've learned.

This is fantastic. And Mike, I've said it to you about five times, but I think the fact that I haven't had anybody come on and talk about saving face, I don't think that term has been used in the 150plus episodes that the show's been on. I think that's one of my greatest oversights. So we are so excited to have you here to rescue us in this way. And so when it comes to saving Face, the three things that we're going to talk about, first of all, what does this mean? Because for the majority of people, they don't know what this means. And then for those who do, they just scratch the surface. And so just getting a great operational definition and some examples would be helpful. So then we're going to shift into when saving face comes into play in negotiation, and then we're going to wrap up by talking about how we can help the other side to save face as we advance our strategies and utilize various tactics during the negotiation. So when it comes to face, can you just give us a simple definition to get us started?

Sure. The original concept of face that was pioneered by Erving Goffman is what he calls the ritualistic claiming of positive social value by participants in an interaction. So what this basically means is that when we interact, we are constantly adjusting our verbal and nonverbal behaviors to protect or maintain our feelings of honor, pride, and dignity, and also to avoid feelings of embarrassment, shame, inferiority.

I love that. It's almost like you have a blog about this. That was a great synopsis. And I love the example you gave about Kennedy and Khrushchev. Can you give a little bit more detail on that for those who are not familiar?

Yes. So in 1962, actually, in October 1962, the Kennedy administration discovered that there were Russian missiles, nuclear missiles, placed in Cuba. And of course, it created a crisis because that was considered a unacceptable strategic threat in the Cold War. Because now the Soviet Union had missiles located just off the United States in a hostile, what was then a hostile, the hostile country of Cuba. So the question really became like, how do we diffuse this situation? How do we get the Soviet Union to remove these missiles? Because otherwise, if the United States could not get the Soviet Union to remove these missiles, they would have to Attack Cuba. The fear there was that there was a very high probability that if we did attack Cuba, there would be an escalation that could and probably would unfortunately lead to a full scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. So in their crisis management over the span of 13 days, there's actually an amazing book by Robert F. Kennedy called thirteen A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it talks about how John F. Kennedy and the top members of his administration managed the crisis. And ultimately, really, the whole theme of the crisis management was helping the Soviet leaders save face. They were greatly afraid that if the Soviet leaders, including Soviet Chairman Khrushchev, felt that they were backed into a corner or if they had to lose face on the world stage, that they would, of course, not do so, and they would even go to the lengths of launching nuclear missiles to avoid that. So how did they fear out of this crisis? Well, first they chose to do a blockade of Cuba instead of an attack. And in the communication with the Soviet leaders, John F. Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev were sending letters back and forth. And what ended up happening at one point is Chermik Khrushchev sent a letter that was kind of softer and did not have as many hard demands that the United States could not meet. And then right after that, though, curiously, he sent a very hard, very aggressive letter with demands that the United States definitely could not meet. So the Kennedy administration felt that things were going in the wrong direction, became very worried. But ultimately, what they decided doing after a lot of discussion, was they decided to respond to the first letter, to the softer letter, and pretend like the second letter never even happened, which was kind of a genius because it gave Chairman Khrushchev the opportunity to now pretend like those hard demands that they just could not have met were never made, and he could ultimately now steer out of the crisis and not lose too, too much faith with the hardliners, quote, unquote, in the Soviet Union. And the United States could not lose too much faith with the, quote, unquote, hardliners in the United States by basically accepting those unacceptable demands.

This is really interesting, and for me, as a lawyer, this sounds oddly familiar because that's often how these interactions with opposing councils begin, because they send you a highly offensive, highly aggressive demand letter telling us about how we're the scourge of the earth and we need to give everything we own to them. And what I find myself doing is spending the majority of my negotiation time negotiating with my client, calming them down, because they've never received Anything like this. And then what I try to do is I find some strand of positivity. Sometimes if it is a three page long letter, I can find one sentence that says, hopefully we can avoid litigation or something like that. And I say, attorney, blah, blah, blah. I'm encouraged to see that you hope that we avoid litigation. And then I begin the response, ignore all of that fire, and then just respond with a softer tactic. And now in this situation with Kennedy and Khrushchev, what was the next play? Because the opening gambit was kind of aggressive from Khrushchev and then Kennedy responded in that way. But for Kennedy, we understand that this helped Khrushchev save face, but how did it help Kennedy save face for the hardliners here in the US does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then will set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year if you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more and we will be right back after this.

