Early in my career, after a significant meeting, my boss pulled me aside and gave me feedback I have never forgotten: “You need a better poker face.”
It was not said unkindly, but it was direct. My face, apparently, was sharing my reaction. Surprise, frustration, disagreement, concern. Whatever I was feeling, it was visible.
At the time, I thought the lesson was simple: hide my feelings, stay neutral and keep my reactions off my face.
But over time, and particularly through years of negotiation, leadership and complex stakeholder conversations, I have come to see the lesson differently.
The issue is not that emotion shows up. Instead, the issue is whether you understand what it is signalling.
In a negotiation, your expression, tone, pace, hesitation and energy are all sending information into the room. The other person is reading you, just as you are reading them. Sometimes they are reading accurately. Sometimes they are not. Either way, the emotional layer of the conversation is shaping what happens next.
This is the third article in my series on negotiation. In the first piece, we explored how power can shape your perception at the table. In the second, we looked at where leverage can come from before you enter the room. This final piece takes you into the room itself, to the layer of negotiation that operates in real time – emotions.
Emotions Are Information
In a high-stakes negotiation, the common instinct is to suppress whatever you are feeling, stay calm and measured, and keep your emotions off the table.
That instinct is understandable. However, emotions in a negotiation are not simply noise to manage away. They are signals that shape what others infer about your position, priorities, confidence, flexibility and limits.
Professor Gerben van Kleef, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, developed the Emotions as Social Information model, known as EASI, to explain how this works.¹ His research shows that emotions influence others both through what they infer from your reaction and how they feel in response to it.
The premise is straightforward. When you express an emotion in a social situation, the other person notices it, interprets it and may adjust their behaviour in response.
In negotiation, that dynamic is in constant motion. For example:
- When you show frustration, the other party may infer that your limit is approaching, especially if your expression seems credible and proportionate to the situation.
- When you show relief, they may assume the current offer is better than you are letting on.
- When you express enthusiasm too early, you may inadvertently signal that you have already reached a favourable point, which can cue the other party to stop moving even when the deal still has room to shift.
Every emotion you express conveys information, so the challenge is whether you are paying attention to what your emotions are saying.
What Specific Emotions Signal
Professor van Kleef and his colleagues found that different emotions can produce different responses in negotiating counterparts.²
The effect depends on context, relationship, power dynamics and whether the other party sees the emotion as proportionate and legitimate.
Let’s use the emotions of anger and disappointment to demonstrate the difference.
Expressed anger, in the right context and with the right relationship, can communicate that a limit has been reached and is more likely to be effective when the counterpart sees the response as credible rather than excessive. It can prompt the other party to make larger concessions because it signals that the current trajectory may be heading toward breakdown.
But context matters. Anger that feels disproportionate or is directed at the person rather than the situation can produce defensiveness and entrenchment rather than movement.
Expressed disappointment works differently. It can signal that the current offer falls short of what the relationship or situation warrants. Rather than pushing back directly, it invites the other party to consider whether a better solution is possible.
It says, quietly: this is not what I expected from you.
Additionally, research on disappointment, worry, guilt and regret in negotiation suggests these emotions can encourage concessions, but again, context matters.³
The practical implication is to understand what emotions are communicating, so you are not accidentally sending signals that undermine your position, and so you can read the signals the other party is sending with greater accuracy.
Reframe Before You Enter
This is where Professor Alison Wood Brooks’ research is useful.
Before a high-stakes conversation, many people believe the best strategy is to calm themselves down. That makes intuitive sense. If anxiety impairs performance, then reducing anxiety should help.
But Professor Brooks found that, in the high-arousal performance tasks she studied, reappraising anxiety as excitement was more effective than trying to calm down.⁴
The reason is practical. Anxiety and excitement are both high-arousal states, so they are physiologically closer to each other than anxiety and calm. Moving from anxious to calm can be a large emotional leap, whereas moving from anxious to excited is often easier.
This does not mean pretending fear is not present. It means giving your body a more useful interpretation of the energy already there.
There is also a negotiation-specific reason this matters. Professor Brooks and Professor Maurice Schweitzer found that anxiety can lead negotiators to make lower first offers, exit negotiations earlier and earn less.⁵
So before you enter the room, pay attention to the story you are telling yourself about your emotional state. The goal is not to erase the feeling, but to interpret it in a way that helps rather than hinders your performance.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Consider a leader who has prepared thoroughly for a significant negotiation.
She knows her alternatives well and has thought carefully about the other party’s likely position. She enters the room feeling a particular tightness in her chest and a knot in her stomach that arises before a conversation about something that matters.
