From the course: Driving Change and Anti-Racism

Being right versus getting what you want

From the course: Driving Change and Anti-Racism

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Being right versus getting what you want

- It's important for us to be collaborative in our attempts to drive for change within our organizations, because you are actually on the same team with these people. You are going to have to interact with people after the fact. So we need to approach these situations in a way that preserves the relationship. It's not an adversarial negotiation where more for me means less for them. We can actually invite them into the problem solving process and co-create a solution that works well for everybody. And it's important for us to recognize the difference between negotiation and argumentation. And the difference comes down to one thing. And that's the goal. The goal in a negotiation is to try to figure out, what's the agreement going forward? Whereas the goal in an argument is to win and to win at all costs. And when you frame an argument, what you're doing is you're saying my only path to victory is for you to admit that you are wrong and most people don't want to do that. So take a collaborative negotiation approach when it comes to driving change in your organization. And so this creates two interesting dynamics, which you need in order to be persuasive. The first thing is it makes you more curious. And the second thing is it makes you better able to empathize. And when I say empathize, what I mean is we want to figure out what the other person sees, how they think about the situation and how they feel about the situation. This makes us more persuasive because now we can tailor what we're saying to match their emotional needs. And now, when it comes to curiosity, I really think curiosity is the secret sauce to effective persuasion. It gives you more information, which is fantastic, and it puts you in a position to use what I call the gap theory of persuasion. And when you ask great open ended questions, you create a scenario where it exposes the gaps in their understanding. And once they recognize, "Hey, I don't really understand this as well as I thought I did," it puts you in a better position to persuade because now they look to you for the answers.

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