Know Your Negotiation Style
Why self-awareness and silence are the most powerful tools in every deal.
Last week, my colleague Stacy Boyles and I led a negotiation seminar at the 2025 national EDUCAUSE conference. It was the fourth time in the past decade I’ve offered this workshop, and we were pleased to have more than thirty IT and higher education leaders join us for a half-day session. Over three hours, we explored the full arc of negotiation: from understanding the process and the psychology behind it, to the art of bargaining, preparation, and listening, blending the timeless insights of Chester Karrass with the modern techniques of Chris Voss.
As we wrapped up, participants shared what resonated with them the most. The clear favorite was our segment on negotiation styles and the short self-assessment we created to help them identify their own approach, its strengths, and how to adapt to others. In today’s Dispatch, I want to revisit that part of the workshop: expanding on the idea of negotiation styles, how to recognize and respond to them in conversation, and how something as simple as silence can mean very different things to each.
Two Paths to Understanding Negotiation: Karrass and Voss
Every CIO negotiates daily: sometimes with vendors, sometimes with stakeholders, and sometimes with themselves. Chester Karrass and Chris Voss define two ends of modern negotiation thinking. Both see it as deeply human, but from different starting points. Karrass treats negotiation as a disciplined system: something to prepare for, structure, and manage through observation and timing. Voss sees it as an emotional encounter, where empathy, tone, and silence reveal what logic alone cannot.
Karrass’s world was the 20th-century boardroom, where he taught that negotiation is a process, not a moment. Every conversation hides interests behind positions, and success comes from curiosity, patience, and incremental trust. Voss, shaped by hostage negotiation, flips the model. He makes emotion the terrain itself, using tactical empathy and calibrated questions to draw out truth under pressure.
Both reject dominance in favor of understanding. Karrass builds value through structure, preparation, and patience; Voss earns it through empathy, tone, and presence. Together, they map the full landscape of negotiation, logic on one axis, emotion on the other, where every effective leader learns to move between both.
Negotiation as a CIO’s Core Discipline
Across my work, Chester Karrass and Chris Voss frame negotiation as the defining discipline of CIO leadership. Karrass supplies structure: preparation, timing, and disciplined concession. Voss adds emotional precision: tone, empathy, and calibrated questioning. Together, they chart the procedural and psychological terrain every IT leader must navigate daily to build and maintain trust and respect successfully.
In Extreme Anchors and the Overton Window, Karrass explains how unreasonable offers shift expectations, while Voss shows how to counter them through calm questioning and controlled pace. Extreme Anchors, Empathy, and the Art of Staying in the Room expands that logic: CIOs earn their seat at the table not through expertise but through empathy and listening: preparation in Karrass’s terms, tactical empathy in Voss’s.
In If You’re Doing Most of the Talking, You’re Losing, Voss’s principles dominate. Listening becomes leverage; influence comes from silence and curiosity, not argument. The Hidden Ladder in Every Negotiation applies both thinkers to escalation, teaching CIOs to recognize manipulation, reset tone, and restore reciprocity. Finally, Negotiation Is the Leadership Skill connects it all: CIO credibility rests on the constant negotiation of expectations, resources, and priorities.
A CIO’s effectiveness in negotiation depends as much on temperament as on technique. Every exchange reflects natural tendencies: assertive, accommodating, or analytical, each with its own strengths and risks. The assertive drives progress but can overlook empathy; the accommodator builds rapport but concedes too soon; the analyzer ensures accuracy but slows decisions. Skilled leaders read both their own style and their counterpart’s, flexing to fit the moment. Credibility, trust, and respect are not won in a single deal but built across countless such calibrated interactions.
The Three Negotiation Styles
Over time, I’ve explored several models that explain how people communicate, make decisions, and negotiate. Two of the most useful are the Effectiveness Institute framework, which classifies individuals as Controllers, Persuaders, Analyzers, or Stabilizers, and the Emergenetics model, which maps thinking preferences across Analytical, Structural, Social, and Conceptual domains. Both frameworks help leaders understand why some people focus on facts while others focus on relationships, why some thrive on structure while others seek possibility. Yet when it comes to negotiation, few systems are as practical as Chris Voss’s three-style approach.
The Analyst—methodical and data-driven, they value accuracy and preparation above all else. They speak slowly, avoid emotion, and hate surprises. Silence for them is not pressure; it’s thinking time. Their strength is logic and precision; their weakness is detachment and delay. The best way to engage an Analyst is through clarity, evidence, and patience.
The Accommodator—warm, optimistic, and relationship-oriented, they measure success by the quality of connection. They love open dialogue and harmony, often yielding concessions to keep relationships smooth. Their strength is rapport; their risk is avoidance. The best approach is to stay friendly but focused, encouraging honest disagreement and guiding talk toward action.
The Assertive—decisive, energetic, and goal-focused, Assertives see time as money and progress as power. They want to be heard and move fast, sometimes faster than others can follow. Their strength is momentum; their risk is impatience. To negotiate effectively with Assertives, listen deeply until they feel heard, then use calm, concise responses to build respect.
