211. How To Get Anything You Want At Work (The BATNA Method), with Richard Birke
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What if I told you that the reason you're not getting what you want at work has nothing to do with your performance, your qualifications, or even how much your boss likes you? Research by Francesca Gino and Deepak Malhotra from Harvard Business School shows that having strong alternatives changes how you negotiate. You become more confident and willing to take risks.

But here's the thing. Most of us negotiate from the worst possible position, desperation. Well, if I have another job offer, if I have somebody in the background who said, Rich, the moment you leave your current industry, I'll give you a million dollars a day to work for me. I'm going to negotiate a lot harder with you because I can afford to walk away. Now, if I have nothing and I lose what I have, I'm going to have to work for you.

I might lose my apartment. I might lose everything. My walkaway alternative is terrible.

And so I'm not going to have a lot of power negotiating with you. That was Richard Burke, who's our mediator, negotiation expert, one of the most experienced dealmakers in the world. He's a Harvard Law graduate who went on to lead research at Stanford, taught business decision-making for 25 years, and now handles billion-dollar disputes, including cases like Enron and Trump University. But today, he's here to talk to you about something much more personal, your career.

What if the key to getting what you want at work isn't how you ask, but how easy it is to walk away? You are listening to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered occupational psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

And as you would have heard already, we're joined by Richard Burke, who spent 40 years mastering the art of negotiation. He's a Harvard Law graduate who became Associate Director of Stanford Center on International Conflict Negotiation, then spent 25 years as a law professor teaching decision-making.

Now at JAMS, he handles billion-dollar disputes such as Enron, Trump University and massive corporate settlements. And what he's discovered will genuinely surprise you. You know how we always think negotiations about being persuasive or charming or even having the right arguments? Well, it turns out that's completely backwards. The most powerful negotiators don't win because they're great talkers. They win because they have something called a BATNA.

BATNA stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. And the psychology behind it is really interesting. When you have a strong alternative, your brain literally operates differently. You're more creative, more confident, and paradoxically, more generous in negotiations.

So today we're going to show you how to create your own BATNA so you can negotiate like a pro. We're also going to look at why most people negotiate badly. We're also going to give you a step-by-step system for getting anything you want at work, not through manipulation or aggression, but through preparation and strategic thinking. So are you ready to discover the secret that world-class negotiators have been using all along? Let's find out after this very short message from our lovely sponsors.

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Welcome back. So here's the thing. Before you can negotiate for anything, you need to know what you actually want. And Richard has this brilliant technique for figuring that out. Because our wants change depending on our mood, maybe even the time of day, whether we've had coffee. One of the basic questions in negotiation is what do I want?

And, you know, because it's hard to get things if you don't know, if you can't articulate them to at least to yourself and the privacy of your own home. So you have to be able to think, what do I care about? What do I want? And yet I know that wants are very transient. There are things that I might want 10 o'clock at night when I'm getting ready to go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning and think, yeah, maybe not.

You know, I try to, um, there, there's a, a wonderful social scientist who says the me that makes my breakfast, my lunch in the morning is a different person than the me that opens my lunch at noon. And sometimes the me at noon says, who packed this? And why did they think I would want, you know, four lettuce leaves? It was like, you know, so the me in the morning was thinking about a healthy lunch and the me at lunchtime wanted, um,

something substantial. So knowing that wants are transitory, that some of them change, that they're dynamic, not static. When I'm thinking about any kind of decision or negotiation, I usually take out my phone and I have a little notes section, as we all do in our wonderful little computers in our pockets. And I'll just make a caption of whatever it is I'm thinking about.

Where do I want to go on vacation? Um, which car do I want to buy? Should I leave my job? Um, you know, um, what will I do next? It could be anything. Um, and,

I might have a thought when I'm commuting to work and think, Oh, open my phone note, put that in. Um, I might have a thought later when I'm at lunch, I might have a thought when I'm at dinner and I will just sort of keep that list of phone notes until I start to see that I'm not adding anything new. Um, because, um,

I will notice that there may be basic conflicts on there. Like, you know, I want to lose weight and I love to eat pints of Ben and Jerry's. And so what I will have to first admit to myself, and this is a tough one,

It's hard to know what you want because sometimes you want things that are mutually exclusive. What Rich is describing there is actually backed by psychological research from Barry Schwartz. Link in the show notes. When we make decisions under emotional stress, like when we hate our job, our cognitive load increases and we start to limit our own options. It's called choice overload and it makes us worse negotiators before we even start.

And this is where most people make their first mistake. They decide they only want one thing and refuse to consider alternatives. Richard calls this bargaining against yourself. A mistake that many people make is they bargain against themselves and they reduce the bargaining range before they've ever found out what's available.

