The 6 Second Trick That Wins Every Negotiation: FBI's Hostage Negotiator || Chris Voss

0:00That's the kind of human being who says to themselves, if experience is the best teacher, it's going to be my only teacher. You learn, but you learn slow with that attitude. Yeah, I agreed. And so best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. If you've never bought a book to read to get better, you're not going to now, especially once you've cleared age 30.

0:22What would happen if we just told the truth?

0:25Chris Voss:Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and, well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:00Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I am your host, Jessica Neal, and I'm here with my favorite co-host. Don't tell Jeff. Peter Clark. Hi, Pete. How's it going? Going well. Thank you. Yeah. Glad to be here. Glad to be asked back. We have an interesting guest today. Yes, super excited. I know, I'm excited because, you know, I just, I feel like this guest is going to give us all a lot of information. We're going to learn a lot. I have always thought about myself as being a good negotiator, but after kind of digging into what our guest talks about, I don't know if I am. I negotiated my entire career, but I learned a lot from him.

1:48And so today, everyone, we have Chris Voss on the show. He is a former FBI and negotiator for kidnapping. I mean, I don't even know where to start with all of that. He's the founder of the Black Swan Group, which helps everybody figure out how to get good at this. And he's the author of a wonderful book that has sold many, many, many, many millions of copies called Never Split the Difference. We're going to talk about how to negotiate better with this expert. And we're going to learn all kinds of things today, like being silent and, you know, which is hard for me. But welcome to the show, Chris.

2:35We're so excited to have you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Happy to be here. Thank you. Yes, you're welcome. Well, I always like to go back in time. Because I like I love the stories of what led people to get to where they are. And you have had like, I don't know, a fascinating career that not many people get to have. There's, I don't know, there's not many, I don't know, maybe there's more than I think. But I don't think that there's a ton of, you know, kidnap negotiators running around out there, free in the world. Maybe I'm wrong. No, I was fortunate. The circumstances came together to create the position, and I held it for about seven years.

3:18So, yeah, I was very lucky. Yeah. So how did that happen? How did you get into the FBI and become this master negotiator? In high stakes, mind you, situations. Well, you know, you're born in a small town in Iowa. You go up about an hour north to Interstate 80. You make a right. Okay. that's where you grew up yeah yeah i grew up in a small town in iowa i know my i know i've got an accent slightly different from that but yeah i'm uh blue collar really i mean i think the essence for a kind of character like me blue collar is just hard working yeah willing to dig in i think of myself as a team player and maintain a sense of humor and get stuff done i mean just whatever whatever the mission is you gotta you gotta get what did your parents do my father was an entrepreneur okay owned a small business so sole proprietorship he never had any more than really two people working from directly at any time as i as i got older the gas station business which is kind of what he was in back in the 1960s and 70s evolved into the convenience store business so by the time i graduated college he had a string of convenience store gas stations that he owned and operated so cool and then did you ever work in the family business oh sorry yeah are you kidding me from the time i could walk my father figured if he put if he if he gave you a place to live and food to eat then you're gonna have to earn your keep so every one of us started working he paid us you know yeah but we all started working pretty much as soon as we figured out how to take out the trash yeah i need to need to think about that with my six-year-old he didn't work very hard So you drive up 80, make a right, and then you, what happens?

5:03Then you go, like, how do you get into the FBI? After I got out, I went to college, four-year degree, wanted to be in law enforcement, became a police officer, Kansas City, Missouri. Great town, phenomenal town, by the way. Great police department, really well-run police department. Then decided I wanted to go federal law enforcement. Originally wanted to go to the Secret Service because the allure of traveling all over the world appealed to me. And I had never really been out of, hardly out of Iowa. Crossing the state line was a big deal, you know, when I grew up. Yeah. And the Secret Service wasn't hiring.

