April 2009
Communique - April 2009
Negotitation Tip: How to Use Demands as Clues
Rather than reacting to the other person's demands, use those statements as clues to underlying needs.
By Grande Lum, originally published in the Huffington Post
A co-worker demands you finish your work in a week. You respond that you will finish your work in two weeks as you originally stated. You immediately sensed the co-worker's anger and take personal offense to the demand. The demand pushed your buttons. An opposite position is taken, and voila, the fight is on. You did not sense the underlying distress and anxiety your co-worker feels because his boss yelled at him and his family is struggling financially. Caving in to a threat will not necessarily satisfy underlying needs. Going ballistic in response to a threat may bring you to a standstill.
Your own demands present a similar opportunity. When you are surprised by your own flash of anger, you may not be fully conscious of your own desires. You may be missing the underlying needs that your own anger is revealing to you. If you do not heed your own clues, you will leave out something that truly matters to you. Ask questions that explore what is motivating that demand: their concerns, desires and goals.
In either of these situations, literally and figuratively taking a deep breath keeps you from being sucked in to the dangerous cycle of anger. If you instead perceive them merely as hints to a deeper diagnosis, you can preempt unnecessary hostility. This mindset leads you to ask helpful questions to others like "What has changed about the work project?" You can ask yourself questions like "Why am I getting so mad here?" This approach expands the possibility of a conversation rather than narrowing to simplistic arguments.
Look at the words and emotions as unique clues, rather than obvious conclusions. Demands reveal the invisible: unmet desires, mixed emotions, and tipping points. Behind the demand is a wealth of thoughts, emotions that ultimately show the path to constructive conversation. Play the detective and probe what is said and unsaid to unearth the insight that points a path forward.
Behind every argument is someone's ignorance. ~Louis D. Brandeis
Negotiation & Mediation Teams Make Their Mark on the World
It’s become something of a routine in April for the Hastings Negotiation and Mediation Team to have reason to toot its horn, and this year is no exception. A record number of 85 students turned out for the Team last August, vying for some 29 competition slots. The students prepared for the Team qualifying event, the In-School Competition, with the assistance of 70 volunteer attorneys and practitioners from the area serving as coaches or judges and providing feedback and advice to the students. Without the help of these volunteers, the Team would not be as skilled or as successful. Thanks to all who contributed!
Last Fall, students Ryan Cunningham, Emily Chan, Eli Underwood, Megan O’Sullivan, Krunal Patel and James Dallal competed in the ABA’s Regional Negotiation Competition in San Diego, CA, and finished in the top half of 24 schools.
At the International Chamber of Commerce’s International Commercial Mediation Competition, held in Paris, France, students James Hurst, Elizabeth Cooper, Maple Lay and Stephanie Peter won 4th place out of 40 teams.
At the ABA Regional Representation in Mediation Competition, held in Eugene, OR, the Hastings’ team, led by students Lisa Hathaway and Lee Lam, and including 1Ls Kalpana Sundaram and Amy Joseph, took 2nd place.
Hastings has competed in the International Academy of Dispute Resolution’s Mediation Tournament in Chicago for 3 years now, and this year’s competition was the most competitive yet, with 36 teams and 108 participants from all over the world. In the team competition, Hastings took both 2nd and 3rd in Mediation. “Sully O’Channingham” – Megan O’Sullivan, Emily Chan & Ryan Cunningham – took 2nd, and Akila Radhakrishnan, Christina Clauss and Manroop Purewal took 3rd. Several awards for individual performance were also handed out:
Akila Radhakrishnan – 3rd Place Mediator
Megan O’Sullivan – 5th Place Mediator
Akila Radhakrishnan and Manroop Purewal – 5th Place Advocacy
Emily Chan – 6th Place Mediator
At the California State Bar’s Environmental Negotiations Competition, held at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, students Ariane Mohamadi, Parul Dutt, Josh Reynolds and Khanh Trieu all performed extremely well – so well that the attorney who wrote the competition problem and who was observing multiple teams, came in during the self-analysis to tell them they had the best strategy for the round of anyone in the competition.
At the Robert R. Merhige National Environmental Law Negotiation Competition, held at the University of Richmond in Virginia, students Christoffer Lee and Timothy Crawley won 3rd place out of a field of 26. Erica Feldman-Boshes and Valerie Kraml placed in the top half.
And, finally, students Eli Underwood, Leah Sykes and Gabriella Bischoff traveled to Leipzig, Germany to compete in The Negotiation Challenge, an international negotiation competition organized by Harvard Law School and the Leipzig Graduate School of Management. Team Hastings won 7th place out of 12 teams.
There is one last competition being held as you read this, and that is the 1st International Law School Negotiation and Mediation Competition, an online competition. Students Alexander Augustine, Sara Pollock, Alice Lin and Tom Abeles are negotiating via a website with software designed specifically for the purpose, similar to the International Competition for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR), held in the past. The Hastings Team is in the midst of Round 1 and will also compete in a second round.
