Negotiating with “Romans” — Part 2

Managers are increasingly called on to negotiate with people from other cultures. Cross-cultural negotiation need not be as frustrating nor as costly as it is often made out to be; it can be a productive and satisfying experience. Which of these outcomes a manager achieves depends in part on the negotiation strategies taken in response to — or better, in anticipation of — the counterpart’s plans and behavior. There are eight culturally responsive strategies for a manager to consider (see Figure 1).1 Clearly, the quality of a negotiation outcome and a manager’s satisfaction with it also depend on how well he or she chooses and implements one of these approaches.

This article presents five steps for selecting a culturally responsive strategy and then offers various tips for implementation, such as making the first move, monitoring feedback, and modifying the approach. These guidelines reflect four basic, ongoing considerations for a strategy: its feasibility for the manager, its fit with the counterpart’s likely approach and therefore its capacity to lead to coherent interaction, its appropriateness to the relationship and circumstances at hand, and its acceptability in light of the manager’s values. There are challenges involved in all of these efforts, and they are pointed out below rather than ignored or belittled, as happens in much cross-cultural negotiation literature. Thus, from this article, managers stand to gain both an operational plan and the heightened awareness necessary to use a culturally responsive negotiation strategy effectively.

Selecting a Strategy

Every negotiator is advised to “know yourself, the counterpart, and the situation.”2 This advice is useful but incomplete, for it omits the relationship — the connection — between the negotiator and the counterpart.3 (For clarity, the negotiator from the “other” culture will be called the “counterpart” in this article.) Different types of relationships with counterparts and even different phases of a relationship with a particular counterpart call for different strategies.

For the cross-cultural negotiator, the very presence of more than one culture complicates the process of understanding the relationship and “knowing” the counterpart. In contrast to the “within-culture” negotiator, the cross-cultural negotiator cannot take common knowledge and practices for granted and thereby simply concentrate on the individual. It becomes important to actively consider the counterpart in two respects: as a member of a group and as an individual.

The right balance in these considerations is not easily struck. An exclusive emphasis on the group’s culture will probably lead the negotiator off the mark because individuals often differ from the group average. Members of the same group may even differ very widely on certain dimensions. At the same time, the degree of variation tolerated between group members is itself an aspect of culture. For example, Americans have traditionally upheld the expression, “He’s his own man,” while Japanese believed that “the protruding nail is hammered down.” The cross-cultural negotiator should thus consider both the counterpart’s cultural background and individual attributes, perhaps weighting them differently according to the culture involved, but mindful always that every negotiation involves developing a relationship with a particular individual or team.4

For years, Japanese managers have come to one of my classes each term to negotiate with graduate students so the students can experience negotiating first-hand and test the often stereotypical descriptions they have read about Japanese negotiating behavior. I deliberately invite many Japanese, not just one or two. The students invariably express surprise when the Japanese teams “deviate” from the Japanese negotiating script, as the students understand it, and when differences appear in the behavior of various Japanese teams.

The five steps for selecting a culturally responsive negotiation strategy take into account these complexities:

1. Reflect on your culture’s negotiation script.
2. Learn the negotiation script of the counterpart’s culture.
3. Consider the relationship and circumstances.
4. Predict or influence the counterpart’s approach.
5. Choose your strategy.

These steps take minutes or months, depending on the parties and circumstances involved. Each step will probably not require the same amount of time or effort. Furthermore, the sequencing of the steps is intended to have an intuitive, pragmatic appeal for an American negotiator, but it should not be treated rigidly. Some steps will be more effective if they are coupled or treated iteratively. Nor should these efforts start at the negotiation table when time, energy, resources, and introspection tend to be severely limited. Every one of these steps merits some attention by every cross-cultural negotiator before the first round of negotiation.

It is important to remember that the procedure represented by these five steps is itself culturally embedded, influenced by the author’s cultural background and by that of the intended audience (American negotiators).5 Not all counterparts will find the pragmatic logic herein equally compelling. As two Chinese professionals have observed, “In the West, you are used to speaking out your problems. . . . But that is not our tradition,” and “In our country, there are so many taboos. We’re not used to analytic thinking in your Western way. We don’t dissect ourselves and our relationships.”6 Even with this procedure, culture continues to influence what we do and how we do it.

One way to deal with this inescapable cultural bias is to acknowledge it and remain aware of the continual challenges of effectively choosing and implementing a strategy. Often these challenges do not stand out —books on international negotiation have not addressed them — yet they can hamper, even ruin, a negotiator’s best efforts. Each step below thus includes a list of cautions for cross-cultural negotiating.

Reflect on Your Culture’s Negotiation Script

Among members of our “home” group, we behave almost automatically.7 We usually have no impetus to consider the culture of the group because we repeatedly engage in activities with each other without incident or question. It is easy to use these “natural,” taken-for-granted ways in a cross-cultural situation — too easy.