So what it did was by responding to the quote, unquote, softer letter, the demand that really Kennedy couldn't accept, at least publicly, was the removal, in exchange for the removal of missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev wanted the United States to remove missiles from Turkey. And that was something that he demanded in the letter. And that was not something the United States, at least at this point in the crisis, was publicly willing to do. So they basically responded to the softer letter and accepted the other demand of the Soviet Union to basically guarantee that the United States going forward would not attack Cuba. So two things ended up happening. The United States agreed that they would not attack Cuba in the future if they removed the missile. So Chairman Khrushchev was able to go back to the hardliners and go back to his constituents and say, look, out of all of this, I got a guarantee from the United States that did not exist before that they will not attack Cuba. Look at me, I'm a winner. But then John F. Kennedy did not have to at least say publicly that I'm going to remove missiles from Turkey. But what ended up happening, we found out later, is that the missiles were actually were removed from Turkey. So when Robert Kennedy met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, he agreed that the United States would remove the missiles from Turkey if the crisis could be resolved. It just couldn't be something that was announced publicly. So I think it's really interesting that two lessons that you see in this crisis and a lot of other crises when face is involved is there's kind of that aspect of having selective hearing. You really have to only respond to what do you think it would be constructive for us to respond to. But then also in a lot of these, maybe not so much everyday negotiation, but a lot of these negotiations that involve foreign policy and diplomacy, there's a lot of secrecy, there's a lot of things that happen that are announced, and there's a lot of things that happen that are unannounced. And usually when they're unannounced is because somebody would lose too much faith if it was known that they agreed to that, if it was known publicly that they agreed to it.

That's really interesting. And I think there are some corollaries that can be made in the business world too, because sometimes you might be in a deal and you are pushing the other side and they say, listen, we can't go beyond this number because if we do, then it might get out and it could, it could impact our future negotiations or something to that effect. And that's where you often see non disclosure agreements coming in, confidentiality agreements where they say, okay, well we might be willing to go beyond this number as long as everybody in this negotiation is willing to keep quiet about it and sign this agreement saying that they're going to keep quiet about it. And so that is a way that you can take that foreign policy example and bring it to the business world. Because there are certain parts that would be announced and other parts that would be unannounced, like you mentioned earlier. And one of the things you mentioned as we were prepping for this was politeness theory. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yes, polite. So politeness theory is something that was developed by two social scientists named Brown and Levinson. And this happened about 20 or so years after Goffman released his original face theory. And politeness theory looked at it a little bit differently, building on Gotham, but they basically broke it down into two specific types of face. And the first type of face was, is called positive faith. So the positive faith is a little bit similar to the Goffman definition of faith. And it stands for that we all have the universal desire for approval, for liking, and for solidarity with others. So we want ourselves and our version of self that we're presenting to others to be approved of in a positive way. The second type, which is a little bit different from where Goffman went, is called negative faith. And negative face is the universal desire to be unimpeded at any given moment and also to not be imposed upon by other people.

That's really, really, really interesting. And I like the bifurcated approach to face because I think it gives a little bit more of a practical view on it, because it's not just like you said earlier, I think, when you were referring to Goffman's approach, where it's about the respect and the honor, but also it's the. The liberty, the. The need for liberty, that quintessential American value, if you will. And you see it in. In the business world, you see it in our personal lives and everything. Whenever, especially when you think about the negative side of it, when somebody feels as though their behaviors are being restricted when. When you tell somebody they can't do something, they want to do that thing more.

Absolutely, yeah. People always want to do things on their terms. And that is true, I found in sales. It's true in negotiation. And it's interesting, too, because one of the things that I think makes like face theory so impactful is that it relates to so much other social psychology. So one of the biggest theories in social psychology is this whole concept of reactance, where it's almost like the same thing as a negative face, where people want to have their freedom respected, and anytime they feel that someone is trying to restrict it, they push back in the opposite direction. So it's just really interesting how it all comes together.

Absolutely. Let's move on to negotiations in particular. Let's just make that full transition. So when we're having that negotiation from beginning to end, where are the places where you're seeing face have the most impact?

In my opinion, I would say the two places that face would have the most impact, although definitely it's present throughout the negotiations, is really in the beginning. And you see a lot. That's where you see a lot of positive face work. There needs to be a little bit of rapport building. There needs to be a little connection, a little bit of trust building if now we're going to work together and deal with some of the more difficult challenges or get into the kind of conflict stage of the negotiation. So successful negotiators are definitely Good at leveraging positive faith to kind of facilitate it and set the tone and set the groundwork for what's about to come later on. Because later on there's going to be, especially towards the end, resolution of the negotiation, someone's going to have negative faith. So in negotiation, I think you'll see politeness theory in face, really in two specific areas, although it's definitely present throughout. The first would be in the beginning stages of the negotiation. There's a lot of positive face work in the beginning stages of the negotiation where this is a time now where we're trying to build trust, we're trying to build rapport, we're trying to connect with the other parties or parties and create a foundation where now we can move into these more difficult stages and some of these more challenging areas of conflict that we're looking to resolve. The whole reason why we're negotiating anyway, towards the latter stages of the negotiation, you'll see a lot of negative facework, Meaning now the time where we are imposing on others and in a way we're trying to. Someone's going to have to give up some sense of freedom in terms of the resources that we're looking to exchange. And there's specific areas. For example, one is, let's say it's towards the end of the negotiation and now there's a deadline. A deadline is a great thing to look at in terms of the frame of facework. So if you look at the deadline, it's actually a great thing. And you, you kind of see why so many deals get made and so many people can now save face because of the deadline. Because the deadline, in a way it changes the imposition. Because now the imposition, the thing that's imposing is the deadline and not a person. So by now making the deal at the deadline, I can say, well, I'm not losing faith because I'm not letting you impose wants upon me. I'm doing this because now there's a deadline. And the deadline I'm basically time is now the imposition instead of the person. And it's just a lot easier to save face when you don't feel like you're being beat by another person.

