—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Brandon Voss is the Director of Training & Operations at The Black Swan Group, which provides negotiation services and solutions for individuals, teams and corporations of all sizes and levels of experience. Brandon is also the son of Leadership and the Environment guest, Chris Voss, and co-author of
Brandon is the thought leader at Black Swan regarding negotiator types. He has made it his mission to teach clients how to identify the basic types of negotiators and has developed a methodology for dealing with each type in the most successful way.
Brandon’s background is in sales. He has done retail sales for Macy’s and business-to-business sales for Verizon. Based on his extensive experience with various selling approaches he has been instrumental in adapting the FBI hostage negotiation techniques to the business world. Realizing that the timetable is different in the business world than in high-stakes hostage situations, he created the “Short Game†– a needs assessment procedure that helps in the critical discovery process phase of negotiation.
In addition to training clients, Brandon has guest lectured at USC Marshall School of Business, Georgetown McDonough School of Business and organizations like Policy Innovators in Education.
We start talking about how to learn---you have to practice. This is one of the most important things to get, not just in learning but in life. Too many people read and analyze, expecting to learn. If you don't change your behavior, you aren't learning, which I took a long time to learn. If you read and analyze, you behave impersonally---that is, you don't learn social and emotional skills. Then we talk about his smiling challenge. For what I said last time about it ducking acting environmentally, it showed how experiential exercises work. Reading and traditional learning alone don't get behavioral results like these. Also, he started acting more on wrappers, which I didn't talk about. If I had chastised him last time on doing too little, I think that imposing my values on him that way would have inhibited him to doing more. I tried to react with nonjudgmental support for where he was, not counting what I said in the post-conversation audio, which he didn't hear. Not sure if you heard how the conversation was about support and reward, while still focusing on doing things. At least that was my goal. I consider support one of the most critical elements of leading. Most conversations I see on the environment are analytical and judgmental---"government should do this," "corporations should do that . . . anything but "I'm going to act." I read his saying that he was already doing things as revealing a common but tragic result of mainstream environmental message: that acting distracts or is a chore. I felt that way, but with experience I've made acting on my environmental values become something that adds joy.
Brandon loves negotiation and teaching it. He learned from the top in the field and practices it apparently 24/7. We start our conversation by covering negotiation as developed by an FBI hostage negotiator---Chris, his father. More than the family nature of their business or the FBI basis of his training and technique, I enjoyed his educational approach to negotiation. Brandon wants to help you improve. Keep in mind, his view of negotiation is not the mainstream view where you just use tricks to defeat your counterparty under high-stakes tension. Listeners who have read my books or taken my courses, or know and appreciate what I call Method Learning, will hear that Brandon's teaching technique is like mine: you learn from practicing the basics. The conversation sounds tactical at the beginning---things like what words to use and what goals to seek in a negotiation. As we continue, you'll hear him reveal strategy, and it's not just to win. It's closer to how to live and participate in relationships. I hope you get as much out of the bottle example we talk about as I did, seeing the richness and depth available to grow a relationship in any negotiation.