5:39The FBI was. Okay. So I didn't really know the difference. You know, the federal alphabet, DEA, FBI, CIA. I didn't know what any of those were. Right. But I caught on with the FBI. It was a great job. Ended up in New York City, Joint Terrorist Task Force. Had a stop in Pittsburgh on the way where I was on a SWAT team. Okay. And then between SWAT injuries and the lure of crisis response, then I tried to apply for the hostage negotiation team in New York. Was rejected, but then did some extra work. Went out on my own, did a whole bunch of extra stuff to become qualified. Hostage negotiator. Was lucky enough, I was involved in New York with a bank robbery with hostages, which is movies make it seem like it happens all the time in real life.

6:22it's an extremely rare effect yeah so that was was that your first one that was the first big deal and it was so rare and one of the bank robbers surrendered to me personally outside the bank and then a big a big thing if you're in hostage negotiation the best way to maintain your skills is to teach it on in anything i mean you you know because you're horrified that somebody's going to call you out for not knowing what you're talking about so right i'd spend a lot of time on a suicide hotline which is for training emotional intelligence for training yeah yeah i mean it's real life emotions i mean yeah simulated negotiations and even when i was teaching at georgetown and harvard at usc yeah simulated negotiations are not great practice you need real actual emotional responses to really to get the feel like you know i get people that work for me in sales now some of the training exercises i put them through we go to the grocery store and ask directions you know because i think you mentioned earlier we're in negotiations all the time one of the things we negotiate for is information uh-huh asking directions especially from somebody who's not there to give you directions right and a dude stacking produce in a grocery store is not there to be your tour guide right so it's you know it's a great way to practice how do you say something to light that person up that like the last time i asked her my girlfriend sends me to the grocery store to look for brussels sprouts now it was what was it broccoli sprouts okay now the picture i have in my head does not resemble any what they are actually i've tried to find them so i promise you that i walk by those things five times without realizing and i feel like this big dope walk and finally i'm like i know who who knows where it is it's a it's a produce guy who's going to claim he doesn't actually work for the grocery store he works for produce deliverer and doesn't know where it is because he ain't there to give directions he's there to put produce in the in the display and get out of the way right so how do you make this guy uh feel great about giving you directions and i will because i'm gonna do an advertisement here oh yeah let's do it i'm gonna move this over here two guys on my team they just put out a book bite less win more bite less win more it's a companion that never split the difference okay so one of the authors of that jonathan gave me this this this opener which works especially with people that are there who know where everything is but it's not their job to give directions so i walk up to the produce guy and i say you look important and they bright and he brightens up and well no you know no i just you know just produce yeah just produce and i go like dude i can't find the broccoli sprouts and now most of the time when somebody gives you directions they point and they go over that over there yeah and you don't know where the heck over there is he walks me over to them and points them out and i'm like thank god because this is not what i thought they look like yeah right yeah i don't think i actually know what a broccoli sprout looks like i'm gonna have to google it it doesn't look like regular broccoli you know i figured it was regular of broccoli on a sprout, you know, and it ain't there.

9:37So when you're, if you're not a cook, you don't, you don't know how to find this stuff. Yeah. Well, um, I guess it's that you made him feel important. Yeah, it's, it, I did. And that's, you know, what I used actually was a very specific skill. It's called a label, which is an observation, a verbal observation. And navigating human emotions you can't plant emotions but you can amplify positives and you can deactivate negatives and the observation of a positive like you know of course deep down inside what this guy's telling himself is i put out food here that makes people healthy like the fact that I work hard to keep this stuff clean.

10:27You know, I stack it orderly. Putting out vegetables that people can consume and be healthier is actually a complicated supply chain job. You know, so this poor schmuck who's making, I don't know,$15,$16 an hour actually has an important job and is an underappreciated human being. The vast majority of people are underappreciated. Yeah, they just walk by. Yeah. And he knows where everything is. Like in point of fact, this dude is a valuable guy. He knows where everything in his store is. Yeah. And so I'm just observing something that's true, and he feels it deep down inside, but nobody really notices it.