A book on international negotiation published by the U.S. State Department displays the flags of six nations on its front cover. On initial copies of the book, the French flag appeared in three bands of red, white, and blue. The actual French flag is blue, white, and red.8

A cross-cultural negotiator should construct a thoughtful, systematic profile of his or her culture’s negotiation practices, using personal knowledge and other resources. Let’s say you want to develop an “American negotiator profile.” There is a vast amount of research and popular literature on negotiation in the United States.9 For insights about American culture more broadly, consider both Americans’ self-examinations and outsiders’ observations.10 Then organize this information into the profile represented in Figure 2.11 The profile consists of four topic areas: the general model of the negotiation process, the individual’s role, aspects of interaction, and the form of a satisfactory agreement. The left side of the ranges in Figure 2 generally fit the American negotiator profile (e.g., the basic concept is distributive bargaining, the most significant issues are substantive ones, negotiators are chosen for their knowledge, individual aspirations predominate over community needs, and so forth).

This profile should also uncover the values that support these tendencies. For instance, distributive bargaining implies certain attitudes toward conflict and its handling (direct), toward business relationships (competitive), and toward the purpose of negotiation (to maximize individual gains). Since some of your group’s tendencies and values may not align with your own, develop a personal profile as well. Doing so does not require probing deeply into your unconscious. Simply ask yourself, “What do I usually do at times like this? Why? What do I gain from doing it this way?”

These kinds of questions resemble those used in basic negotiation training to distinguish an underlying interest from a bargaining position, namely, “What does this bargaining position do for me? Why?”

In the mid-1980s, a white American banker planned to include an African-American analyst on his team for a forthcoming visit to white clients in South Africa. When they learned about this, the clients intimated their preference that she not attend. While the banker wanted to serve his clients, he also had strong feelings about including the analyst and about basing qualifications on merit. She was the best analyst on his staff. The banker’s values swayed his decision: he told his clients that he would not make the trip without this analyst on his team.12

Developing cultural and personal profiles is an ongoing task. Instead of writing them up once and moving on, return to them and refine them as you gain experience and understanding. The value of such a process is considerable. It increases your self-awareness; it helps you explain your expectations and behavior to a counterpart; it prepares you to make decisions under pressure; it allows you to compare your culture to another on a holistic rather than fragmented basis; it helps you determine a counterpart’s level of familiarity with your culture; its products — profiles — can be used in future negotiations with other cultural groups; it motivates interest in other cultures; and it enables you to act consistently and conscientiously.

This process demands a good deal of effort, especially at the outset (note the cautions in Table 1). But as a negotiator, you will find such reflection to be a good basis for developing a cross-cultural negotiation strategy.

Learn the Negotiation Script of the Counterpart’s Culture

This step applies to both the negotiator highly familiar with a counterpart’s culture and the one who knows next to nothing about it.13 The highly familiar negotiator should review what he or she knows and gather additional information to stay current. The uninitiated negotiator should begin to construct a negotiator profile from the ground up. Ideally, this process involves learning in the active sense: developing the ability to use the counterpart’s cultural and personal negotiation scripts, as well as “knowing” the scripts and related values.

Learning these scripts enhances the negotiator’s ability to anticipate and interpret the counterpart’s behavior. Even a negotiator with low familiarity who is likely to employ an agent needs some information in order to interact effectively with the agent and to assess the agent’s performance. Although few negotiators learn everything about a counterpart before negotiation, advance work allows for assimilation and practice, provides a general degree of confidence that helps the negotiator to cope with the unexpected, and frees up time and attention during the negotiation to learn finer points.

Again, the negotiator profile framework is a good place to start. Try especially to glean and appreciate the basic concept of negotiation because it anchors and connects the other dimensions. Without it, a negotiator, as an outsider, cannot comprehend a counterpart’s actions; they appear bizarre or whimsical. Moreover, if you focus merely on tactics or simple “do and don’t”-type tips and reach a point in a transaction for which you have no tip, you have no base — no sense of the “spirit of the interaction” — to guide you through this juncture. For instance, the “spirit” of French management has been described like this:

French managers see their work as an intellectual challenge requiring the remorseless application of individual brainpower. They do not share the Anglo-Saxon view of management as an interpersonally demanding exercise, where plans have to be constantly “sold” upward and downward using personal skills. The bias is for intellect rather than for action.14

Continuing with this example, let’s say you are preparing to negotiate with a French counterpart. You may find information about French negotiation concepts and practices in studies by French and American researchers and in natives’ and outsiders’ popular writings.15 In addition to general nonfiction works on French culture, novels and films can convey an extraordinary sense of interactions among individuals and groups.16 Other sources include intensive culture briefings by experts and interviews with French acquaintances, colleagues, and compatriots familiar with French culture, and, in some cases, even the counterpart.

Here, as in reflections on your own culture, make sure to consider core beliefs and values of the culture. Keep an eye on the degree of adherence to them as well as their substantive content.

A Frenchman involved in the mid-1980s negotiations between AT&T and CGE over a cross-marketing deal revealed his own culture’s concern for consistency in thought and behavior as he discussed AT&T’s conduct. He described the AT&T representatives’ style as “very strange” because they made assurances about “fair” implementation while pushing a very “tough” contract.

