The Effect of Advice on Negotiations: How Advisors Influence What Negotiators Do Open Access

Negotiations run on advice. From the White House to the corner store, from the halls of the United Nations to the conference rooms of corporations, advisors, counselors, and consultants to negotiators fuel both the process and outcomes of negotiations through the advice they give. In addition, the effectiveness of mediators, whether they are working to settle ethnic conflicts in Africa or family disputes in Cleveland, often also depends on their skills as advisors. Sometimes the presence of advisors is obvious, but in many cases it is not. As a result, our understanding of the full nature of the negotiation process in many instances is limited and incomplete. Indeed, theoretical models of the negotiation process often overlook or, at least, fail to fully account for the important role played by the people who advise negotiators. Through their advice, advisors are important but often unrecognized sources of influence on the negotiation dynamic.

Two examples illustrate the important roles that negotiation advisors play. The first concerns the 1978 Camp David negotiations between Egypt and Israel, and the second relates to the origins of United States policies on the use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects. The Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt in 1978, which led to a peace agreement between two countries that had been at war for thirty years, has, of course, had a major impact on geopolitics in the Middle East. The decision to hold those talks at Camp David in the hills of rural Maryland, rather than in Washington or Geneva, was an important factor in the effectiveness of the talks. The idea to hold the negotiations there did not come from Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin, members of their governments, or even from their host, President Jimmy Carter. No, the idea was advanced by one of Carter's most trusted advisors — his wife, Rosalynn. During a quiet family weekend at Camp David in July 1978, as the president was lamenting with her the difficulty of doing anything positive to resolve the conflict between the Arabs and Israel, Mrs. Carter suggested that he bring Sadat and Begin to Camp David to talk through their problem (Wright 2014: 45).

Embedded in Mrs. Carter's suggestion were two key elements of advice: (1) that the president convene a negotiation between Begin and Sadat and (2) that the negotiation take place at Camp David. Her advice set in motion a process of negotiation that would yield a peace treaty between the two adversaries and would profoundly affect the Middle East for years to come. A close examination of the history of that negotiation reveals the ways in which the location clearly facilitated agreement in a way that more traditional diplomatic settings, like Geneva or Washington, would not have. The nature of the place in which a negotiation happens can greatly affect its results (Salacuse 2013:153–169).

A less positive example of an advisor's influence was reported by the New York Times in a front page story in December 2014 (Risen and Appuzo 2014: 1). A few months after the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11, 2001, the U.S. captured Abu Zubaydah, who was suspected of helping to plan the attack. At a meeting in 2002, Central Intelligence Agency officials discussed who was to interrogate Zubaydah and how it would be done. A legal advisor at the meeting suggested the name of a psychologist, a person he did not know who had been a contract employee of the agency's Office of Technical Services, and who was working on a U.S. Air Force program to train American personnel to resist interrogation and torture if captured.

Desperate to obtain vital information from Zubaydah and other prisoners, the CIA turned to this person for guidance on interrogation methods of suspected terrorists without actually vetting or evaluating him. This psychologist developed a program of enhanced interrogation techniques that included torture. The legal advisor's advice, almost casually delivered in that meeting, ultimately led to the widespread use of notorious interrogation techniques that Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would label “a stain on our values and our history” (Risen and Appuzo 2014: 1).

The moral of these two stories is that advice, no matter how earnestly or casually given, can have significant consequences, consequences that neither the advisor nor the recipient of the advice foresees when it is given. Moreover, scholars and the public may be unaware of the advice and its impact until years later, if at all. Analysts of negotiation, as well as negotiators themselves, should therefore routinely and systematically incorporate an examination of the role and impact of advisors into their own methodologies and strategies.

In this article, I seek to explore the roles and methods of advisors in order to understand how they influence negotiations and affect what negotiators do. To do this, I draw on prior studies of advisors (Salacuse 2000 and 1994), as well as on new data I obtained from survey research conducted among seventy‐one advisors present at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, in June–July 2013.