So if I say, do I want a red car or do I want a blue car? And I decide I only want a red car and I will not even consider blue cars. And so then I go to the car dealership and I started asking for cars and they say, would you consider another color? And I say, no.

I never find out that there was a blue car that they were willing to sell me for a dollar. That would have been the perfect car and it would have made me very happy. But I've already limited the bargaining range by negotiating against myself in advance. So when I am taking those phone notes,

when I'm writing things in there, I expect that there will be contradictions because I know, like Walt Whitman said, I am large. I contain multitudes. Um, some of those multitudes, uh, don't exist in the same universe as some of the others. Um, I want to lay in bed all day. I want to go get exercise. Um, so,

And once I start to see that the notes are kind of coming to an end, I can tell that, you know, I've tried that. Well, I'm going to take a note when I'm hungry. I'll take a note when I'm full. I'll take one when I'm tired. I'll take one when I just had a cup of coffee. When I start to see that nothing new is happening.

Then I can look at those notes and I can start to prioritize. What are the main themes that I'm seeing? And I try to look at it as an objective third party. So that's the first problem. We don't know what we want. And the second problem is we limit our option before we explore them. The third problem is that most people just don't prepare properly. They think negotiation is about being clever in the moment. But Richard says it's actually about the work you do beforehand. First thing I would ask you is, well, tell me about your discontent.

What is it? Was it, were you happy once and now you're not? Um, because that could be your interests have changed. Uh, you've gotten bored. Um, something has changed at work, but I want to find out what happened. What do you care about? Because your discontent is going to be highly revealing about the things you want more of and less of.

So I want us to be 100% clear on that. Is it just money? Is it something else? What's the issue there? Then I'm going to ask you questions about your relationship with your boss. Say, okay, so can you have an exploratory conversation without it leading, going to a bad place?

You know, can you say, I'd like to talk about making a change? Is your boss going to say, well, the change could be, we'll just remove your name from the door and you'll be, you know, or do you socialize and say, yeah, I think that they'd be open to that. So I'm going to first start thinking about what do I want? And then I'm going to think, how do you inquire about what's available?

Can that be a collaborative conversation with your boss? So we've established that most people negotiate poorly because they don't prepare, don't know what they want and limit their own options. Now, this is where we get to this BATNA idea. And honestly, when Richard first explained it to me, it completely changed the way I think about every conversation I've ever had at work. Let's learn more about this BATNA after this very, very short break. Welcome back.

Here's where it all gets interesting. Richard has a framework that solves all of these problems. It's built around three questions. And the third one is where the real power lies. But firstly, let's just remind ourselves what BATNA is. Can you just tell us what the BATNA was? Is that an acronym, was it? Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. It's what you walk away to. I like to boil things down to simple, easy to remember rubrics. Yeah.

And I think in every decision and every negotiation, you want to ask yourself three hard but basic, simple questions. And the first one is, what do I want? And like we say, that one's hard. So if you're thinking, you know, do I want to leave my job? Do I want to make my job better? Well, what does better mean?

Because better is going to be eclectic. It's going to be better to you. You need to separate out the means to an end from the end. It's like, well, I'd like to get a raise. Well, why? Well, because I want a nicer car. Well, maybe the company can lease you a car, right? There may be other options. So the interest versus the way to achieve that interest are different. So the first question everybody should ask themselves is, what do I want?

The second question that they should ask is what's available? Because many people in decision making become attached to things that would never in a million years happen. So you need to think what's available because it's no use getting attached to things that are never going to happen. And when I say what's available, part of what makes that

complex is let's say we're in a negotiation. You're my employer and I'm looking for a change of status. Um, what's available is going to be a product of what you're going to say yes to. So that second question is a question that requires exploration of a world outside of you. So if you're interacting with others, um,

I'd like to get a job as a movie star. Okay. Is that available? Have you explored that? You know, how realistic is that? And the third question is, well, what happens if there's no deal? In other words, how well does the status quo serve my interests? That third question, what happens if there's no deal? That

That's your BATNA. And the psychology here is brilliant. Research by Adam Galinsky at Columbia Business School shows that people who have strong alternatives feel more confident, take more risks and achieve better outcomes in negotiations. It's not just strategy.

So let's go back to Richard explaining how he used a BATNA when he was negotiating for his current position at JAMS. In the negotiation literature, the best selling book in our field of all time is Getting to Yes. The authors talked about something called the best alternative to a negotiated agreement and they created the acronym BATNA. What's my BATNA?