Of all the frameworks I’ve used, Voss’s remains the most accessible and actionable. People naturally fall into one of these three styles, and every healthy organization depends on a balance among them. The Assertives generate and promote ideas; the Analysts test and validate them; the Accommodators build the relationships that make them real. Leadership and negotiation, at their core, are the art of aligning these instincts, turning individual tendencies into collective strength.
As part of our recent EDUCAUSE 2025 Negotiation Workshop, Stacy Boyles and I developed a brief 20-question self-assessment to help participants identify which of Voss’s three negotiation styles best reflects their natural way of engaging others.
The goal isn’t to label, but to increase awareness of how instinctive patterns shape tone, pacing, and trust in every interaction. Understanding one’s dominant style and recognizing it in others turns negotiation from a contest of positions into a dialogue of personalities. A dialogue that either enhances or inhibits trust and respect.
Reading the Room: Assertive, Accommodator, Analyst
Every negotiation is a mix of personalities, and recognizing how others naturally engage is the first step to adapting your own approach. When preparing for a negotiation, think this through carefully. Most counterparts you encounter will fit broadly into one of these three styles, each with its own cues, strengths, and pitfalls.
The Assertive negotiator is easy to spot by pace and language. They move fast, speak directly (like “Let’s cut to the chase”), and focus on outcomes rather than process. To work effectively with them, keep your communication concise, energetic, and results-oriented. Affirm their ideas with phrases like “That’s right” and stay focused on progress. What frustrates them most is repetition and delay: rambling, emotional appeals, or overexplaining signal indecision. Never interrupt or challenge them directly; it reads as disrespect rather than engagement.
The Accommodator reveals themselves through warmth and openness. They build relationships first, negotiation second, and often use inclusive phrases like “I just want to get this done smoothly.” When engaging with them, focus on rapport and active listening. Reflect their perspective to show understanding and use calm, cooperative language that maintains trust. Avoid being forceful or overly transactional. Pushing too hard creates retreat, not resolution. They respond best to empathy and steady pacing, not urgency or confrontation.
The Analyst is methodical and measured. They ask detailed questions, speak slowly, and often pause to think. They see negotiation as a problem to solve, not a relationship to manage. The most productive way to engage is through facts, structure, and logical sequencing. Provide data, use calibrated questions, and leave a quiet space for analysis. Avoid rushing their decision-making or relying on emotional persuasion: they will read both as sloppy or manipulative. What earns their respect is clarity, preparation, and patience.
The assertive style often shows up in budget reviews or contract talks, where clarity and speed dominate. The accommodator appears in campus partnerships, where relationships carry more weight than timelines. The analyst emerges in data governance and process discussions, where logic and risk precision rule the day.
How each style responds to information, tone, and timing shapes every exchange, but the real test often comes not in what is said, but in what isn’t. The next dimension of negotiation is how each style interprets, uses, and reacts to the pauses between words.
The Power of Silence
Silence is one of the most underused tools in negotiation. A well-timed pause can invite reflection, reveal discomfort, or surface truth, but how it’s interpreted depends entirely on the listener’s style. Some see silence as space to think; others experience it as pressure or weakness. Understanding how each style perceives a pause helps to use quiet strategically. The key is to manage the silence rather than rush to fill it.
Assertives see pauses as interruptions in momentum, often interpreting them as hesitation or weakness. Their instinct is to fill the silence quickly to regain control. When negotiating with an Assertive person, the most effective response is to hold the pause. After asking a calibrated question, stay silent. The discomfort will prompt them to speak first, revealing valuable information. If you are the Assertive, resist the urge to dominate the space, practice letting the silence sit. It signals composure and control, not indecision.
For Accommodators, silence creates anxiety. They may rush to fill it with concessions or chatter to restore harmony. When working with them, use short, intentional pauses to encourage thought, but avoid letting the quiet linger too long. Long silences can feel like rejection and shut them down. If you are an Accommodator, train yourself to breathe through the discomfort and let the other side speak first. What feels like tension is often your strongest leverage.
Analysts see silence as an ally. They use it to think, process, and prepare precise responses. To engage them effectively, leave long pauses after asking questions: they appreciate the time and interpret it as respect for their reasoning. If you are an Analyst, be aware that others may misread your quiet as disengagement. Signal that you’re thinking by saying, “Give me a moment to process that.” The pause is your strength, but communication keeps it productive.
In negotiation, silence is not absence; it’s presence with purpose. How you use it and how you let others experience it often determines who leads the conversation.
The final word
Negotiation is not a performance of persuasion, but a practice of awareness: of self, of others, and of timing. Chester Karrass and Chris Voss remind us that leadership depends on both structure and empathy, preparation and presence. For CIOs and leaders alike, the task is not to choose one approach, but to balance them: to know when to guide, when to listen, and when to stay silent. The challenge now is to make this practical: to study your own negotiation style, recognize those of others, and experiment with silence as a strategic tool. Every pause, question, and response becomes a chance to turn conflict into understanding and understanding into trust.
Pick one upcoming negotiation, large or small, and consciously test a new stance. Pause longer than feels natural, listen more than you speak, and note what changes. Awareness is the first step toward mastery.
For more information on the work of Chester Karrass and Chris Voss, please read their most famous works: In Business as in Life - You Don’t Get What You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate, and Never Split the Difference.