Moving from information gathering to assimilation and greater familiarity with a culture usually requires intensive training on site or in seminars.17 Some Japanese managers, for example, have been sent overseas by their companies for three to five years to absorb a country’s culture before initiating any business ventures. When the time comes, familiarity may be assessed through tests of language fluency, responses to “critical incidents” in “cultural assimilator” exercises, and performance in social interactions in the field.18

Whether or not you have prior experience working with a particular counterpart or other inside information, try to explore the counterpart’s own negotiation concepts, practices, and values. They can be mapped in a negotiator profile just as you mapped your own values.

This entire undertaking poses challenges for every negotiator, regardless of the strategy ultimately chosen. One of the highest hurdles may be the overall nature of the learning itself. Learning about another culture’s concepts, ways, and values seems to hinge on the similarity between that culture and one’s own. Learning is inhibited when one is isolated from members of that culture (even if one is living in their country) and “may fail to occur when attitudes to be learned contradict deep-seated personality orientations (e.g., authoritarianism), when defensive stereotypes exist, or at points where home and host cultures differ widely in values or in conceptual frame of reference.”19 Other significant challenges can be seen in Table 2. Remember that, ultimately, you have access to different strategies for whatever amount of learning and level of familiarity you attain.

Consider the Relationship and Circumstances

Negotiators and counterparts tend to behave differently in different relationships and contexts.20 One does not, for instance, act the same way as a seller as one does as a buyer. So a negotiator should not count on the same strategy to work equally well with every counterpart from a given cultural group (even if the counterparts have the same level of familiarity with the negotiator’s culture) or, for that matter, with the same counterpart all the time. The peaks and valleys that most relationships traverse require different strategies and approaches. In the same vein, circumstances suggest varying constraints and opportunities.

To continue your preparations for a negotiation, consider particular facets of your relationship with the counterpart and the circumstances. The most important facets on which to base strategic choices have not yet been identified in research and may actually depend on the cultures involved. Furthermore, laying out a complete list of possibilities goes beyond the scope of this article.21 But the following considerations (four for relationships, four for circumstances) seem significant.

Life of the Relationship.

The existence and nature of a prior relationship with the counterpart will influence the negotiation and should figure into a negotiator’s deliberations. With no prior contact, one faces a not-yet personal situation; general information and expectations based on cultural scripts will have to do until talks are under way. Parties who have had previous contact, however, have experienced some form of interaction. Their expectations concerning the future of the relationship will also tend to influence negotiation behavior.22 In sum, the negotiator should acknowledge any already established form of interaction, assess its attributes (e.g., coherence) and the parties’ expectations of the future, and decide whether to continue, modify, or break from the established form. These decisions will indicate different culturally responsive strategies.

Fit of Respective Scripts.

Having completed steps 1 and 2, you can easily compare your negotiator profiles, both cultural and individual, with those of the counterpart. Some culture comparisons based on the negotiator profile in Figure 2 have already been published.23 Noting similarities as well as differences will enable you to identify those aspects of your usual behavior that do not need to change (similarities) and those aspects that do (major differences) if you choose a strategy that involves elements of both your negotiation script and the counterpart’s (e.g., the adapt strategy). The number and kinds of differences will also suggest how difficult it would be to increase your level of familiarity with the counterpart’s culture or to use certain combinations of strategies.

Do not allow such a comparison to mislead you. Some people overemphasize differences. Others, focusing on superficial features, overestimate similarities and their understanding of another culture (e.g., when Americans compare American and Canadian cultures). The cautions in Table 3 can help you stay on track.

Of course, a negotiator highly familiar with the counterpart’s culture who plans to adopt an embrace strategy, operating wholly within that culture, has less need for these comparisons.

Balance of Power.

It may seem that power would have a lot to do with the choice of strategy. A more powerful party could induce the other to follow his or her cultural script. A less powerful party would have to embrace the other’s script. A balance of power might suggest an adapt or improvise strategy.

But the issue is not so simple. The tilt of the “balance” is not easily or clearly determined; parties often measure power using different scales.24 Indeed, forms of power, their significance, and appropriate responses are all culturally embedded phenomena.25 Furthermore, it makes little sense to rely on power and disregard a counterpart’s familiarity with one’s culture when one’s goal is coherent interaction. This is not to say that one could not benefit from an imbalance of power after choosing a culturally responsive strategy or in other areas of negotiation. Still, since power is culturally based and Americans have a general reputation for using it insensitively, American negotiators should be extremely careful about basing the strategy decision on power.

Gender.

Consider the possible gender combinations in one-on-one cross-cultural relationships: female negotiator with female counterpart, male negotiator with male counterpart, male negotiator with female counterpart, and female negotiator with male counterpart. Within most cultures, same-gender and mixed relationships entail different negotiating scripts. There are few books on negotiation designated for American women, but communication research has shown that men tend to use talk to negotiate status, women tend to use it to maintain intimacy, and they are often at cross-purposes when they talk to each other.26 The debates over how American women should act in male-dominated workplaces further substantiate the existence of different scripts. In a sense, gender groups have their own cultures, and mixed interaction within a national culture is already cross-cultural.