Um, for folks around the world, they can just think that what, what do I walk away to if the deal falls apart? Um, now the better your baton, the more power you have at the negotiation table. When I was negotiating with jams about, am I going to join? I was a tenured law professor.

I didn't have to take a deal in order to keep feeding my family or enjoying what I was doing. So I had a really good walk away and I brought that right to the table and said, look, you know, it's going to be hard for you to persuade me to leave because I kind of like where I am. But I'm open to listening. And of course they listened.

succeeded and here I am. So if I'm sitting down with you and you're my employer and I say, you know, Al, I want to be wearing the headphones and doing the interviews sometimes. Um,

And, uh, you say, well, maybe I don't think you're quite, you know, I make it look easy cause I'm a pro, but you know, there may be some things that you could develop and we could think about that. Um, well, how hard am I going to bargain with you? If I'm going to say, no, if I don't get a podcast in a week, I'm out of here. Um,

Well, if I have another job offer, if I have somebody in the background who said, Rich, the moment you leave your current industry, I'll give you a million dollars a day to work for me. I'm going to negotiate a lot harder with you about how soon I'm going to get a podcast because I can afford to walk away. Now, if I have nothing and if I say, gosh, if I jeopardize my relationship with Al and I lose what I have,

I might lose my apartment. I might lose everything. Um, my walkaway alternative is terrible. And so I'm not going to have a lot of power negotiating with you about a change in duties. So the, one of the first things a savvy negotiator will do before they sit down at the table and think about what's available is they will make their walkaway better. You know, it's, it's kind of like, um,

If you're negotiating for a new car and your car is broken, maybe you want to see if maybe a little small fix to your car is available. Because when you're negotiating with the car dealer, if you have a car that doesn't work, you're

The dealer's going to have the upper hand. If you have a car that you can at least drive for a little while, you bought yourself some time. And so some of what might need to happen is before you sit down and negotiate with your boss about different terms, you might want to ask, well, what happens if the negotiation goes south?

And can I prepare better? Can I have a better walkaway alternative? That's going to make a huge difference in negotiation. I love that car analogy because it shows how your banner isn't just about having options. It's about your psychological state.

When you know you can walk away, you literally negotiate differently. Your posture changes, your voice changes, your confidence changes. So it's not about being manipulative or aggressive. It's just about being prepared. For example, you should never go into a client pitch without knowing exactly what you'll do if they say no. It's going to make you much more relaxed.

which makes you better at the actual conversation because you can concentrate on what people are saying. Now, to be fair, this does raise an interesting question. Imagine you're negotiating for a raise at work. If having a strong BATNA gives you power, should you go out and get job offers just to use as leverage? I asked Richard about this because honestly, it felt a bit weird to me. That doesn't really feel that ethical to me. I mean, if you're just using a job as leverage...

Right. Um, you have to go back to the, what do I want? And, um, maybe you say, well, geez, I don't want to have bad relationships in the industry. And so, uh, you know, I'm kind of poisoning the well, if I go and, uh, let's just say flirt with a lot of people with no intention of ever taking a next step, um, that'll quickly become known. And I don't think that'll feel good to you as well. Um,

but I don't think there's anything wrong with being open to exploring. Um, when jams was talking with me about joining, um, I didn't really ask them. They asked me. Um, and so, you know, I was, uh, I guess I was in a little bit of a privileged position that way. Um, had I really desperately wanted out of my job, it might've looked a little bit different. Um,

but I wasn't going to go try to get another offer that I wasn't going to accept just as leverage on my own job. Because then I have to turn back to that person and say, thanks for the job offer, but no. And if they say why it's like some level of, well, I was just using you as a tool. And,

Maybe some people feel fine about that, but I wouldn't. Now, exploring, seeing what's available, talking to friends in other industries or adjacent industries, you know, a lawyer talking to another lawyer at another firm saying, how are things over in your shop? Are you looking for people? What kind of qualifications? How do mine match up?

There's a lot that you can do short of applying for a job strategically just as leverage. What Rich is touching on there is something psychologists call authentic self-presentation. Basically, being genuine about your interests rather than playing games. And there's research from the China Europe Business School showing that people can actually sense when you're being strategic versus when you're being honest. And it affects their willingness to cooperate.

