🧠Smart people = Lousy Negotiators? 🤔

 

Interesting: Smart people don’t make good listeners, hence lousy negotiators

In his book “Never Split the Difference”, author Chris Voss says,

“Really smart people often have trouble being negotiators”.

Wait, what? 😱
Why?

Because they think “they’re so smart they think they don’t have anything to discover. Too often people find it easier just to stick with what they believe. Using what they’ve heard or their own biases, they often make assumptions about others even before meeting them. They even ignore their own perceptions to make them conform to foregone conclusions. These assumptions muck up our perceptual windows onto the world, showing us an unchanging—often flawed—version of the situation.” (End Quote)

The point the author is making here is: For geniuses, their smartness becomes a handicap from becoming good listeners: and therefore becomes a barrier from becoming effective negotiators.

Aha, so the problem here isn’t intelligence. The problem here is ARROGANCE: when our intelligence gets to your head that we consider ourself superior than others, to the point that other opinions or perspectives are just discarded or ignored.

Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “a person with an atom’s weight of arrogance will not enter Paradise! Arrogance is to reject the truth, and to look down upon other people” (Muslim)

It’s one thing to be smart. It’s another thing to be Mr. Smartypants.

So, what DO great negotiators do?

“Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.”

It’s possible be very smart, AND simultaneously have the humility to listen with an open heart and mind.

One of the most inspiring examples to me is the tabi’ee Muslim scholar, Ataa bin Abi Rabah:

“A young man came to me to inform me something (of knowledge), therefore I kept silent and listened, being fully attentive, as if I have never heard of it before, even though I have actually known about that matter before this man was even born!” (Siyar A’lam An-Nubula 5/86)

Interesting, when you put things in perspective: the key to becoming an effective listener - and by extension, a great negotiator - is humility.

Even more interesting when we consider that this is also the primary leadership characteristic of what Jim Collins defines as “Level 5 leadership” in his book, Good to Great.

Is Humility some kind of secret superpower?

I believe so. Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said:

وَمَا تَوَاضَعَ أَحَدٌ لِلَّهِ إِلاَّ رَفَعَهُ اللَّهُ

“No one humbles himself for the sake of Allah, except that Allah raises his status” (Muslim)