Mixed interaction across national and other cultures holds even greater challenges. One of the primary determinations for a woman should be whether a male counterpart sees her first as a foreigner and second as a woman, or vice versa. According to some survey research, Asian counterparts see North American businesswomen as foreigners first.27 The opposite may be true in parts of France. Edith Cresson, former French prime minister, once said, “Anglo-Saxons are not interested in women as women. For a [French] woman arriving in an Anglo-Saxon country, it is astonishing. She says to herself, ‘What is the matter?’”28 Thus, although current information about negotiating scripts for other countries tends to be based on male-male interactions, complete culturally-based negotiator profiles should include gender-based scripts.

Whether your negotiation involves mixed or same-gender interaction, try to anticipate the counterpart’s perception of the gender issue and review your core beliefs. Gender-based roles in France, for instance, may appear so antithetical (or laudable) that you will not entertain (or will favor) the embrace strategy.

With regard to circumstances, the second part of step 3, there are at least four relevant considerations.

Opportunity for Advance Coordination.

Do you have — or can you create — an opportunity beforehand to coordinate strategy with your counterpart? If so, consider the joint strategies. If not, concentrate at the outset on feasible, unilateral strategies.

Time Schedule.

Time may also shape a negotiator’s choice in that different strategies require different levels of effort and time. For the negotiator with moderate familiarity of the counterpart’s culture but an inside track on a good agent, employing an agent may take less time than adapting to the counterpart’s script. The time required to implement a strategy also depends on the counterpart’s culture (e.g., negotiations based on the French script generally take longer than the American script). And time constrains the learning one can do to increase familiarity. Imagine the possibilities that open up for a diligent negotiator when discussions are scheduled as a series of weekly meetings over a twelve-month period instead of as one two-hour session.

Audiences.

Consider whether you or the counterpart will be accompanied by other parties, such as interpreters, advisers, constituents, and mass media. Their presence or absence can affect the viability and effectiveness of a strategy. If no one else will attend the meeting, for instance, you have no one to defer to or involve as a mediator at critical junctures.

During the early months of the ITT-CGE telecommunications negotiations in 1985 and 1986, fewer than ten individuals were aware of the talks. That permitted the parties to conduct discussions in ways not possible later, when over a hundred attorneys, not to mention other personnel, became involved. At the same time, that choice may have ruled out the initial use of some culturally responsive strategies.

Wild Cards.

Finally, you should assess your own and the counterpart’s capacities to alter some relationship factors and circumstances. Parties may have extra-cultural capabilities such as financial resources, professional knowledge, or technical skills that expand their set of feasible options, bases for choice, or means of implementation.

During the GM-Toyota joint venture negotiations in the early 1980s, Toyota could afford to and did hire three U.S. law firms simultaneously for a trial period in order to compare their advice and assess their compatibility with the company. After three months, the company retained one of the firms for the duration of the negotiations.

Predict or Influence the Counterpart’s Approach.

The last step before choosing a strategy is to attempt to determine the counterpart’s approach to the negotiation, either by predicting it or by influencing its selection. For the effectiveness of a culturally responsive strategy in bringing about coherent interaction depends not only on the negotiator’s ability to implement it but also on its complementarity with the counterpart’s strategy. Embracing the counterpart’s script makes little sense if the counterpart is embracing your script. Further, reliable prediction and successful influence narrow the scope of a negotiator’s deliberations and reduce uncertainty. And the sooner the prediction, the greater the time available for preparation. While these concerns relate to the parties’ relationship (step 3), they have a direct impact on interaction that merits a separate step.

Assuming that your counterpart will not ignore cultural backgrounds and that each of you would adopt only a unilateral strategy, you can use Figure 3 to preview all possible intersections of these strategies.29 They fall into three categories: complementary, potentially but not inherently complementary, and conflicting. Thus the figure shows the coherence of each strategy pair.

Among these pairs, adapt-adapt and improvise-improvise might seem inherently complementary. The catch is that parties can adapt or improvise in conflicting ways. Of all the potentially complementary cells, the improvise-improvise interaction may, however, be the most likely to become coherent, given the nature of the improvise strategy and the capabilities it entails.

Not all of the strategies in Figure 3 will be available to you in every situation. Remember that in addition to potential coherence, your choice will be based on your familiarity with the counterpart’s culture, the counterpart’s familiarity with yours, appropriateness, and acceptability.

Prediction.

Sometimes a counterpart will make this step easy by explicitly notifying you of his or her strategy in advance of your talks. If the counterpart does not do that, there may be telling clues in the counterpart’s prenegotiation behavior, or other insiders (associates or subordinates) may disclose information.

