Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Ecological Intelligence

Written on October 24, 2006 – 2:40pm | by admin |

George Kohlreiser knows a lot about negotiation – he’s been held hostage four times, and talked his way out of harm each time.

The first time was early in his career as a psychologist, when he was working with the domestic violence team of an urban police department. They had just intervened with a couple, and the police had left. At that point, the still-angry husband grabbed a scissors and held it to George’s neck.

The husband was furious at George, who he saw as part of a plot against him. But George somehow thought to ask the man, “How do you want your children to remember you?” That question began a dialogue that ended 45 minutes later with the man letting George go.

Since then, George has gone on to teach police around the world how to make a person-to-person contact with the hostage taker as a first step toward establishing communication that can end positively. George has applied these lessons to negations in general, particularly in the business realm. He outlines his approach in his new book, Hostage at the Table, which I recommend.
George’s argument fits well with the distinction I make in Chapter Seven of Social Intelligence between an I-You and an I-It mode of relating. Whether people’s lives are in peril or just a business discussion, the path to progress begins with an I-You connection, rather than an I-It: you have to treat the other with empathy, rather than as an object.
If it’s an I-It connection from the start, there’s no hope, no possibility of getting the hostage-taker to relent – or establishing the rapport that leads to a successful business negotiation.

The I-It attitude underlies an individualist, me-first mode, one which sees others in terms of ‘what you can do for me.’ Such a perspective starkly limits empathy to instrumentality, attuning only enough to understand how to get what one wants. And at the group level, the same blindered empathy leads to Us and Them thinking, accentuating differences and divisions and ignoring commonalities.

In contrast, the I-You stance leads to a spontaneous outlook of compassion: when we see others in an I-You way, feeling with and for them, putting ourselves in their place, and so wishing them no harm, but what is best. Rather than relegating others to ‘Them,’ they are seen as part of Us, as having an innate humanity in common no matter our surface differences.