Now there's another question, something I read about, and it's about whether you should pretend to want something you don't actually want just to get something you do want. Rich has got some quite strong views on this. I read somewhere, I think it was in Bo Burlingham's book, that there was an entrepreneur and he used to negotiate very hard on certain, when he was buying real estate, on certain terms, like the price, for example. He'd negotiate really hard on the price, knowing that actually what he wanted was money.

more square footage or something, or he wanted something else. So we sort of like negotiated really hard on the price and then went, all right, tell you what, I'll go to your price, but you have to throw this in. And the point was he was prepared to pay the price and all he wanted was the thing that he asked them to throw in at the very end, like a sort of offhand comment.

is that just a nice story is that is there a lesson there perhaps for someone who is doing a bit negotiating at work yeah and i don't know that i uh agree with that lesson entirely because we uh we categorize that as strategic misrepresentation of interests be careful what you ask for because the other side might say yes um you know if uh if in the real estate negotiation um

Somebody just, you know, exceeds to the price. Well, now all of a sudden you say, oh, but I really want square footage. Well, so you're saying, okay, so you want everything. You wanted the best price and you want more square footage, or you were lying to me about price and you only care about square footage. Now, all of a sudden the deal is in a whole new place and the negotiation, the party on the other side might say, I'm not really sure I want to work with you.

So if we're talking about employment and you're talking about a continuing relationship with an employer, that's strategic misrepresentation of interest, like asking for a job duty you don't want because, you know, you think that it'll go to somebody else and then they'll owe you a favor because they said no. Oh, that could, you know, that could be a big problem. But now I have reason not to trust you or anything you say, because I know you're asking for things you don't want and you're not bargaining in good faith.

And in an employment context, that could be terrible. But at least if you go forward and you talk about your interests as opposed to the positions, and the same is true with your employer, to say, you know, I want more responsibility. I want more money. I'll retire. I want to feel excited about my job. I want to maybe, you can point at somebody in the organization and say, I eventually want to be them when they retire. So if you talk about your interests,

as opposed to turning them into concrete positions, there may be many ways to achieve your interests that the other person knows about, and they could start to reveal, well, we're thinking about starting a new project, and we weren't sure who was going to do that. We were thinking about expanding this division or opening a new

you know, branch over here. And maybe would you be interested in some of those things? And now you're in a nice dynamic conversation. Whereas if you say, you know, if I don't get $10,000 more a year, uh, by Friday, I quit.

Um, well, you better have a really good BATNA if you're going to negotiate that hard. So we've established you need to be honest about what you want and ethical about how you build your BATNA. But Richard also has this brilliant technique for figuring out what career move you should make in the first place. It's all about role models. Now, this comes from Richard's own story of leaving the DA's office to become a professor. He had this moment where he realized he needed to find someone in his field who was actually happy.

I would encourage anybody who is first, honor the feelings that you're having, but don't take a transient moment as reality. It's just a reality in that moment. So it wasn't like I had one day where I thought, oh, I don't feel like getting up and going to work. It was the beginning of a seed of something that kept going on. And I realized, okay, I need to make a change.

Um, and so first thing honoring your own sense of where you need to be and what you want to do. Secondly, um, have a role model. You know, I have a, I have a daughter adopted from China and she was super excited to see, uh, Asian figures represented as the leads in movies. Right. And so, you know, there was that sort of, if you can see it, you can imagine it. Um, and so I think in your profession, um,

just ask yourself if you could be any person in your field, who would it be and why? Right. And start. Uh, and so I started making decisions based on role models who were one step ahead of me in the path toward happiness. And of course the, uh, the funny little paradox, um, was, uh, happiness is the journey, not the destination. Um,

So once I was moving toward a goal, uh, I realized I was waking up in the morning and I was excited again. So, um, that served me well. And that's a piece of advice that I give everybody, um, step back and always imagine, um,

Is there, you know, is there something you want to do? And if there is, it's probably because you saw somebody doing it and thought, oh, I'd like to be doing that. Right. So let's just bring this all together for a second. You worked out what you want using the phone notes technique. You've identified a role model, someone who's genuinely happy, and you've built your BATNA ethically. Now what? How do you actually have that conversation with your boss?

This is where Richard basically becomes your negotiation coach. He walks through exactly what questions to ask yourself before you sit down with your manager. As a practical matter, if I were helping you, I'd say, why are you unhappy? What do you think would make you happy? And tell me about your boss. So...

Those that's a practical way of saying, you know, taking the big questions and turning them into a context. And of course, you're going to have answers to those questions with me. And those are going to lead to additional questions as well. So with the limited information that I have now, that's about as far as I could get. But if you started to enrich the story and tell me, you know,

I would like to do more of this, you know, and it's like, oh, sounds like you should be inventing a new AI company. And finally, there's this question of timing. How long should you wait before deciding whether to stay or go? Rich's approach here is really smart.