Without direct and reliable information, you are left to predict the counterpart’s strategy choice on the basis of his or her traits and motivations. Some counterparts will have a rational, task-directed orientation. Strategy research based on this perspective shows that counterparts seeking to coordinate their actions with a negotiator often select the course of action most prominent or salient to both parties (e.g., choosing a river as a property boundary).30 Other counterparts will focus on what is socially proper. Indeed, whether a counterpart even responds to the cross-cultural nature of the interaction may vary with his or her cosmopolitanism. A cosmopolitan counterpart may lean toward adapt and improvise strategies, whereas a counterpart having little experience with other cultures may be motivated primarily by internal, cultural norms. In the latter case, the counterpart’s negotiator profile may be used to predict some behavior. For example, the internally focused individual from a culture with high communication complexity (reliance on nonverbal and other contextual cues for meaning), which often correlates with low risk-taking propensity, would be more likely to involve a mediator than to coordinate adjustment (which is too explicit) or to embrace or improvise (which are too uncertain).31

Influence.

Whether or not you can predict a counterpart’s strategy choice, why not try to influence it? If you predict a strategy favorable to you, perhaps you can reinforce it; if unfavorable, change it; and if predicted without certainty, ensure it. Even if prediction proves elusive, it behooves you to try to influence the counterpart.

The first task in this process is to determine your own preferred strategy based on the criteria in step 5. This may appear to be jumping ahead, but choosing and influencing go hand in hand. They will go on throughout negotiation, for new information will come to light and necessitate reassessments.

Once you have chosen a strategy, use the matrix in Figure 3 to locate interaction targets. Your prime targets should be the coherent (complementary) combinations, followed by the potentially coherent ones. For example, if you intend to employ an agent, influence the counterpart to use the induce strategy. Some negotiators may also contemplate targeting conflicting strategies.

In this line of thinking, a conflict could bring out the parties’ differences so dramatically as to provide valuable lessons and “working” material for both the negotiator and counterpart. Influencing the counterpart to pursue a strategy that conflicts with one’s own (or selecting one by oneself if the counterpart has already set a strategy) might establish that one is not a negotiator who can be exploited. However, these effects lie outside of our main purposes of demonstrating responsiveness to cultural factors and establishing a coherent form of interaction. Furthermore, such conflict often confuses, causes delays, and provokes resentment. (Note also the other cautions in Table 4.)

With respect to means of influence, Americans sometimes preemptively take action, such as using English in conversation without inquiring about a non-American counterpart’s wishes or capabilities, but there are other, often more mutually satisfactory, ways to influence a counterpart. They range from direct means, such as explicitly requesting a counterpart to choose a particular strategy, to tacit means, such as disclosing one’s level of familiarity with the counterpart’s culture, revealing one’s own strategy choice, or designating a meeting site likely to elicit certain types of conduct. For example, in 1989, then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker hosted his Soviet counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, instead of Washington, D.C. Prenegotiation communications may also be carried out by advance staff or through back channels. As you evaluate these options, bear in mind that their effectiveness will probably differ according to the counterpart’s culture and personal attraction to you.32

Choose Your Strategy

When you have completed the previous steps, it is time to choose a strategy or a combination of strategies. Four selection criteria emerge from these steps. The strategy must be feasible given the counterpart and cultures involved; able to produce a coherent pattern of interaction, given the counterpart’s likely approach; appropriate to the relationship and circumstances; and acceptable, ideally but not necessarily, to both parties. These criteria apply to the prenegotiation choice of strategy, but you may also use them to assess your strategy during negotiation.

A possible fifth criterion would be your degree of comfort with a strategy. Even negotiators highly familiar with two cultures’ scripts favor one script over another in certain circumstances. So if the four criteria above do not direct you to only one right strategy, consider, at the end, which of the remaining strategies you would be most comfortable implementing.

Apply the four criteria in order, for their sequence is deliberate and designed for negotiators with a pragmatic orientation (e.g., Americans). Feasibility, after all, appears first. Acceptability appears later because the value judgment it involves impedes deliberation in cross-cultural situations when used too early.33 (Note that counterparts from other cultural groups may prefer to use a list that begins with appropriateness or acceptability.)

Each criterion deserves attention. Feasibility and coherence considerations may narrow your choices down to one unilateral strategy, yet you should still check that choice for its appropriateness, given the relationship and circumstances, and its consonance with core beliefs and values. For a negotiation scheduled to take place over many years, for example, the negotiator might look at a strategy that is potentially but not inherently complementary to the counterpart’s (see Figure 3) or at combinations or progressions of strategies. For a negotiation where the negotiator cannot narrow strategy options by reliably predicting the counterpart’s strategy, the negotiator may actually have to rely on the last two criteria. And when a negotiator wishes to consider joint strategies, relationship factors and circumstances are essential to consult. In sum, the support of all four criteria for a particular strategy choice should give you confidence in it.

