Quartz at Work: “…Tactical empathy requires demonstrating to your counterpart how deeply you’re listening to their words and, in effect, how thoughtfully you’re considering their position…A negotiation is typically portrayed as a winner-take-all skirmish. Be it haggling for a higher salary, asking for a promotion, or closing a deal, the process might summon tactics, for example, from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.Countless MBA courses and textbooks have taught us that business is a battlefield. Ironically, Chris Voss, a top hostage negotiator turned leadership coach, has a different take. Years with the FBI, and later running a leadership training consultancy called the Black Swan Group, have taught Voss that negotiations entail trust and teamwork more than pinning an opponent to the ground. “I believe in a collaborative approach to conflict,” he says. “One definition of a confrontation is a focused comparison. If we start looking at stuff together, we both get an instinct that what we’re attacking is the problem.” In other words, pushing one’s agenda first entails understanding your counterpart’s motivations. In a four-week MasterClass course titled “Win Workplace Negotiations,” Voss instead suggests tactical empathy—”intentionally using concepts from neuroscience to influence emotions”—as a core stratagem in navigating any type of friction. Helped by the Hollywood-caliber production value that MasterClass has made its signature, the resulting session is like a workplace training video that’s actually engrossing…”