Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/02/5-clever-tactics-for-defusing-bullies-during-negotiations.html
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I think this is fine advice for one-time negotiations. For dealing with a bully that is an ongoing presence in your life, it’s wonderful advice for enabling the bully.
“That person who’s being a tyrant needs you to give them some pushback so that they have something to push against,” says St. Amour. “Don’t need to supply it.”
I think this is the most important part for dealing with a ongoing bullying presence in your life. If you can’t step aside so the bully is pushing against nothing, you need to take away whatever it is that makes the bully think they have control over you. Listening, letting them talk themselves out, and demonstrating empathy won’t cut it. Protect yourself. Take away their power.
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These sound like standard tactics when negotiating with kidnappers and terrorists, too.
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I agree. Imagining using it with the bully I had to drop everything (move, change phone numbers) to get him out of our lives, these tactics were what we did to try to survive, but ultimately, if we used this stance, everything would mostly work out mostly in his favor.
- “Start small – Practice negotiating in low-stakes” : our bully threw lots of little everyday negotiation situations so we’d be exhausted by the time something big came around for us to fight for.
- “Listen first for 20 minutes” : if our bully had an hour with us, he’d speak for 59 of those minutes.
- “Watch for tactics – Ask clarifying questions” : He prided himself of being a “master negotiator.” He was kinda right. He could out maneuver us, often. Clarifying questions would let him figure out what we were thinking and then know how to shut us down.
- “Let them get it all out – Patiently listen until the bully has completely exhausted their side” : Again, 59 minutes out of an hour. They love to talk. We’d often get exhausted first.
- “Demonstrate empathy – Show you genuinely understand their perspective, Share your story rather than trying to ‘win.’” : This is how our bully would also win. Turn everything into a problem of us not getting him, or how he’s the victim, until we felt bad for “bullying” him. Then he would get his way.
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It also depends on the bully, what their motives are, and the situation.
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This all assumes that you can have a meaningful dialog with your bully, and that the bully is open to such a conversation regarding alterna…
PUNCH YOUR FACE YOU LOSER.
is likely how that all goes.
along with the blood, school indifference, police inaction.
I don’t care that his dad doesn’t love him, or whatever the sad backstory is… in the moment you are terrified and aren’t in a position to negotiate.
Amazing the cruelty and harm that can be passed off as simple bullying.
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Great advice. Even for one-off business negotiations, this is key. Put yourself in a position where you can walk away and be whole. That is the core of your power.
Even if you need a deal, you don’t need this deal, regardless of the terms.
Know the line where the deal goes from good to bad and be ready to walk away rather than cross it.
When you have all of the above lined up, you can remain calm in the face of bullying tactics. I completely disagree with the advice to let the bully rant. Walk away. If they still want the deal, they can find you and apologize and be professional in round 2 (assuming you haven’t already found an alternative).
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Yikes. I went to see where this list came from.
A Fastcompany link? Really? Maybe this is an AI article?
Come on, there is no negotiating with a true bully. You cannot. It’s amazing how the words written in this article sound so reasonable, yet are just…wrong?
This sounds more like negotiating tactics in the workplace?
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This sounds like good advice for dealing with someone who’s annoying, possibly even aggressive, but is mostly dealing with you in good faith. That’s not a bully. This is how the Democrats have been dealing with Republicans for the last several decades, Republicans being an excellent example of bullies, and it’s not difficult to see where that has gotten our country.
Trying this approach with actual bullies will only gain you an increased amount of bullying.
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This right here. Using this approach with an actual bully is how you get a consensus that half a genocide is ok but a full one is not.
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In the context of dealing specifically with bullies…
That is: don’t go in naive and cold to negotiations with a bully. Practice negotiating in small stakes things elsewhere, with other people, so that you have at least some experience with the concept before going in to the lion’s den when you’re having to defend yourself against real harm.
Why it is not useful advice: If you need to get practice, you’re not going to get nearly enough to be helpful in small doses here and there with low stakes and in safe friendly environments. If you’re doing it all the time, then a) you don’t need more practice, and b) it’s exhausting.
- Listen first – Actively listen more than you speak. Don’t take the bait if the bully tries to provoke you. Wait out the “refractory state” of about 20 minutes if you feel triggered before responding.
That is: don’t blurt out everything you think as soon as you think of it: if the bully wants to speak for 59 minutes out of an hour, let them, and use as much of what you hear against them later. Let them dig their own hole. Don’t respond in anger, because you’re not thinking and you’re just going to step in it, and undo all the careful silence by giving up the info anyway.
Why it’s not useful advice: You will never get a word in edgewise, which means you’ll never get to make a case. Also, if it’s one-on-one, the bully doesn’t actually care what you’re going to say, they’ll make something up in their head and use that against you whatever you actually say. They will use your silence against you too.
- Watch for tactics – Be aware of confusing statements or criticism no matter what you do, which can be bullying tactics. Ask clarifying questions.
That is: keep an eye out for traps. An ambiguous question will be used to trick you into saying (or looking like you said) something false or actionable. An accusation or a criticism is designed to make you angry and saying something stupid. A compliment is designed to make you off balance and saying something stupid. Leaving an awkward silence is designed to make you uncomfortable and saying something stupid.