Occasionally, criteria may conflict. Feasibility and coherence point to an embrace strategy for a counterpart’s induce strategy, but the negotiator may find aspects of the counterpart culture’s script unacceptable (e.g., fatwa, Iran’s death threat.) Or the embrace-induce strategy pairing may have worked well in a cross-cultural relationship for years, but now you expect your counterpart to be at least moderately familiar with your culture. The resolution of such conflicts begs for further research. In the meantime, you may want to defer to your core beliefs and values. Values define the very existence of your home group and your membership in it; by ignoring or violating them you risk forfeiting your membership.34

As an example of strategy selection based on all four criteria, consider an American, Smith, who is preparing for a confidential, one-on-one meeting with a French-man he has never met before, Dupont.

Smith once lived in France and, as the meeting is being held in Dupont’s Paris office, his gut feeling is to speak in French and behave according to Dupont’s culture — that is, to use an embrace strategy. However, he takes the time to evaluate his options. Smith realizes that he is no longer familiar enough with French language and culture to use an embrace strategy, and the short lead time prevents him from increasing his familiarity. With a moderate level of familiarity, he has five feasible strategies: employ an agent or adviser, involve a mediator, induce Dupont to follow his script, adapt to Dupont’s script, or coordinate adjustment by both parties. Smith does some research and learns that Dupont has only a moderate level of familiarity with American negotiation practices. That rules out the induce strategy. The relationship and circumstances make an agent or mediator inappropriate. An adapt strategy would be hit-or-miss because Smith has no cues from previous face-to-face interaction and only one meeting is planned. Overall, the best strategy choice is to coordinate adjustment.

A complicated situation will require more complex considerations. (See also the cautions on choosing a strategy in Table 5.) But the five steps above — reflect, learn, consider, predict, and choose — constitute a sound and useful guide for strategy selection.

Implementing Your Strategy

The full value of the most carefully selected strategy rests on effective implementation, a formidable task in the general fluidity of negotiations and especially in the multifaceted process of most cross-cultural negotiations. It is here, in a negotiation’s twists and turns, that a negotiator deals head on with distinctions between the counterpart’s attributes as an individual and as a member of a cultural group. Simply adhering to one’s own plan of action is difficult — and may become undesirable. For the negotiator must ensure that the strategy complements the counterpart’s approach and enables the two of them to establish and maintain a coherent form of interaction.

Whatever the chosen culturally responsive strategy, a negotiator may enhance the effectiveness of first moves and ongoing efforts by generally respecting the counterpart and his or her group’s culture and by demonstrating empathy (both of which may take different forms for different cultures). These qualities, among others, have been recommended in the literature on cross-cultural competence and are consistent with cultural responsiveness.35 They do not necessitate lowering one’s substantive negotiation goals.36

First Moves

The strategies of employ agent, embrace, and induce entail complete, existing scripts for negotiation. Pursuing one of these strategies essentially involves following the script associated with it. The adapt strategy involves modifications of your own script, at least some of which should be determined beforehand. With the improvise strategy, you ought to give some advance thought to a basic structure even if much of the path will emerge as you travel on it. Thus you have a starting point for each of the five unilateral strategies.

These strategies assume that when a counterpart recognizes your strategy, he or she will gravitate toward its corresponding script.37 The counterpart wants to understand you and to be understood; that is what occurs in coherent interaction. If you have accurately assessed the counterpart’s level of familiarity with your culture and ability to use a particular script, and if the counterpart recognizes the strategy you are using, you stand a better chance of achieving coherence.

Should you make the first strategic move or wait until the counterpart does? This decision affects the transition from preliminary “warm-up” discussions to negotiation of business matters. It depends, in part, on whether you need to gather more information about the counterpart’s strategic intentions and abilities. This would matter when both parties have at least moderate familiarity with each other’s cultures and have more than one unilateral strategy they can realistically choose, and when you have chosen a strategy (e.g., adapt, improvise) that relies on cues from the counterpart. The decision over timing also depends on whether you need to make the strategy you have chosen distinguishable from another one (e.g., improvise from adapt) and want to clearly establish this strategy at the outset. (Note that if a negotiator has chosen to employ an agent or has successfully influenced the counterpart, then timing should not be an issue.) In sum, to decide on timing, you should weigh the benefits of additional information against the costs of losing an opportunity to take leadership and set the tone of the interaction, a loss that includes being limited in your strategy options by the counterpart’s strategy choice.

The three joint strategies are explicit and coordinated by definition. Once parties have decided to use a joint strategy, first moves consist of fleshing out particulars. Which mediator? What kinds of adjustments? What basic structure will underlie improvisation? These discussions may require the intermediate use of one of the five unilateral strategies.

Parties coordinating adjustment might consider trading off their respective priorities among the twelve cultural aspects in the negotiator profiles. If your counterpart values certain interpersonal conduct (protocol) more than the form of the agreement, for example, and you value the latter more than the former, the two of you could agree to adhere to a certain protocol and, on agreement, to draw up a comprehensive legal document. This pragmatic approach will probably appeal more to Western counterparts than to Asian ones, however, particularly if the Asian counterparts have only low or moderate cultural familiarity. So take this approach with caution rather than presuming that it will always work.

