Interactions between people constantly include some sort of negotiation, big or small: Where are we going to dinner? What movie are we going to watch? How much will you sell your product for? How much will you buy it for?
How do you reach a resolution? There are six paradigms for these interactions.
The Win/Win paradigm aims to find a solution that benefits both sides, where everyone is happy with the decision and committed to the plan. People with the Win/Win frame of mind value cooperation over competition and believe that there is plenty — of money, success, happiness, and good fortune — to go around.
Reaching a Win/Win resolution can be difficult, and sometimes feels impossible. It often requires you to persist in dialogues longer, even when it feels you’ve reached an impasse. You also must listen carefully and genuinely try to understand the other person’s perspective and goals, then explicitly and respectfully express your own point of view (we’ll go into detail about how to do this in Habit 5). Eventually both parties can reach a solution that neither could have come up with on her own.
The Win/Lose paradigm makes everything a competition, making it seem that one person’s success must come at the expense of someone else’s success. Leaders with the Win/Lose mentality use an authoritarian style of leadership; people with this mindset tend to use their authority, power, status, or personality to get what they want.
Most people have a deeply embedded Win/Lose mentality that’s taught early on and reinforced through different life experiences.
When a child is compared — explicitly or implicitly — to her sibling or other children, it creates a Win/Lose framework; if you’re being judged and valued based on how you stack up against someone else, then there’s no way both people can win. As children get older, they often look from their parents to their peers for validation, and other children raised with the same scripting are likely to reinforce the Win/Lose paradigm.
In school, grades are another form of external value. Distribution curves and percentiles inherently measure students’ performance against their classmates’, regardless of individual effort or immeasurable strengths and weaknesses: The position of a child in the 90th percentile depends entirely on the 89 percent of her classmates getting lower grades and 10 percent getting higher grades.
Sports is built on the Win/Lose paradigm: You can’t win a game unless the other team loses. And even our system of law is designed to determine who is guilty and who is innocent.
While there are situations when a Win/Lose approach is appropriate, most of life calls for cooperation, not competition.
People with the Lose/Win paradigm are more interested in taking the path of least resistance than getting what they want. They generally want to appease and gain acceptance by the other person, and they tend to be intimidated by others’ strengths and shy away from expressing their own wants and feelings. Leaders with this paradigm have a permissive, indulgent style of leadership.
Win/Lose people enjoy dealing with Lose/Win people because they face no resistance in getting what they want. But both the Win/Lose and Lose/Win paradigms stem from personal weaknesses and insecurities that are being expressed either in a power grab or acquiescence.
People with a Lose/Win mindset lose not only in their interactions, but also in their own well-being: They tend to suppress a lot of feelings, which can fester and bubble up in anger, resentment, cynicism, and psychosomatic illnesses that can especially affect the respiratory, nervous, and circulatory systems.
When two people with a Win/Lose paradigm get in a standoff, their attitudes can devolve into a vindictive Lose/Lose mentality, meaning that you want the other person to lose so badly that you are willing to take a hit as well. Lose/Lose is the result of getting so focused on the demise of your enemy that you become blind to everything else, including your own well-being. You may also develop a Lose/Lose paradigm if you’re very dependent and have no sense of personal direction, so you think that if you’re unhappy then others should be, too (think: misery loves company).
Ugly divorce battles are often examples of Lose/Lose. In one case, a judge orders a man to sell assets and give half the money to his ex-wife. The man sells his car, worth more than $10,000, for a meager $50 and hands $25 to his ex-wife. He does the same with the rest of the assets, selling them for far less than their true value just so that his wife also gets less money.
A Win paradigm is different than Win/Lose or Win/Win because it only focuses on your own outcome; if you have a Win mentality, you want to get what you want whether the other person wins or loses. The Win paradigm is an every-man-for-himself mentality — you’re concerned with taking care of yourself, and you expect others to do the same for themselves.
Sometimes a Win/Win resolution is impossible, and it’s better for the relationship if you walk away from a negotiation altogether. If it’s clear that the two parties aren’t going to see eye to eye, or they have entirely different goals and expectations, it can save a lot of tension and problems in the relationship to forego a deal and keep the relationship healthy and options open to collaborate on something else down the road.