11:08So that amplifies me about 10 times. Plus on top of that, when I walk away from this guy, it's probably the best he's felt all day. And I kind of enjoy that. Yeah. I don't know. I just got a little goosebumps when you said that. Okay. But I want to, I want to before, because we're going to get into like a lot of advice and tactics and things. But I want to go back to that massive bank negotiation because I don't, I'm curious. So what did, what did that feel like when that guy surrendered to you? Yeah, it was, it was surreal for a lot of reasons. The thing had been going on at that point in time for almost seven, seven, eight hours.

11:44We had SWAT negotiators. We had a blended hostage negotiation team, the FBI and the NYPD. The NYPD commander named Hugh McGowan was running the negotiations. Hugh was an extremely talented guy. He had put me on as a swap in negotiators to disrupt what was going on. Disrupt in a really, in a gentle way, but a very intentional, disruptive move. That's a tactic you all use. If the circumstances call for it, a disruption is a good idea. And what you want to do is disrupt in a non-threatening way. And most of the time, people disrupt in a very threatening manner. And in any negotiation, whether it be a hostage negotiation or a business negotiation, one side will swap negotiators not to be nicer, but to be tougher.

12:33It's like good cop, bad cop. You never change to be nicer. You change to take a harder line. And so the challenge is to take a harder line in a more gentle way. And that was a very specific coaching that Hugh gave me. And then a great negotiation is a team event, which means the people with you are not, if they're really helping you, they're listening with you, for you. They're not waiting for their turn to speak. And so in the midst of the negotiations, one of the negotiators on my team, a guy named Jamie Cedena, heard a couple of things that nobody else heard. And he passed me a note at two critical points in time.

13:10I am coachable. Many negotiators, you know, they don't want to be bothered. You know, I got this. they want to be a diva you know they want to be a soulless i'm coachable and two critical times jamie passed me the notes and with everything that i had emotional intelligence that i'd applied up to that point in time with jamie's insight i had the i had the guy surrendering to me personally out in front of the bank wild one thing you mentioned was that you applied to hostage negotiation for nypd and they rejected which one rejected you because then all of a sudden you're in there doing this so right right or is that part of the process we reject you and you negotiate your way to that job see how resilient you are right yeah no it was i was on the fbi's hostage negotiation team i had gone to the woman that was in charge of the negotiation team probably about two and a half years before the bank robbery and i just thought volunteering was enough and i was not qualified and she made it clear to me that i was unqualified uh you know she's you know my kind of she's if i say it in the finest way she's tough new york chick and that's my kind of that's my kind of girl yeah and she she was just like you know kind of no you're not qualified to go away uh but i said look there's got to be something i could do and she said yeah go volunteer on a suicide hotline now until you've done that you know don't bother me yeah and that i mean what did you think in that moment i mean were you like that's a that's not it no i didn't think it was hard no i mean i feel like that's such a a critical time and you know for someone for a person well my whole life hard emotionally for everybody you got it well volunteering on suicide hotline like helping people talk people off the ledge if you go to learn a skill it's fascinating i went to learn right it you know in hindsight i've always believed in in investing in myself but actually doing it for as far back as i could remember i would go out and take training i would i and on my own time i i do extra um i was thinking about this the other day because that's a characteristic of a person who's coachable you know everybody says they're coachable but like if i would ask you this when's the last time you bought a book to get better a lot of people i'm i'm on a plane next to an extremely influential person in the professional medical community a couple years ago.

15:35One of the people on a plane says, hey man, I want you to know that I made a million dollars on one deal from what I read in your book. And so this guy is sitting next to me in the medical community. He's a loud dude and kind of annoying. And he's like, hey, you know, why did he say you made a million dollars as a result of reading your book? What's your book? And I looked at him and I said, have you ever bought a book to get better at a soft skill.

