Be a Giver. Think Beyond Win-Win.

--

Most negotiators walk into a room with a map. They know what they want. They know what the other side wants. They aim, with the precision of a chess player, to find the intersection — the famous win-win. Stephen Covey made this the gospel of effective leadership. Think Win-Win, he said. A noble idea. A necessary corrective to the zero-sum thinking that dominates most deal rooms.

But here is what I have come to believe after decades at the negotiating table — in boardrooms, in mergers, in employment disputes, in hotel management contracts across three continents: win-win is not the ceiling. It is merely the floor.

Win-win is where negotiations should begin, not end.

Let us be honest about what most negotiations actually look like. One side extracts. The other concedes. Both call it a deal. The taker walks away with more than they came for. The giver walks away grateful they retained anything at all. This is not negotiation. It is theatre with a contract at the end.

Adam Grant, in Give and Take, mapped the negotiating world into three archetypes: Givers, Takers, and Matchers. His research produced a result that surprised even him: Givers populate both the bottom and the top of the success ladder. They get exploited in the short run. And they build empires in the long run.

The Takers, for all their early wins, tend to burn relationships and create reputational residue that catches up with them. The Matchers sit safely in the middle, never ahead, never behind — comfortable, unremarkable, and forgotten.

What makes the strategic giver effective in negotiation, Grant found, is that they look for opportunities that serve both their interests and their counterpart's — and in doing so, find pie-expanding solutions that others miss entirely.

What Win-Win Misses

Covey's framework, set out in The 7 Habits, was a moral corrective to exploitation. It asked negotiators to look beyond their own interest and see the other side as a legitimate participant in the outcome. That was radical when he wrote it. It remains underutilised today.

But the win-win frame has a structural limitation: it is still transactional. It asks, 'What do we each need from this exchange?' It does not ask, 'What could we build together that neither of us imagined walking in?' It optimises the deal. It does not reimagine it.

The most powerful thing you can bring to a negotiation is not leverage. It is generosity with intent.

What Givers Do Differently

Grant profiles David Hornik, a venture capitalist at August Capital, as a primary example. In an industry defined by speed and pressure — where founders are pushed to sign before competitors can bid — Hornik did the opposite. He gave entrepreneurs time to shop his offer. He shared his thinking openly. He built relationships before he built returns. His peers thought he was naive. His portfolio said otherwise.

Grant also draws on Abraham Lincoln - When Lincoln won the presidency, he appointed his fiercest Republican rivals to his cabinet. A taker would have surrounded himself with loyalists. A matcher would have rewarded allies. Lincoln gave the country the best minds available, regardless of personal cost — because he believed he had no right to deprive the country of those capabilities.

From my own observation at the negotiating table: the Indian executives who built the most durable client and partner relationships were rarely the sharpest extractors. They were the ones who came in having thought about the other side's pressures — and were willing to give ground on things that mattered less to them but mattered greatly to the counterpart. That asymmetry is where trust is made.

When Givers Build the Table

Tarun Khanna and Krishna Palepu of Harvard Business School spent years studying why conglomerates like Tata operated across such seemingly unrelated businesses — steel, power, hospitality, education. Western executives, schooled on focus and specialisation, saw this as strategic sprawl. Khanna and Palepu saw something else.

In colonial India, the institutional infrastructure that Western companies took for granted simply did not exist — and the colonial administration had neither the incentive nor the intention to build it for Indian enterprise. So Jamsetji Tata built what was missing. Tata Steel at Jamshedpur in 1907. The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, endowed in 1909. Worker townships with schools, hospitals, and housing — not philanthropy, but the precondition for business to function at all.

The Tatas were not negotiating for share in these sectors. They were making the sectors negotiable. Every deal they later struck — with the colonial government, with foreign capital, with labour unions — was shaped by that prior act of giving. They had credibility before they had leverage.

Jamsetji Tata's institution-building was not separate from his commercial strategy. It was its foundation — and it remains the Tata brand's deepest asset.

The Tatas did not negotiate for advantage. They built the table before they sat down at it.

The Giver's Return

None of this is naïveté. Grant is explicit: givers must learn to spot takers early, set terms that protect them from exploitation, and channel their generosity strategically. Being a giver is not about setting aside your own interests. It is about knowing what your interests actually are — and measuring them over the right time horizon.

In every negotiation I have sat in, the most durable agreements were never the ones where one side had the best terms on paper. They were the ones where the counterpart felt genuinely understood — where their pressures, their concerns, their unstated anxieties had been seen and accommodated. Trust built that way does not erode at renewal time.

The next time you prepare for a negotiation, do the standard work: know your BATNA, anchor well, understand your zone of possible agreement. And then ask one more question — what could I give in this conversation that costs me little but means a great deal to the other side?

Win-win keeps you safe. Giving well makes you trusted. And in a world awash with transactional intelligence, trust is the scarcest — and most durable — asset of all.

Trust us to get your leaders to be at their best!

Connect with us

Know your mentor