This is really cool. I'm reading this book called Sapiens, a really fascinating book. And they talked about how one of the main reasons humans are able to come together and organize to the levels beyond the simple tribe that can only get to 150, about 150, you can get thousands and millions of people to organize is because of the Common belief in agreed upon fictions or myths. So something like a stone that's tangible, that's real, we can all feel and agree upon its existence. But concepts like liberty, justice, and those things, those are things that are essentially made up and agreed upon by humans. And then if you get enough people to believe in it, then we can act in unison. And so essentially what we're doing with a deadline is that you and the other party, you're creating this fiction that we agree is now real between us. And so now, at this moment, when we're having this difficult conversation, I can impose a deadline and get you to believe in it. And so now this thing that was once in my mind and is now in yours is real to both of us. And so you can blame the outcome on that thing and not the other person, so the other person can save face because they didn't lose to you. They were just adjusting to what you've agreed upon as real in this interaction.

Absolutely. You said it perfectly. I mean, that is. And that is the kind of the cool thing about looking at it from the sense of Facebook, because again, it's a ritual. And exactly what you just described, the whole. The myth that we or the story that we create is. I mean, that that's a ritualistic behavior.

Fascinating. And so now that we have a better understanding of face, it helps us to understand why threats can be so damaging. Can you give us a little bit of an analysis of threats analyzed with the concept of face?

Yes, those threats can be. They could be very damaging because of two reasons. One, because of the way they're made, and two, because a threat, by its very essence now, is harming our sense of negative faith. So in terms of how the threat is made, politeness theory breaks down all messaging into two types of messaging. There's one called on record messaging, which is like a very direct, abrasive way to do something. So if I wanted you to do something and I literally say to you, go do this now, that would be on record. Off record is a little bit different. And that is more. That is more implied, that is softer. It's a little bit of, you know, it's kind of shaded where we're not directly asking or telling something to do something. And it makes it just more. It makes it easier to swallow for the person to accept doing it. So instead of saying, go do that now, which would be on record, an off record example, a simple one would be saying, you know what, it would be very nice if somebody happened to go do that thing. So now instead of directly telling something someone to do something, I'm just surmising, I'm putting it out there. And again, going back to we want to do things on our own terms. It's very different. Being told to do something is now you're implicitly recognizing that you're doing it for that reason. But even just so simply putting something out there opens just enough space and oxygen for someone to be like, okay, I'm kind of doing it on my own term.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, and correct me if I'm wrong here, it seems as though it's almost like bit of a spectrum here when we have on record versus off record. And so there are varying degrees of recordness, if you will, when it comes to the way that we approach this. And sometimes in my conversations I might want, I might try to use the off record approach initially and usually maybe get things across, get the points across through innuendo. But sometimes I'm met with resistance or the person isn't really getting it. Then as the conversation develops, I start to go down the spectrum more toward the on record where it's like, okay, indirect hasn't worked. Now I need to be a little bit more direct. But I wanted to at least exhaust that indirect method initially before becoming more direct just for the purpose of face. Does that approach make sense from, from your perspective?

Yeah, I would say same way. It's kind of good to start out cooperative before we move super competitive. I definitely think it's good to start off record before we go more on record. However, it really depends on really three things. And politeness theory, they look at all face threatening actions and all on record and off record messaging against three elements and those are social distance, power and imposition. So what tends to happen is when we are close and social distance, we are more likely to feel comfortable using on record messages. They're not going to be taken the wrong way when we are in terms of power. When we are on the, I guess more attractive side of the power spectrum, where we have the power, we are definitely more comfortable using direct on record messages. Like a boss can tell their subordinate just to do something, they don't have to dress it up. But the subordinate, if they're asking their boss or giving an opinion or feedback, it's going to be very dressed up in terms of imposition that deals with the spectrum of the size of the imposition. So if we are asking for something very small, a small amount of time, a small amount of money, a small favor, we can definitely Say it more on record. What happens is when we start asking for bigger things and bigger impositions, the more off record the message tends to become. Or at least that is the attempt at first.