16:04Chris Voss:Probably not. And he thought for a second and goes like, no. That's the kind of human being who says to themselves, if experience is the best teacher, it's going to be my only teacher. And you learn, but you learn slow with that attitude. Yeah, I agreed. I agreed. And so best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. If you've never bought a book to read to get better, you're not going to now, especially, you know, once you've cleared age 30. Yeah. And I said, you know, I could tell you the title of the book, but you're not going to buy it. And if you did buy it, you wouldn't read it. And he literally says to me, yeah, you're probably right.

16:42Chris Voss:Yeah. You know, that guy's not coachable. Right. Not everybody believes enough in themselves to take the time to listen to a podcast, to learn. Yeah. You know, that's one of the reasons why I love doing the podcast is I learn every time I do it. I learn. From the person that we have on. And with natural curiosity, then you help people who actually want to get smarter and get better and be entertained at the same time. It's a very cool thing to host a podcast, and I'm grateful to be with you. Well, thank you. I'm grateful to have you. I was just thinking about this element of emotional intelligence that you brought up.

17:20Chris Voss:Is that key to being good at this? Do you have to have really high EQ, or can people that have high IQ also thrive? You can try, but it's going to take you longer. I read a book a long time ago, an article called The Habits of Unskilled Negotiators. And if you have a high IQ and you haven't learned EQ, you kind of want to show people how smart you are, which is not about hearing what they have to say. Nobody feels heard if you're showing them how smart you are. Now, emotional intelligence is making somebody feel like they're the center of your universe. I'll give you an example. I loved it. Robert Greene's book, The Laws of Seduction, he talks about the different seducing types, if you will.

18:05And one of them is the charmer. And then there's a quote from a woman. She said, you know, I went to this dinner and I talked to this guy and I thought he was the most interesting person I ever met. Then I went to another dinner and I talked to this guy and he made me feel like I was the most interesting person he ever met. Now, that's the second. the real tactical empathy emotional intelligence it's like if i'm curious about you you're the most interesting person i ever met that's what makes the impression on people and you don't create that impression by showing them how smart you are yeah makes total sense tactical empathy you know i think when you say it out loud it sounds a bit of an oxymoron right because it's an empathy supposed to be the yeah i mean i think it's i'm feeling and then you've got oh but tactic i'm trying to get something so uh but i love the term but yeah i love you know explain that a little bit more well it was when the book first came out the book's been out 10 years now which is cool because it's still number one

19:09empathy was seen as this soft weak weak weak skill you know way back when when hillary clinton first ran for president and she talked about using empathy with america's adversaries internationally and she was just torn apart for it because empathy how dare you that's soft you you and a point of fact it's not so we put tactical in front of empathy originally sort of the same reason why you can't teach a navy seal how to do yoga breathing but you can teach them tactical breathing right yeah just a rebranding i love it yeah it was some rebranding and then as it turns out it's it's neuroscience based and the neuroscience backs up the reality that works.

19:50And so tactically, you're applying neuroscience to communication so that somebody feels heard and bonds with you consequently. Yeah. So we've kind of talked about we're constantly negotiating, but let's put it in the context of work. Like we're constantly negotiating at work, whether it's your salary or how much time you're going to spend on it or when you're going to get a task done, like whatever. So what do people mostly get wrong with negotiations at work the idea that you need to be heard before you make the other side feel heard or that you know um seven habits of highly successful stephen covey yeah that's a good one of his habits was seek first to understand then be understood people don't understand they seek first to demonstrate understanding if i understand you that doesn't mean you feel understood it that I've shown that I comprehend where you're coming from.

20:49And frequently this extra effort, especially in a disagreement, to show you see where the other side's coming from. You can even say, look, before I disagree, this is how I think you see this. That extra effort will seal half of your deals on the spot, like on the spot. And most people think what they got to do is they got to make their argument first. Business school trains you, make your elevator pitch, which is your value proposition only since it's so painful to listen to it's just got to be shorter and it's still painful for a short period of time yeah you know it's about it's about speaking first and and listening hearing first showing comprehension first is the is the move well let's talk about like an actual thing like let's talk about i want i want to make more money right i i think i should get paid more how do i do that okay so you got first empathy is about understanding how the other side sees it.

