Beyond the Technical: Emotions and Negotiating in Security Leadership Roles
Discussions about emotions come up a lot in our incident preparedness and response work with clients because we’re always thinking about how different stimuli impact people’s expectations and ability to communicate effectively. It’s also a very common topic of focus with the CSO/CISOs and team leads who engage Discernible for communication coaching.
This week alone, I received the following comments from two different clients (shared with consent):
“Thanks for the help, you've got me past the murderous stage.”
“It may be a bad move, but it’s the only impulse that I have.”
Current events suggest other security leaders may be struggling with how to navigate emotional situations. So, here’s a resource I recommend: Beyond Reason by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro. This book builds on Fisher’s previous work from the 1980s, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, which he wrote with co-author William Ury.
Why am I recommending this book to security leaders?
In any cross-functional security role, such as a CSO/CISO, product security engineer, or TPM, a significant percentage of the work requires negotiating, e.g. what engineering tools/processes will be allowed, what risk tolerance will the organization accept, what security issues must be fixed before a release?
I recommend reading the book Beyond Reason specifically because it analyzes the role that emotions play in negotiating, two things that often trip up security leaders.
Before I get into the details of the book, let’s think about why emotions matter to leadership. When strong emotions arise, our attention narrows and impairs critical thinking. We’ve discussed the impact of negative emotions on this blog before when talking about how stress impacts our ability to think and complete tasks during incident response. The way our bodies and minds respond to strong emotions can lead to failure of even simple or familiar tasks as we reach the limits of our cognitive capacity. Strong emotions change the way we think, so having a strategy to deal with them before entering into a negotiation is strongly advised.
Next, consider that negotiations are a core competency of effective problem solving. Too often people associate negotiations as uncomfortable or difficult conversations, or perhaps a last ditch effort to resolve a seemingly dead end conflict. If that’s how you approach negotiating, that’s what it will become. However, in my experience, effective negotiation skills are a fundamental part of working with cross functional partners whose perspective, goals, and needs differ from ours. There’s no escaping it if you want to move your work forward. Forming productive relationships with other teams requires negotiation – and effective negotiation does not ignore emotions.
Below is a summary of a few key ideas explored in Beyond Reason and my thoughts on how they relate to leading effective security teams.
According to Fisher and Shapiro, an emotion is:
an experience
of personal significance
associated with a distinct type of physical feeling, thought, physiology, and action tendency
This indicates that emotions are deeply personal and highly influential. Negative emotions often create obstacles during negotiations while positive emotions can be used as an asset or facilitator in moving negotiations forward. Rather than suppress our emotions or let them overwhelm our perspective, Beyond Reason outlines five core concerns to help us identify and address underlying needs at the root of human emotions.
The 5 Core Concerns
Appreciation: Everyone wants to feel understood and valued, and cooperation increases when there is a mutual feeling of appreciation. Three primary obstacles to achieving this are:
Failing to understand a different point of view
Criticizing the merit of someone else’s point of view
Failing to effectively communicate your own merit
Affiliation: Affiliation describes our sense of connectedness with another group or person. Often we fail to recognize commonality as group members and individuals. We don’t have to become friends with everyone we work with, but recognizing affiliation helps us humanize them, which is an important element of effective negotiation. Fisher and Shapiro offer a specific piece of advice that I relay to my clients as well: avoid agreements based solely on emotions because they are prone to manipulation. Emotions can quickly and unexpectedly change. Agreements based on shared business goals, resources, or formal policies help keep things on track even when emotions change.
Note: there’s a great episode of the Hidden Brain podcast that discusses how our mindset shifts when we feel part of a group. Check it out here.
Autonomy: Having “freedom to affect or make decisions without the imposition of others,” is critical to negotiations, but so is having the discipline not to interfere with someone else's autonomy. Joint brainstorming sessions are common tactics for ensuring everyone is adequately informed of the challenges and metrics for success, but we don’t often enough consider consulting other colleagues before making decisions that will impact them. This infringes on their sense of autonomy and creates friction in negotiating.
Status: Competing for status is a quick way to torpedo any negotiation because it directly impacts feelings of self-worth. Why would cross-functional teams want to work with security if we make them feel bad about themselves, or if we don’t demonstrate respect for their expertise and experience? Do they feel treated as equal partners in the negotiation or do they get a strong-arm and competitive vibe from us?
Role: Everyone needs to feel fulfilled in their role during a negotiation in order to foster feelings of appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, and status – the required conditions for successful collaboration. You have the freedom to limit your role to the things you are obligated or expected to do, or you can expand it to incorporate more of your skills and interests.
Social Triggers
For group communications and relationship building, I also recommend leaders consider a SCARF training for their teams. The SCARF Model was developed by David Rock, in his 2008 paper "SCARF: A Brain-Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others," and represents the five key "domains" that influence our behavior in social situations:
Status – our relative importance to others
Certainty – our ability to predict the future
Autonomy – our sense of control
Relatedness – how safe we feel with others
Fairness – how fair we perceive interactions between people
The SCARF model is based on neuroscience research that implies these five social domains activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. As individuals, we prioritize and associate with these domains to varying degrees, which is why we don’t all react the same way to things. I mention SCARF here because of the similarities the social domains have with the core concepts discussed in Beyond Reason. Both resources are helpful in identifying and anticipating triggers that create specific reactions from ourselves and the people we work with.
Additionally, both recognize that the expression of strong negative emotions is rooted in an underlying concern that needs to be addressed in order for us to work together productively. This means understanding our own triggers and emotions as well as those of the people we’re working with. Learning how to identify those needs to effectively negotiate is an important part of effective leadership.
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