That's really, really, really interesting. I think we just found our second episode, Mike, because that. That's really fascinating. I. As much as I want to spend another 40 minutes digging deeply into that, I want to move forward. And I think actually we can bring in elements of your last point to. The third point is, when we're having these conversations and we're trying to have these negotiations in a way that helps the other side save face, what are the key things that you think we need to keep in mind?

The key things we need to keep in mind when we're having the conversation and making sure that we are helping the other person save face? I mean, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is no matter what, you always have to make this person feel like a winner. And we look at negotiation, and there's really two ways to look at it. There's the tangible issues in the negotiation, which is the actual things we're trying to exchange, and then there's the intangible aspects of the negotiation, which is really the feelings of the people involved. And I know there's a lot of hesitation around win, win, negotiation. And in terms of looking at tangible things, we don't want to strive for win, win. We want to get the, hopefully, what we view as the better outcome. However, when it comes to intangibles, we always need to realize that that does need to be win, win. No one's going to accept your version of the negotiation if they're feeling like a loser or they're feeling like they're being eaten or they're being taken advantage of. So when we're with people ultimately, like, what are some things that we can do to help facilitate this? So ultimately, one is just being mindful and thinking, how can I help the other person save face? And in terms of what we could do from, like, a practical standpoint, I mean, I heard actually on your podcast with Zabina recently, and she probably said the most perfect thing you can prescribe for this is help the other person write their victory speech. So I love that. But in the interaction, something you can do is going back to kind of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and our discussion earlier is having selective hearing. You want to really try to actively latch on to the things that are going to be constructive or at least kind of avoid or disregard or not latch onto the things that are going to be unconstructive because sometimes we could be the victims of our own selves and we can say things we don't really mean or, or pretend we want things we don't really want for a variety of different reasons. And then the problem is once the other person latches onto that and recognizes it, now we have to stand behind it. So consistency is such a big part of this. And realizing that people can fall victim to their own consistency is definitely something that we want to make sure we're kind of managing. And I think that if we can realize that if we help people be consistent in the way that, in the way that we think they truly want to be, we're going to get better outcomes for ourselves and we're going to get better outcomes for them.

Right. And so it sounds as though when it comes to the outcome, like you said, we don't necessarily want it to be win win in a substantive sense, but they need to at least feel like a winner. It seems as though we want to get a substantive win for ourselves all the time because we engage in these conversations in order to meet our needs. But we can emotionally make it so that the other side feels as though it was a win win. We always want to make them feel as though they left this with as a winner. And I think that is a magical distinction that can help a lot of people when they're having these conversations. And now one of the things that I know some of the hard nosed negotiators are going to be saying, I want to address their needs too, is when do we cross that line where we're being too nice, where we are being too friendly, too complimentary, almost to the point of coddling, where it could almost encourage the other side to push back.

And yeah, this can definitely be a concern or a hesitation. Too often we fall victim to politeness in itself because we're so socially conditioned to be polite, especially in regards to not wanting to impose on other people that what happens is I think we are not vocal enough about our wants and our needs out of this inherent fear of imposing on the other party. I also think that we should realize that it's okay for us to make impositions that are of a fairly large size. But I think what then happens is if we can be more mindful, so we don't need to be afraid of making these impositions, we should be very vocal and confident about going after what it is we want so long as we're mindful that the other party, one wants to be recognized. And as we would in that they want to be a winner too. And number two, they have their own wants and needs that want to be respected, recognized and fulfilled. But however, we kind of have to put that aside and just realize that that's something that we can acknowledge and respect, but we do not have to prioritize the other side. We can still prioritize ourselves.

Yeah. And the responsibility is on us to protect ourselves in these difficult conversations. And I think that's something that we always need to make sure we keep in mind. We need to be unashamed when we move forward and try to get what it is that we want and need out of these conversations. And now we are coming up on time. So I want to be respectful of the listeners.

Time.

But Mike, this has been fantastic. I appreciate this. Before you go, can you let the listeners know how they can keep in touch with you?

Yep, absolutely. So you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. And then also, if you'd want to subscribe to my blog and learn more about faith and how it affects all of our interactions with others, you can follow the blog at SavingFaith blog.

Fantastic. Yes, listeners, check that out. There'll be a link in the description for that blog. Cause that's how I discovered you. Mike. This was great. And I will offer some friendly peer pressure here. Now, when the book comes out, please book me for your tour, your promotional tour. Cause we'd love to have you back for that one.

Absolutely. My pleasure.

Perfect. All right, my friend. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode. If you're liking what you're hearing, please leave a review and subscribe. Subscribe and tell your friends. Our goal is to help as many people as possible. And when you leave reviews, it makes it easier for people to find us in the searches. Thanks again for being a listener. I'll catch you in the next one.