21:45So without enough preparation and demonstration of understanding, how does a boss see this? You just walked into their office and you want to get paid more for doing the same thing. I want to raise. Okay, you want to raise. That means you want me to pay you more for doing the same thing, which means you want to make us less profitable. That's not saying that's the case. That's how the other side sees it. Nobody walks into the boss's office to help the boss out. out like the moment you clear that doorway he knows you're there for yourself so you seem selfish yeah so what you really want is to negotiate your career and let your salary follow now if you start negotiating your career the best career is you're a team player you're you want to focus on stuff that's important to the company so you you want to get paid more you walk into the boss's office and you say, how can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of this company?

22:46Now, all of a sudden, the boss is like, what? Yeah.

22:50Chris Voss:Like, you want to be a team player? You want to make me look good? Because if I got a superstar working for me, then I look like I developed you. Now, all of a sudden, the boss is listening. This is your opportunity to get involved in high-value operations. Maybe they had you count paperclips, but the thought that you want to do stuff that helps everybody, that's what creates a valuable employee, negotiates your career advancement. Because your salary pays your bills, it doesn't advance your career. You want to be involved in the stuff that advances your career. Secondarily, your salary comes along behind.

23:28If it doesn't, then you did monumental things that make you that much more attractive to somebody who is going to pay you. Right. That is good. I think, you know, I think about this also, like when you're starting a new job. And Pete, I think you've probably seen this too. There's, you know, we get really excited about somebody we're going to hire. they've got the best experience and then they come in and they start negotiating for salary and you're like this person is just demanding out of touch like it and they ruin the whole deal and and there's oftentimes because of how they handled that situation where where you know at netflix we would walk away we're like oh yeah you know so what's that about you know i think people get the wrong idea.

24:20I think they've been given bad guidance. I think it's a huge mistake. First of all, they didn't focus on a relationship. There's so much bad guidance. You know, the job description lays things out in advance. And a job description also always lays out salary range. And so if you walk into a job application and then begin to ask for something outside the salary range, The other side is going to presume that you're deceptive because, you know, here's a set of parameters. Don't walk into this interview and by and large, you agree to these parameters. And so to come in and to change the salary is it makes the other side mistrust you.

25:02When I joined the FBI, there was no cost of living across the board in the FBI. So an FBI agent in New York City, which is where I ended up, got paid the same amount of money as an FBI agent in Omaha. You can imagine cost of living was radically different.

25:16Chris Voss:Yeah. Rather be in Omaha. Yeah. So the guy that hired me in Kansas City said, don't take this job if you can't go to New York. And I'm like, all right, you've been up front with me. You've laid out some expectations. Two years later, I'm getting transferred to New York, and I'm like, I agree this was part of the bargain. For me to all of a sudden act like, oh, I'm surprised. I didn't think you guys really meant that. Right. You know, that would cause the other side to have misgivings about me. So if you come into a negotiation and you start asking for a salary that's outside the range of what the other side laid out in the beginning, you didn't feel you're negotiating a bad faith.

25:57But empathy is how the other side sees it, and they're going to see it as a bad faith negotiation. Yeah, and there is just a lot of bad advice that I think people get on how to handle this. Yeah, and so don't listen to that. please listen to Chris because you'll save yourself a job. Yeah, or promotion. I mean, I teach a salary negotiation course. You guys asked me earlier, you know, what I want to let people know. We've got a professional dealmaker day coming up May 15th, but I also teach a salary negotiation course, and we do that online, and I think it's coming up. It's either in June or July.

26:36Chris Voss:Okay. And the last, when I rewrote it last time around, I thought to myself, what would I tell my employees I wanted to do so I could pay them more? You know, this is from an operational standpoint of how you can build your career, how you can get paid more. And I'm going to tell you straight out, which is the same thing I tell the people that work for me. Here, I want to pay you more. And here's the avenue to get there. It's got to be a collaboration with your boss. Otherwise, you're going to get fired. You're going to get passed over for promotion. You know, it's got to be a collaboration with your boss and your employer, and then you can prosper.