As Head Coach Clint Waasted stated, “Another strong year, all around!” Indeed!
CNDR Flocks to New York
New York will be the place to be for ADR professionals April 15-18, as the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution will host its 11th Annual Spring Conference there. In addition to several CNDR professors attending, Professors Clark Freshman, Darshan Brach and Howard Herman, along with CNDR Director Grande Lum will be actively participating in the conference.
Clark Freshman will be presenting “Emotional Truthfulness and Lie Detection in Negotiation: Science, Culture and Skills”, a workshop using video examples to illustrate ways to detect unconscious and concealed emotion. The workshop will also introduce techniques to recognize emotion and other signs of “soft spots”, and will talk about cultural differences in emotional clues – which are universal and which differ between cultures.
Howard Herman, who is also a Program Chair for the conference, will be co-presenting “Designing and Facilitating Reflective Practice Groups for Court Mediation Programs”, along with Claudia Bernard, Daniel Bowling and Dana Curtis, all from the Bay Area. Reflective practice groups are one way court mediation programs combat feelings of isolation and loneliness amongst their mediators. Practice groups also provide a forum to learn from and with peers on how to become more skilled as mediators. The session will examine how courts can establish successful practice groups, provide suggestions for how best to facilitate such groups, and offer participants the opportunity to experience how the groups work in practice.
Darshan Brach and Grande Lum will each be facilitating a discussion group for professors who teach mediation. Grande’s group will address recent empirical findings on what mediation consumers want and how (or whether) these findings and skills should be taught to our students. Darshan’s group will discuss issues germane to the classroom setting – new ideas for simulations, and grading and evaluation of students.
Grande Lum will also be on the judging panel for the first round of the 2009 National ABA Representation in Mediation competition.
New Scholarship from CNDR
CNDR is pleased to announce two new publications from its distinguished faculty, both appearing in this month’s edition of the Negotiation Journal. Professor, and Faculty Chair of CNDR, Melissa Nelken’s article “Negotiating Classroom Process: Lessons Learned from Adult Learning” asks the question “How might we leverage the educational power of classroom process to maximize student learning about negotiation?” Professor Clark Freshman’s article, co-written with Professor Chris Guthrie of Vanderbilt University Law School, entitled “Managing the Goal-Setting Paradox: How to Get Better Results from High Goals and Be Happy”, notes from empirical research that “Negotiators who set optimistic goals are likely to obtain better objective outcomes but worse subjective outcomes.” The authors consider sources of and explanations for this goal-setting paradox, and suggest how negotiators and negotiation teachers might better manage this paradox through mindfulness and other techniques.
Copies of Professors Nelken and Freshman’s articles are available upon request, at cndr@uchastings.edu
Student Spotlight: Elizabeth Cooper
Elizabeth Cooper knew that she wanted to be a mediator for a long time. Her parents, both psychologists, used mediation in their divorce, and she was grateful that they chose to avoid protracted litigation and resolved their issues in a way they all could live with. It was just a matter of how she was going to become a mediator – through psychology or through law?When she graduated from UC Santa Cruz, Elizabeth looked into graduate schools for mediation. At the time, CNDR had not yet been established at Hastings, and she didn’t feel sure about her other choices. She chose instead to work in the non-profit sector, gaining administrative and organizational experience. Five years later, and living in the Bay Area, she looked into graduate schools again, and discovered that CNDR had created a robust program for alternative dispute resolution at Hastings. Her choice was now clear!
Elizabeth has thrown herself into dispute resolution at Hastings. In addition to taking Negotiation & Settlement, Judicial Settlement Conference, Advanced Negotiation: Multi-Party Processes, International Negotiations and an ADR Externship at Marin County Mediation Services, Elizabeth has been a member of the Negotiation & Mediation Team for two years, winning second place at the International Chamber of Commerce’s Commercial Mediation Competition in Paris in 2008 and fourth place in 2009. She has also been the student coach for the International Academy of Dispute Resolution Mediation Tournament in Chicago two years in a row. During the summer of 2008, she interned at San Francisco Community Boards, where she also took their 40 hour mediation training.
This writer met Elizabeth at the Community Boards’ training, and sensing a winner, approached her to be on the Negotiation and Mediation Team. She laughed! “The thought of adding a competitive element to mediation seemed antithetical to its purpose”, she recalls. However, Elizabeth soon found the Team to be a “wonderful learning experience.” The one on one attention and constant practicing developed her skills in honing in on communication breakdowns and underlying issues within a negotiation so that she can intervene more instinctively. And, there were other perks. “Law school can be a very lonely endeavor, and the Team gave me community and life long friends.”
For the future, Elizabeth will take the Bar this summer and find an internship abroad or a job with a mediation/ADR component. Ultimately, she would like to establish her own non-profit business in ADR systems design. Regardless of what she ends up doing in the short term, she intends to stay involved with CNDR. “CNDR saved my life and my law school experience. I’m jealous of the students who will come to Hastings later. CNDR will be larger and even more robust for them. I’m excited to see how it develops.”