You will be able to protect face and work with hierarchy when negotiating.
Kai Xin is an account manager at a Singapore packaging company. She's in Jakarta for a meeting with a family-owned food manufacturer that could become a large customer. Across the table sit the purchasing manager, two of his team, and, at the end, an older man who has said nothing so far. Halfway through, the purchasing manager quotes a figure from Kai Xin's own proposal wrongly. She corrects him, politely but firmly, in front of everyone. The room goes quiet. The meeting ends early, and the follow-up email takes two weeks to arrive.
She was right about the figure. What she missed was everything else in the room. This module is about negotiating across cultures in Asia, including the many cultures inside Singapore's own workplaces, and this lesson starts with two things that shaped Kai Xin's meeting: face and hierarchy.
Face is a person's standing and dignity in the eyes of others. Losing face means being embarrassed or made to look smaller in front of people whose opinion matters. Giving face means helping someone keep or gain that standing.
If you've done Communicate at work, lesson 8.2, Hierarchy, face and hearing an indirect no, covered face in everyday team life. In a negotiation the stakes are higher, because the person who loses face often can't agree to anything afterwards without seeming to give in to the person who embarrassed them. Kai Xin's correction cost the purchasing manager face in front of his own team, and worse, in front of the older man. Agreeing to her proposal in that same meeting would have looked like a second defeat.
Nobody, anywhere, likes being shown up in public. But in many cultures across Asia, and in plenty of Singapore offices, the cost of losing face is high, and people work hard to avoid causing it.
The practical habit is to give the other side room to change position without doing it in front of an audience.
Kai Xin could have handled the wrong figure differently. She might have said, "Let me check I've given you the latest version," and then confirmed the correct number during a break, or in a short call afterwards. The error gets fixed, and nobody is diminished.
The same applies to concessions. A senior person who has stated a position in a meeting may find it very hard to move from it in the same room. Give them a private channel to do it: a call the next day, a quiet word over lunch, or a revised proposal that changes the terms enough that agreeing to it looks like a response to new information. Avoid challenging a senior person in public at all, even when you're sure you're right.
In more hierarchical organisations, the person negotiating with you may not have the authority to agree. Decisions may sit with a director, a family patriarch or a committee that never appears at the table. The quiet older man at the end of the table in Jakarta may well have been the person whose view mattered most.
This is the higher authority from lesson 6.1, The pressure tactics you will meet, except that here nobody is playing a game, because that is how the organisation works. So learn the approval route early. You can ask directly, in a respectful way: "Who else will be involved in the decision, and is there anything they'll particularly want to see?" You can also ask a contact inside the company, or someone in your own network who has worked with them before.
Once you know the route, plan for it. Your proposal may need to persuade someone you never meet, so make it easy to pass up the chain: clear, short, and framed around what that senior person is likely to care about.
In hierarchical settings, who you send matters. If the other side's most senior person attends, and your side sends a junior manager alone, it can read as a sign that you don't take them seriously. Who turns up tells the other side how much the relationship matters to you, and they will read it that way whether you mean it or not.
Where you can, match levels. If a director will attend from their side, ask a director from yours to join, even for part of the meeting. If that isn't possible, explain it in advance and make clear that your senior people support the proposal. Kai Xin, at her next meeting, brings her company's head of sales, who spends the first half hour talking with the older man, now known to be the founder.
The activity asks you to map one negotiation of your own with a more hierarchical counterpart: who decides, who influences, and how you'll give them room to concede without losing face.
For a negotiation with a more hierarchical counterpart, write who decides, who influences, and how you will let them concede without losing face.
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