This is where the Win/Win or No Deal paradigm comes in: With this framework, you’re determined to find a solution that benefits both parties and, if that’s impossible, you’re at peace with walking away from the deal, knowing that your goals and values don’t align in this situation.
Having the No Deal option in mind as you go into a negotiation — before either party has set any expectations or created any contracts — prevents you from forcing a deal that will inevitably bring issues later, potentially hurting the relationship. Win/Win or No Deal shows that you value the relationship more than the negotiation.
This paradigm can be especially useful in families. For example, if you can’t decide on a movie that everyone will enjoy for family night, skip the movie and do something else; this approach gives you the freedom to find something that everyone will enjoy, rather than sacrificing some people’s enjoyment for the sake of others’.
In business, the Win/Win or No Deal paradigm is most effective at the start of a relationship or enterprise, because No Deal may no longer be an option in an ongoing business relationship. If implemented from the start, this framework can preserve the core relationship, especially in family businesses or businesses started among friends; if they reach a disagreement somewhere along the lines, they can both agree to walk away (or have a buy/sell or other agreement) without hard feelings.
In certain relationships, No Deal is not an option. For example, if you can’t reach an agreement on something, you may not be willing to walk away from your spouse, and certainly not from your child. In those cases, you can find a compromise, which is a lower form of Win/Win.
No single paradigm is best for every situation; there will be times when different frameworks are appropriate. The challenge is to have an accurate enough perspective of a situation to determine which paradigm fits best, without just defaulting to what your scripting has ingrained in you.
If you’re playing a sports game, your teammates would probably appreciate you taking on a Win/Lose mentality. In a business setting, competition between regional offices that don’t need to work together can spur sales and motivate employees. A Win/Lose paradigm can be effective as long as the two parties don’t need to cooperate.
There may also be occasions in a relationship when it’s worth taking a Lose/Win approach. If something is really important to the other person and not very important to you, if you feel it would do more good to the relationship to affirm the other person by letting them get the win, or if it simply isn’t worth the time and effort to negotiate, a Lose/Win can be the way to go.
In other situations when you don’t need to be very concerned about how your win affects others, a Win paradigm is appropriate. For example, if your child is in danger, saving your child is your primary focus regardless of just about anything else.
However, in interdependent relationships — where two people are working together to achieve something — Win/Win is generally the only viable option. If both parties don’t win, they both ultimately lose in the long-term effectiveness of the relationship.
Either a Win/Lose or Lose/Win paradigm will bring a short-term win to one party, but the losing side will develop negative feelings that harm the relationship in the long term. In a business dealing, if I get a win in this negotiation, you may walk away and decide you don’t want to work with me in the future. That becomes a loss for me too.
Lose/Lose obviously does nothing to benefit a productive interdependent relationship. And the lack of consideration for the other person in a Win paradigm doesn’t foster the necessary trust and cooperation for an effective interdependent relationship.
A Win/Win paradigm is essential to a successful interdependent relationship, but it’s admittedly difficult; it takes courage, consideration, willingness to learn about the other person, and an ability to influence the other person. Win/Win is an effective form of interpersonal leadership that stems from a foundation of principle-centered personal leadership, which we explored in Habit 2.
There are five components necessary for a Win/Win paradigm, each creating the foundation for the next: Character, Relationships, Agreements, Systems, and Processes.
Character is the bedrock of a Win/Win paradigm, encompassing three critical traits.
1. Integrity — your commitment to “walk the talk” and live out your values and principles — is essential to a Win/Win mindset. If you don’t know what your values are, then you can’t determine what constitutes a win for you in the first place. Additionally, if you can’t keep the commitment to yourself to remain true to your principles, then how can other people believe that you’ll genuinely commit to helping them win?
2. Maturity requires you to balance the courage to express your goals and expectations with the consideration to factor in the other person’s perspective. Courage allows you to pursue the P (what you want) while also maintaining the PC (the relationship).
Think of a diagram with four quadrants, measuring courage on one axis and consideration on the other.
