Negotiating a deadline: understanding constraints without giving in
In Vevey, dealings between the global food industry, group headquarters and SMEs on the Swiss Riviera can bring together scheduling constraints that are difficult to reconcile. The managerial question is specific: when a partner requests an extension, should the priority be to share their concern or to understand what limits their room for manoeuvre?
What the literature establishes
Adam D. Galinsky, William W. Maddux, Debra Gilin and Judith B. White (2008, Psychological Science) experimentally distinguish perspective taking, focused on another person's thoughts and interests, from empathy, focused on their feelings. In their negotiation tasks, perspective taking does more to facilitate the discovery of beneficial agreements and trade-offs between different priorities. These findings concern specific instructions in experimental settings, not the general superiority of a particular managerial profile.
Another person's perspective remains a hypothesis
Nicholas Epley, Boaz Keysar, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich (2004, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that perspective taking can begin with an anchor in one's own viewpoint, followed by insufficient adjustment. Imagining another person's situation therefore does not guarantee an understanding of their actual constraints. A manager might, for example, attribute a request for an extension to a lack of resources when the decisive issue is an approval that is still pending.
The premature conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that emotions should be set aside to negotiate better. The cited research only supports distinguishing approaches that have different effects in the tasks studied. Acknowledging a partner's concern remains compatible with a firm exploration of their priorities, without turning that acknowledgement into a concession. (our executive and employee training programmes)
The limits of the evidence and of common practice
These experiments do not reproduce the full complexity of an ongoing business relationship, including its economic dependencies and contractual obligations. Nor do they demonstrate that emotional intelligence training automatically improves negotiated agreements. In practice, asking managers to put themselves in someone else's shoes remains an incomplete instruction unless their assumptions are also checked.
A practical check in Vevey
Within SHR's Emotional Intelligence programme, an exercise applicable to dealings between headquarters and Riviera SMEs would distinguish, for each extension request, the emotion expressed, the assumed constraint and the constraint confirmed by the partner. Over a four-week pilot period, the team could record whether this confirmation preceded the decision and whether an option other than accepting or refusing the extension was considered. The measure would be the proportion of requests containing both written records, verifiable in an anonymised log. This indicator would document an exploratory practice, not a performance gain or a level of emotional intelligence. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Vevey in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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