Whichever joint strategy you adopt, pursue it visibly in your first moves. Especially in first-time encounters, a counterpart reads these moves as indications of one’s integrity (“sincerity,” in Japan) and commitment to coordination.

Ongoing Efforts

A cross-cultural negotiator has myriad concerns and tasks, including vigilant attention to the cautions in the tables presented thus far. Still, as negotiation proceeds, one’s most important task is concentrating on interaction with the counterpart. Parties’ actions and reactions evidence adherence to and departures from a given negotiation script, fill out the incomplete scripts associated with some strategies (i.e., adapt, improvise, effect symphony), and determine the ultimate effectiveness of every one of the eight culturally responsive strategies. These interactions occur so quickly that analyzing them makes them seem fragmented and in “slow motion.” Nevertheless, some analysis can have tremendous value.

As you negotiate, shift most of your attention from the counterpart’s culture to the counterpart as an individual. Specifically, monitor feedback from him or her, be prepared to modify, shift, or change your strategy, and develop this relationship.

Monitor Counterpart’s Feedback.

A counterpart’s reactions to your ideas and conduct provide critical information about the counterpart personally and about the effectiveness of your chosen strategy with this particular individual. As you use that information to make continual adjustments and to evaluate your strategy, you may want to return to the four criteria of feasibility, coherence, appropriateness, and acceptability.

Some verbal and nonverbal cues transcend cultures in signaling positive or negative reception to a negotiator’s use of a certain script. They range from a counterpart’s statements (“Things are going well,” “We don’t do things that way”) to a tightening of the corner of the mouth and cocked head, which convey contempt.38

In one film of the “Going International” series, an American manager urges his Saudi counterpart to expedite delivery of supplies from the docks to the hospital building site. He points out that the supplies have already sat at the dock for a week just because of paperwork, he personally is “in a crisis,” “nobody works here” on Thursday and Friday (it is now Tuesday), and during the upcoming Ramadan observance “things really slow down.” At various points during these remarks, the Saudi does not respond at all to a direct question, perfunctorily sets aside a written schedule he receives, and looks disparagingly at the American’s shoes. In the end, the Saudi states, “Mr. Wilson, my people have been living for many years without a hospital. We can wait two more weeks.”39

Admittedly, a counterpart’s statements can be more or less honest or truthful, and the gradations are often fuzzy to an outsider. A number of cultures distinguish between saying what is socially acceptable (tatemae in Japanese) and saying what is truly on one’s mind (honne). Other standards may also differ across cultures.

Many cues (e.g., silence) do not carry consistent meaning from culture to culture. Generally, individuals learn the culturally specific meanings as they become familiar with a culture. Negotiator profiles include some cues and imply others under dimensions such as “communication complexity” and “nature of persuasion.” A negotiator can use these cues when he or she embraces the counterpart’s culture.

Then again, some singularly powerful cues are very subtle. (See other cautions for strategy implementation in Table 6.)

In the 1950s, an American couple — the lone foreigners — at a Japanese wedding banquet in Tokyo were socializing and dining like everyone else. All of a sudden, everyone else finished eating and left the reception. Residents of Japan for many years, the Americans concluded later that a signal had been sent at some point, and they had not even detected it.

In cross-cultural interactions that do not involve embracing or inducing, or when a negotiator cannot clearly decipher the counterpart’s strategy, nonuniversal cues are disconcertingly difficult to detect and interpret correctly. You can handle ambiguous cues (e.g., the hesitation of a counterpart who has so far been loquacious) by keeping them in mind until additional cues and information convey and reinforce one message. Other ambiguous cues may be decoded only by asking the counterpart; alternatively, they remain unclear. Dealing with these cues is a very real and ongoing challenge.

Be Prepared to Modify, Shift, or Change.

Even the well-prepared negotiator faces some surprises and some negative feedback in a negotiation. You want to be nimble enough to respond effectively. “Modifying” refers to refining implementation of a strategy without abandoning it; “shifting” refers to moving from one strategy to another within a previously planned combination of strategies; and “changing” refers to abandoning the strategy for another, unplanned one.

Making alterations is relatively easy with some counterparts.

For the first round of the 1980-1981 Ford-Toyota talks, Ford negotiators employed a bilingual Japanese staffer from their Japan office. The Toyota team, apparently confident in their English language abilities, suggested that Ford not bring the interpreter to subsequent meetings, so that the negotiators could “talk directly.” Ford negotiators obliged and changed their approach.

On other occasions, one may have to explain modifications, shifts, and changes before they are made in order to minimize the odds of being perceived as unpredictable or deliberately disruptive. One may also deflect criticism by directly or indirectly associating these actions with changes in circumstances, the subject on the agenda, phase of the discussion, or, when negotiating as part of a team, personnel. For ideas about specific modifications to make, other than those prompted by your counterpart, review the counterpart’s negotiator profile. Changes in strategy should be shaped by both a negotiator’s culturally relevant capabilities and the strategy being abandoned. You may go relatively smoothly from an adapt to a coordinate adjustment strategy, for example, but not from inducing to embracing or from involving a mediator to employing an agent.