27:09Yeah, exactly. Well, everybody take the course coming out in June or July. I'm sure Chris is going to tell us where to find all this at the end of the show. And then what's happening on May 15th? What do you have? What is it? Well, we've got a one day in person. We call it Professional Dealmaker Day. Now, in-person training, there's an energy to being in person. Yeah. You're in a room with people that are there to make deals. you're going to bring us a deal that you want to get across the finish line that day. Don't... If you haven't got stuff on the line where you need to make deals because we're going to give you the coaching, we're going to give you the preparation that if you follow the coaching and instruction and that deal's a possibility, some negotiations, you're the fool in the game.

28:01We actually want you to figure that out too because then you stop investing your most precious commodity, which is your time, in that. But you're going to be better off substantially if you come to one of our professional dealmaker day, May 15th, if you're coachable. You want to come and prove to us that we're wrong? Fine. I hope you get satisfaction out of that. Come and follow our advice. You're going to make a deal that day. I love it. So bring a real deal. Yeah, bring a real deal. Theoretical, yeah, as you said earlier, right? It's a lot different. when you're doing it for real. How do you know if you're the fool in the situation?

28:41All right, so at least 20 % of negotiations, you're the fool in the game. 20%. And the number is actually higher. Okay. But the other side is doing due diligence. Okay. Or your competing offer. Now, the business community thinks this is okay. So they don't mean to be playing you for the fool. They think this is, you know, submit an RFP. give us our RFP. Tell us how you're going to do this. Lay out your approach. The business world accepts that by and large and doesn't realize that they're wasting your time, but there's always a favor. Human nature makes its mind up anywhere from 50 to 80 percent before they even speak to you.

29:25So you got to understand where they are. Are you competing bid? Are they due diligence? You know, I get advised, we're looking for an HR consultant probably about six years ago now. So how do I find an HR consultant? I go to somebody I've already been doing business with, my accountant at the time, because that's a trusted advisor. And I say, who do you recommend? Now I'm going to go with that recommendation, but he recommends a specific company. And then he says, go talk to XYZ Corp just to see what they have to say. XYZ Corp's not going to get that business. Yeah. They're in point of fact just to see what they have to say.

30:02And that's kind of standard operating in the business world. Now, what you want to do is you can sniff out if they're talking to you just to see what you have to say real easily. We'll go back to the negotiation skill I used to find the produce, the Brussels, the broccoli sprouts. Yeah. An observation. In this case, the observation with someone I suspect might still be shopping is I'm simply going to say, sounds to me like you guys are still shopping around. Nine times out of 10, they're going to tell me what the truth is. I've got another guy who's dedicated. He's still addicted to yes. So he'll say, on a scale of 1 to 10, where do we rank on that we're going to get this deal?

30:43Now, what happens when he does that scale question, if they hesitate, that's because you got a low number. If they hesitate, they go like, well, you know, you've got a good chance. Yeah. But if you're the favorite in the game, they're going like, oh, 9 out of 10. They'll tell you right away. Yeah. Because it feels so good for them to give you that information. And they're very caught off guard. Right. And I think people are afraid to ask those questions. Horrifying. Well, they're afraid of the answer. Right. Exactly. They want to know, but they don't want to know. And when you think about it, hope is not a strategy.

31:26Right. Love that. You might not like the answer. Yeah. But if you go from wondering if you're the fool in the game to knowing, then now you move on. No hard feelings. And you stop spinning your wheels. Right. And you can stop wasting your time because it's not going to go anywhere. Exactly. Right. That's fascinating. Pete, what do you want to know? because I have a couple more. Yeah. So I think I mentioned before we jumped on this, Chris, that I work at a venture capital firm on the talent side. So I've spent a lot of time chatting with founders about, you know, building teams. And I think inevitably in all of that process is a lot of negotiation.