Getting what you want: A guide to negotiating

What It Covers

Columbia Law professor and mediator Alex Carter and linguist Magdalena Hoehler present frameworks for negotiation and intercultural communication. Carter draws on 20 years of mediation experience to reframe negotiation as relationship-steering, while Hoehler identifies three hidden language challenges that shape romantic partnerships across cultures.

Key Questions Answered

• •Open-ended questioning: Replace closed yes/no questions with "Tell me" statements to unlock maximum information in any negotiation. "Tell me how the company sees the salary range" outperforms "What's the budget?" because it builds trust simultaneously with information-gathering, producing better outcomes in both salary negotiations and personal relationships, including with teenagers who instinctively ignore scripted social questions.
• •Two-part negotiation framework: Every negotiation has a mirror phase before the table phase. Before engaging anyone else, list your needs in two buckets — tangibles (salary, title, resources) and intangibles (autonomy, challenge, communication style) — then define what each intangible looks like concretely. Skipping this self-negotiation causes confusion, under-asking, and misaligned priorities during the actual conversation.
• •Strategic silence: Research confirms that pausing approximately 3.5 seconds after making a proposal increases the likelihood of receiving a high-value concession from the other party and registers as collaborative rather than aggressive. Filling silence with nervous justifications undermines negotiating position — ask the question or state the proposal, then stop talking completely.
• •Relationship-first positioning: Carter's motto "I never request, I recruit" reflects decades of mediation data showing that treating counterparts as co-conspirators rather than adversaries produces better long-term outcomes. In repeat-encounter industries, tricking someone once costs future deals. Employers also expect salary negotiation — hiring managers in 2020 reported 10–20% budget flexibility that candidates never requested.
• •Intercultural power dynamics in language: In bilingual partnerships, the native speaker holds a structural advantage — faster responses, greater vocabulary precision, and emotional fluency — that intensifies during conflict. Linguist Hoehler recommends two countermeasures: build awareness that both partners carry hidden language disadvantages, then actively construct a shared microculture with invented words, switched languages, and co-created humor to equalize the dynamic.