Fifteen minutes in, the other party shifts tactics. They become more assertive than she anticipated, pressing hard on a term she expected to be more straightforward.
Her instinct is to match their energy, suppress her discomfort or push through rationally.
Instead, she pauses and gives herself time to read the energy in the room. In that moment, she realises that their pressure suggests this issue matters more than their opening position implied. She takes that as information, adjusts her understanding of their position and reframes the conversation around a different variable.
The pressure eases, and the deal structure shifts.
It’s a perfect example of a leader paying attention to the emotional layer of the room and using what she noticed wisely.
Navigate the Room: The MOVE Framework
Once the conversation begins, you cannot script every reaction, pause or shift in energy. But you can become more deliberate about how you read and respond to what is happening in the room.
That is where the MOVE framework helps. MOVE is four in-the-room disciplines for working with the emotional layer of negotiation.
Where LENS (from article one in this series) is about perception and PLAN (from article two) is about preparation, MOVE is about real-time intelligence: noticing what emotion is signalling, and using that information with care.
M: Monitor your emotional state before you enter
What are you feeling?
Name it precisely. Not just nervous or stressed, but more specifically. Is it:
- Anticipatory anxiety?
- Frustration carried in from a previous conversation?
- Impatience with how long the process has taken?
- Concern about the consequences if an agreement is not reached?
- Or something else?
Precision matters because different emotional states send distinct signals and require different strategies.
You cannot work with what you have not named.
O: Own what you express
Whether you intend it or not, you are broadcasting signals throughout a negotiation.
The discipline is choosing what to express and when, rather than defaulting either to suppression or unfiltered reaction.
Your aim is to be intentional about what you express by considering the room’s emotional dimensions and wisely managing your emotions so you respond with thought rather than reaction.
V: View their emotions as data
When the other party shows frustration, hesitation, relief or unexpected enthusiasm, treat those expressions as information.
For example:
- What is their frustration telling you about where they feel constrained?
- What does their hesitation suggest about risk tolerance or uncertainty?
- What might their relief reveal about what they valued in your last offer?
E: Engage with what you know
Use the emotional intelligence you have gathered to direct the conversation.
If the room is becoming defensive, slow the pace.
If the pressure is escalating, test what lies beneath it.
If enthusiasm appears too quickly, check whether you have misunderstood what matters most.
In this way, you are wisely using what you understand about the situation to create the conditions where agreement becomes more possible.
A Different Kind of Negotiator
We started this series with a single image: a letter drawn on a forehead by someone who could not see beyond their own vantage point. That image was about what power can do to perception.
In the second piece, we moved to preparation and to the importance of knowing your alternatives before the pressure starts.
This final piece brings us into the room itself.
Across these three articles, the underlying theme is that the most effective negotiators are not always the most powerful people in the room, at least not in the conventional sense. They are the people who see clearly, prepare wisely and calibrate emotions to move deliberately.
Professor Deborah Gruenfeld, whose work opened this series, describes power not as a fixed personal attribute but as a role you play in someone else’s story.⁶
The leader who negotiates with that understanding is playing the long game. Not just for this outcome, but for the relationships and influence that every outcome either builds or erodes.
So before your next negotiation, ask yourself:
- What am I feeling?
- What might I be signalling?
- What is the other person showing me?
- And what would change if I treated the emotional layer of the room not as interference, but as information?
This is the third and final article in a three-part series on negotiation and power. Read Part One here: The Blind Spot That Power Creates at the Negotiating Table and Part Two here: The Negotiation Trap That Starts Before the Conversation Begins.
Getting you ready for tomorrow, today®
Award-winning author and global workplace expert, Dr Michelle Gibbings, helps leaders, teams and organisations unlock strategic influence to accelerate progress.
References:
- Van Kleef, G. A. (2009). How emotions regulate social life: The emotions as social information (EASI) model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3), 184–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01633.x
- Van Kleef, G. A., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2004). The interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.1.57
- Van Kleef, G. A., De Dreu, C. K. W., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2006). Supplication and appeasement in conflict and negotiation: The interpersonal effects of disappointment, worry, guilt, and regret. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(1), 124–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.1.124
- Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144–1158. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035325
- Brooks, A. W., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2011). Can nervous Nelly negotiate? How anxiety causes negotiators to make low first offers, exit early, and earn less profit. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115(1), 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.01.008
- Gruenfeld, D. H. (2020). Acting with power: Why we are more powerful than we believe. Currency.