I love this idea of finding out the person who is happiest in your industry. I'd never thought of it that way. However, let me ask you, everyone has bad days at work and lots of people have bad weeks at work and some people are unfortunately have bad months at work. So how long are we leaving it before we start going, this really isn't for me? I'm going to think more proportionally. You know, if you've been in a job for,

15 years and you know let's just say you're well a law professor and there's a change in who's the dean and all of a sudden the dean doesn't support your program quite the way the prior dean did or you know financially or class schedules or you know whatever things are not things aren't the way they used to be and we put on our rose-colored glasses and we say wow yesterday was so much better um

Well, 15 years, you know, one bad semester is not enough to say time to go. If you're in your first semester and you hate it, maybe it was a bad fit. So,

I think that you can't make that decision in isolation. So there you have it. The BATNA method is not about being ruthless or manipulative. It's about understanding how true negotiating power comes from having genuine alternatives. And like Richard said, when you have a good BATNA, you can actually afford to be more generous in negotiation because you're not coming from a place of desperation. Your entire psychology is going to change.

Which brings us back to that preparation piece. As we said before, people with strong alternatives don't just get better outcomes. They're more creative problem solvers and they maintain better relationships because they're negotiating from confidence, not fear. There's a very famous book by an FBI guy. I think his name's Chris. Chris Voss. Never split the difference. My question is that a lot of the

stuff in that book, you can read it and you go, oh, so if I just use certain words in a certain way, I'll get my own way. It doesn't seem as simple as that. You know, in order to sell a book, you have to distill things down into some pretty simple phrases that are memorable. And, you know, Chris Voss is a brilliant negotiator. He's a great marketer. It's a very popular book and there's a

Everybody who's giving advice in some respects cannot get outside of that's the advice that they would give themselves. So, uh, I would say it's not enough to read one negotiation book, no matter what that book is. Read three, four or five negotiation books and ask yourself, um,

what they all have in common and what you'll, if you read getting to yes, or if you read, you know, uh, blacks and Sabini is, you know, books on negotiation that are Harvard business school people or Max Bazerman's books, you know, whatever it is, this funny. And there's, um, you also want to be looking for books written by authors who feel like maybe they resemble you.

I'm going to do a plug for a book by a colleague. Damali Peterman just wrote a book called Negotiating While Black, and it's how to be who you are to get what you want.

Right. And so, you know, maybe if you're thinking, you know, maybe you're a young African-American female and you're saying, oh, I'm reading five negotiation books by 65 year old white guys. I just don't necessarily see myself in these conversations. Just be aware that there's a much bigger literature out there and you can find people who kind of speak to you. Now, one of the things that they're all going to say is prepare, prepare, prepare.

Right. So Chris Voss was not just sort of, oh, it's a hostage situation. Let me pick up the phone. I mean, he was asking questions about like, who is this person? What is this situation? Right. So the amount of preparation that, you know, you're going to find that to be common. Whenever you see hard and fast rules, I have a knee jerk negative reaction.

Um, never split the difference. Um, actually sometimes splitting the difference is really the most efficient, simple, best way. And, um, I do that with friends when we go to lunch all the time. So never split the difference. It's like, um, avoid knee jerk splitting the difference.

I would say to, uh, you know, buy Chris Voss's book, um, wherever you are, Chris, I'm a fan. Um, but you're not the only voice out there. Uh, and, uh, I think the title of your book, well, provocative, um, maybe it was a little bit too absolute for, for, for me. Um, so, uh, always prepare, uh,

and then take everything else with a grain of salt. So here's your homework this week, and this is going to sound completely mad, but trust me just for a second. I want you to go out and try and negotiate for something you absolutely do not want. Maybe it's a car you hate or a service you'd never use or a product that's completely wrong for you. Brilliant, because your BATNA is perfect. You genuinely don't want it. You can walk away from anything they offer because you never wanted it in the first place.

Just be careful not to talk yourself into actually buying it. Exactly. And pay attention to how differently you feel in that conversation. Notice how relaxed you are, how curious you become about their position, how willing you are to explore creative options when you've got zero attachment to the outcome. Then ask yourself, how can I bring this same energy to the negotiations that actually matter? The promotion conversation, the salary review, the project assignment you really want.

If people want to learn more about you, where's the best place for them to go, Rich? Jamspathways.com is a wonderful website where you can learn more about how some of the ideas that I've been thinking about for decades are manifesting themselves in practice at work.

You can also easily link to my bio. And I'm also on the main JAMS site, which is just jamsadr.com. So feel free to reach out to see if there's a question I can answer for you or whether there's something that our company can do for yours. We'll be back next week with another deep dive into the science of work. Until then, remember, your BATNA isn't just your plan B, it's your secret weapon.

This is Truth, Lies and Work. We will see you next week.