Why it’s not useful advice: You have to assume that it’s all “tactics”. Nothing they say or do can be treated at face value. Even if it is just what it seems. Especially if it’s nothing more than what it seems. (Because the point isn’t just to lie, it’s to make it so that you don’t know what’s a lie and what’s true. If it’s all a lie, that’s something you can hold on to, but if you can’t tell what’s what, you’re going to have to guess, and you’ll get it wrong, and you’re screwed.)
The asking of clarifying questions might seem sensible, but will be used to accuse you of asking stupid questions, to which the answers should be obvious, what are you stupid or something? Note that they will not clarify anything. And it doesn’t matter if they did, because your attempt to narrow it down to an answerable question will be used to accuse you of deliberately avoiding all the other schroedenquestions, and thus implicitly of admitting quilt to those aspects. (“I did not kill that man with a hammer” … “Ah, so you killed him with a lead pipe?”)
- Let them get it all out – Patiently listen until the bully has completely exhausted their side before speaking. This can de-escalate the situation.
That is: let them make all their arguments. If they’re arguing in good faith, just the act of expressing their grievances can be enough to relieve their own stress, and make them amenable to a compromise.
Why it’s not useful advice: A bully is never arguing in good faith. Also, their grievances are inexhaustible and do not need to be based on facts. Their arguments will not be exhausted, they will feed on themselves and grow and fill all the available space. What’s more, by not countering them, they go uncontested and gain the feeling of veracity by being left there on the table as if they were true. This is the heart of the Gish Gallop. The bully will take all the time to lay out all the accusations, and leave you no time to address any one of them, let alone all of them.
- Demonstrate empathy – Show you genuinely understand their perspective, which can open them up to hearing your side without agreeing or conceding. Share your story rather than trying to “win.”
That is: make a human connection with the other side.
Why it’s not useful advice: THEY DON’T CARE. You would be empathising into a void. Their “perspective” is that they’re going to make you suffer, because they can. What’s to empathise with?
Also, aren’t you also supposed to be “listening first” and “letting them get it all out”? When, exactly, are you meant to have the time to “share your story”? Also: they don’t care about your story. Unless it gives them more ammunition to use against you.
TL;DR: You can’t negotiate with a bully. None of these items of advice will be of the slightest use, because they’d be like negotiating with a lawnmower. They all might be effective in a good-faith disagreement, but we already specified that this is with a bully. There is no good faith negotiation with a bully. Anything you say or do will be used against you. Anything you don’t say or do will be used against you. Things you never said or did will be used against you. There is no way to make fair dealings with someone whose goal is to break you because they can; the only ways to deal with that situation is to either escape from it, or to get the support of a more powerful third party who isn’t already suborned by the bully.
Let me summarise the five points: “Don’t get angry, don’t react, and be nice to the bully, and things will magically work out.” It’s a dangerous lie, and it might have more effect on an audience which didn’t have such a large proportion of people with such extensive experience of being on the wrong end of a bully.
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In my experience with bullies you have to go on the offensive any way you can. Find that loose thread and pull on it. It’s the only thing I’ve found that gets them to fuck off. They are arseholes but they are not invulnerable.
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That’s how I took it. Not showing up and trying to convince a bully to stop beating you up, but rather walking into a negotiation and having the other party use strong arm tactics. Ultimately, those tactics are usually used to compensate for a position of weakness.
If you’re really dealing with a bully, though,
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This is good advice for dealing with relatively average people who are perhaps a little self-involved and prone to whine to others or get who get annoyingly defensive.
Bullies OTOH though:
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Cut the red wire.
I think for even slightly privileged people it’s like the shock of how many women are like “I’d take my chances with a bear” even if it isn’t the optimal choice for obvious reasons.
Similarly I imagine a person who has actually lived their whole life in this dynamic where people abide by these social rules in their presence enough that they think this is how the world operates. The shock of realizing how many of us are not in a negotiating position with the person who abuses us! Like… ever… and how that just kind of feeds a system that accepts this as normal and keeps us dependent on abusive systems for survival.
How? How could so many people in this wonderful meritocracy be so deluded as that!?
The reality is that if you are being targeted by some one who has any measure of power over you the solution you are generally going to find offered is “find a way to accept this as your life or find a way to get away completely no matter the associated loss.”
I guess I think it’s not bad advice assuming basically a functional system but I guess it depends on whether a bully is more of a general blowhard vs what really tends to happen which is often more like some kind of targeted abuse/harassment.
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Yup. “Show me a person whose opening move is a left hook, and I’ll show you someone who won’t listen to anything you have to say.”
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I once stood up for myself in the sixth grade with a speech about ethics and fairness.
We moved at the end of that year mercifully… because that’s when that situation got better.
At the next school a girl tried it with me and I just insulted her face. I had a lucky break and said something that I guess landed well. Whole class laughed. I didn’t have to deal with her in that class at all after that. She found someone else to take it out on.
Hard to replicate. Genius is fickle. And it could have backfired.
And of course… sometimes the victim can’t retaliate like that because the environment won’t allow it, which is to say that all of us know that some amount of bullying is simply tolerated and people are expected to have good enough humor about in workplaces and schools particularly.
This is often nebulous and subject to bias.
This is how things often slide fully into abuse/torment… but even getting people to perceive that threatens the balance of the community somewhat so people react protectively of the abuser in most cases to some extent.
But this is not as fun to read as a listicle that offers a brief feeling of agency and self-control with the promise of a definite end at which one can hopefully say something was learned.
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