Over time, some movement between strategies may occur naturally (e.g., adapt to coordinate adjustment), but a shift as defined here involves a preconceived combination, or sequence, of strategies (e.g., coordinate adjustment, then effect symphony). A negotiator could plot a shift in strategies for certain types of counterpart feedback, variation in circumstances or relationship factors, or, especially during a long negotiation, for a jump in his or her level of cultural familiarity.

Develop This Relationship.

Pragmatic Americans may view the cultivation of a relationship with the counterpart primarily as an instrument for strategy implementation. Concentrating on coherent interaction and a satisfactory relationship usually does enhance a culturally responsive strategy’s effectiveness. But the strategy should also —even primarily — be seen as serving the relationship.

Riding describes the views of Mexican negotiators when they returned home from Washington after the negotiations over Mexico’s insolvency in 1982: “ ‘We flew home relieved but strangely ungrateful,’ one Mexican official recalled later. ‘Washington had saved us from chaos, yet it did so in an uncharitable manner.’ Even at such a critical moment, the substance and style of the relationship seemed inseparable.”40

Many of your non-American counterparts will be accustomed to an emphasis on relationships. Indeed, greater attention to relationship quality may be the most common distinction between negotiators from American and non-American cultures.

Developing a relationship with a particular counterpart requires an attentiveness to its life and rhythms. The form of your interaction can evolve across different scripts and approaches, especially after many encounters. There is also the potential for culturally driven conflict, which you should be willing to try to resolve.

Clearly, such a relationship should be treated dynamically, whether time is measured in minutes or in months. In that light, you can continuously learn about the counterpart and the counterpart’s culture and educate the counterpart about you and your culture. Over a long period, you may experiment with a counterpart’s ways in noncritical areas (at low risk) to develop skills within and across culturally responsive strategies. In this way, you can expand the number of feasible strategies, giving both you and the counterpart more flexibility in the ways you relate to each other.

Toward Cross-Cultural Negotiating Expertise

A friend of mine, a third-generation American in Japan who was bilingual in Japanese and English, used to keep a file of items that one must know . . . to function in Japan. . . . [He] never stopped discovering new things; he added to the file almost every day.41

Over the years, many cross-cultural negotiators have essentially asked, “What happens when you’re in Rome, but you’re not Roman?” The most common advice available today was first offered 1,600 years ago: “Do as the Romans do.” Yet these days, a non-Roman in Rome meets non-Romans as well as Romans and encounters Romans outside of Rome. The more we explore the variety of parties’ capabilities and circumstances and the more we question the feasibility, coherence, appropriateness, and acceptability of “doing as Romans do,” the more apparent the need becomes for additional culturally responsive strategies.

The range of strategies presented here provides every negotiator, including one relatively unfamiliar with a counterpart’s culture, with at least two feasible options. Combinations of strategies further broaden the options.

If there is “something for everyone” here, the value of developing and sustaining cross-cultural expertise should still be clear. That includes high familiarity with a “Roman” culture — knowing the cognitive and behavioral elements of a Roman negotiating script and being able to use the script competently. The negotiator at the high familiarity level enjoys the broadest possible strategic flexibility for negotiations with Romans and the highest probability that, for a particular negotiation, one strategy will solidly meet all four selection criteria.

A negotiator can also gain a great deal from learning about more than one other culture. For lack of space I have concentrated on negotiations between two individuals, each belonging to one cultural group, but most cross-cultural negotiations involve more than two cultures: most individuals belong to more than one group; negotiations often occur between teams that have their own team cultures in addition to the members’ ethnic, national, and organizational backgrounds; and multiparty, multicultural negotiations occur as well. In short, the non-Roman highly familiar with culture A still encounters cultures B, C, and D. Even though a negotiator may need to focus only on the one culture that a counterpart deems predominant at any one point in time, there are several to explore and manage across time, occasions, and people.42

As soon as he was assigned to GM’s Zurich headquarters in the mid-1980s, Lou Hughes, one of GM’s main representatives in the GM-Toyota negotiations of the early 1980s, began taking German lessons because GM’s main European plant was located in Germany. Now president of GM Europe, Hughes’ effectiveness as an executive has been attributed in part to his cultural sensitivity and learning.43

In the process of exploring other cultures, one may discover an idea or practice useful for all of one’s negotiations.

Another American negotiator in the GM-Toyota talks was so impressed with the Toyota negotiators’ template for comparing parties’ proposals that he adopted it and has relied on it since for his negotiations with others.

It is in this spirit of continuous learning that this article has presented culturally responsive strategies, selection criteria, key steps in the choice process, and implementation ideas. If negotiators with a moderate amount of cross-cultural experience have the most to gain from these tools, first-time negotiators have before them a better sense of what lies ahead, and highly experienced negotiators can find some explanation for the previously unexplained and gain deeper understanding. In addition, the culture-individual considerations and ongoing challenges highlighted throughout the article will serve all cross-cultural negotiators. Perhaps we can all travel these paths more knowingly, exploring and building them as we go.