The Slap Negotiations

Last week at the Academy Awards, something happened that took less than two seconds but will affect careers and even entire industries for decades to come. It was instantly known as “the slap.”

Will Smith, offended by a joke that Chris Rock made about his wife, walked to the stage and physically slapped the comedian in the face. It happened in an instant. Almost immediately, negotiations were underway among the powers that be.

One school of thought said Smith should be asked to leave the theater, that this was an inexcusable act and cannot be tolerated.

Another school of thought said don’t do anything; it will blow over and will die out on its own. Anything we do to address it will simply call attention to it, give it oxygen. 

Another school of thought said it’s not enough that the slapper leave the theater. He should be expelled from the Academy.
Future negotiations will undoubtedly center on a more pragmatic question: Should we hire Will Smith for this movie? Will the backlash of that violent event diminish ticket sales? And so on, and so forth, ad nauseam.  

At the end of the day, the main lesson for us here may be, don’t let your emotions get in the way of just plain common sense.

When I coach teams, getting them ready for a negotiation, I’m aware that people care deeply about the issues. So I make sure that we’re not going to have an emotional outburst during the negotiation.

Let’s be clear. There is little you can do about the emotions. In many situations, they arise unbidden, for any of us. What you can do is control your reaction to the emotion. The anger that Will Smith felt when Chris Rock made a joke about his wife is understandable, even predictable. He had no choice in that. What he had complete control of, however, was whether to act on that impulse—on that emotion.

All of us have emotions and impulses that are noble. And we all have emotions that are less than noble. And we all have thoughts and feelings that are just plain malicious, lascivious, or mean-spirited. Everyone experiences sorrow, anger, guilt, and, on rare occasions, an impulse to violence.

These do not belong to our best selves, yet they are undeniably human. The point is not that we feel these emotions; the point is that we can make deliberate choices about what we will do about them. These choices always influence—and sometimes determine—joy or sorrow, happiness or misery, for ourselves and for others. Experiencing the impulse is just part of being human. Whether and how we act on that impulse, however, Is another matter entirely. Because that choice, multiplied by the ten thousand times it comes up, is nothing less than the difference between failure and success in our lives.