3. An Abundance Mentality reassures you that there is plenty — of success, money, and happiness — for everyone. You can only see the possibility of both people winning if you believe that one person’s success doesn’t come at the expense of the other person’s success. The Abundance Mentality requires a deep conviction of self-worth and security; once you know that you possess a unique inner value and a personal sense of direction, you can appreciate and celebrate others’ value and direction.
On the other side of the spectrum is the Scarcity Mentality, which says that life only offers a limited supply of good fortune, and if someone else has it then there’s less for you. Many people are scripted with the Scarcity Mentality, and that forms the basis for the Win/Lose paradigm. These people don’t have an intrinsic sense of self-worth, but rather measure their value in comparison with other people’s successes or failures. Because of this, a person with Scarcity Mentality struggles to be genuinely happy for other people’s successes and tends to surround herself with people who make her feel superior.
With a strong character foundation, you can create Win/Win relationships with Emotional Bank Accounts that carry high balances of trust and mutual respect. That trust is essential because you have to believe that the other person respects and cares about you so much that she genuinely wants you both to win. Both parties must care enough about each other and the relationship that they’re willing to do the sometimes difficult and tedious work of reaching a mutually beneficial resolution.
When you’re trying to find a Win/Win solution with a person who has a Win/Lose paradigm, focus on the relationship: Make deposits in the Emotional Bank Account, show that you respect and appreciate the other person and her perspective. Don’t be reactive, but rather try to truly listen to and understand the other person. This process is itself a major deposit in the Emotional Bank Account, and eventually the other person may recognize that you genuinely want a Win/Win solution.
Once you’ve established Win/Win relationships, you can create Win/Win agreements. Establishing an effective Win/Win agreement entails the five steps we discussed in stewardship delegation.
There are four kinds of positive and negative consequences that a manager or parent can impose (as opposed to natural consequences that are beyond either person’s control):
When people know what they’re supposed to achieve (results and accountability) and what will happen if they succeed (consequences) — without being confined to any particular method of getting there — they’re inclined to be incredibly motivated, creative, and innovative in reaching that goal.
In a business setting, an employer or manager can create Win/Win performance agreements by first having a thorough conversation with an employee about the expected results for a project, the guidelines, and the resources available. Once they’re on the same page with each other and with the company’s larger goals, the employee can write a “manager’s letter,” a letter to her boss summarizing what they discussed and outlining when their next check-in or performance review will occur. The manager’s letter empowers employees to manage themselves, liberating managers from micromanaging.
In order for agreements to be effective, the entire system has to be set up to reinforce the principles in your mission statement: Everything from training to communication to compensation systems need to align with the same values. If you want to embed a Win/Win mentality among your employees, don’t set up office competitions that undermine a spirit of cooperation. Even the most competent employees won’t perform to their full potential in a system that doesn’t support Win/Win.
For example, Covey worked with a large real estate company that held annual sales meetings where top performing employees were presented awards. The first time Covey attended, about 40 people received awards — for achievements based on comparisons, like “Most Sales” and “Highest Earned Commissions” — out of the 800 employees at the meeting. Despite all the fanfare, the other 760 people had essentially lost; the company wanted to instill a Win/Win culture, but they had created a Win/Lose system.
Covey worked with the organization to reform the system to reflect a Win/Win paradigm: They developed individual performance agreements that reflected the work and goals of each employee or team, and the following year the company presented awards to about 800 employees out of the 1,000 who attended the annual meeting. These awards recognized associates who met personal and team goals, and as a result everyone was able to celebrate and encourage each other more genuinely because each person’s achievement had been her own, not as a result of someone else’s shortcomings. Additionally, the performance agreements and Win/Win culture led those 800 people to produce as much in sales as the top 40 people the previous year, tremendously benefitting the organization as a whole.
With all the components in place — a character foundation, relationships built from that paradigm, agreements made, and systems in place — how do you actually arrive at a Win/Win solution?
This same framework is reflected in Harvard law professors Roger Fisher and William Ury’s explanation of principled negotiation: A principled approach to negotiation focuses on the problem as opposed to the person, creates options that benefit both parties, and uses objective criteria to measure those benefits.
Taking a Win/Win approach to negotiation and problem-solving is a paradigm shift for many people who were embedded with a Win/Lose framework. Use these steps to start practicing Win/Win in your life.