The Council of the European Union, informally known as the EU Council, is the institution where the heads of state and governments from each of the its twenty‐eight member states meet to adopt and coordinate EU policies. The Treaty on European Union, an EU constitutional document, states the basic function of the EU Council in Article 15(1): “The European Council shall provide the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and shall define the general political directions and priorities thereof” (Treaty on European Union 2010). Jointly with the European Parliament, the council exercises the EU's legislative and budgetary functions (Article 16[1], The Treaty on European Union 2010); consequently it is the site of intense, continuing, and complex multilateral negotiations and group decision making on a wide range of topics and issues. According to one observer, ‘decision‐making in the EU … entails a large number of negotiations taking place on a daily basis with thousands of diplomats from different national ministries” (Dijkstra 2010: 529).

The work of the EU Council is supported by the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, a supranational institution authorized by the Treaty on European Union¹ comprising approximately 3200 European Union civil servants. One of the important means by which the secretariat assists the council is through its advisors and the advice that they provide to the EU president and the representatives of EU member states attending council meetings. Important tasks undertaken by individual secretariat officials, as identified by the officials themselves, include providing information and common analysis to the member state delegations, supporting the council president's role by drafting initiatives and recommendations, and identifying new policy problems and devising new policies (Juncos and Pomorska 2010). The successful execution of each of these tasks requires secretariat officials to take on the roles of advisors.

In June and July 2013, I conducted a series of master classes on “The Art of Advice” for the professional staff of the General Secretariat (Schnickel 2013). One of their most important professional duties was to provide various types of advice to representatives of member states participating in council meetings. One secretariat official described the participants in the class as “all policy advisors, on the back seat (they are not on the front line of negotiation and decision making, meaning: they don't make political decisions).”

During one of these classes, I administered a questionnaire, “Assessing Your Advising and Communication Style,” to seventy‐one members of the professional staff of the General Secretariat. The survey instrument, a copy of which is reproduced in the  appendix to this article, asked the participants to rate ten different elements relevant to the advising process on a five‐point scale.² The respondents were all professionals from various disciplines who were nationals of twenty‐two different EU member states. Thirty‐eight (54 percent) of the respondents were male and thirty‐two (46 percent) were female. Because culture and regional characteristics may affect advising styles just as they do negotiation behavior (Salacuse 1998), for purposes of analyzing the results I have divided the sixty‐nine respondents who specified their nationalities into three regional groups, Eastern Europe (nineteen respondents), Northern Europe (twenty‐five), and Mediterranean Europe (twenty‐five), in hopes of identifying cultural or regional differences among advisors.³ In this article, I draw on their responses to the questionnaire to illustrate observations on the role of advisors and advice in negotiation and group decision making.

Advice to negotiators comes in many forms: consultants write background papers for government officials on how to negotiate with other countries over trade barriers; executives from corporate headquarters recommend strategies for making joint ventures to their colleagues in the field; a colleague — or a spouse — suggests how to resolve a dispute between contending parties. Despite differences in form, all advice is essentially a communication from one person (the advisor) to another (the client) designed to help that second person determine a course of action for solving a particular problem.

One of the defining characteristics of advice is that it is not obligatory. The client is free to take it or leave it. In this way, advice is markedly different from certain other communications, such as laws, contracts, and directives, whose contents are intended to impose obligations on the people to whom they are addressed. On the other hand, because of the information asymmetry that often exists between client and advisor, over time a dependency relationship may develop between the two, making it often difficult in practice for a client to reject advice without having another source of needed information on which to rely.

Such dependence often exists between the advisors of the General Secretariat and representatives of member states attending council meetings. Because of their long‐term involvement with the decision‐making processes of the council, the secretariat staff have knowledge about the rules of the game and how to use them to achieve desired results in negotiations that is vastly superior to that of political representatives from member states — some of whom may be attending council meetings for the first time. In this connection, I note that the word “client” comes from the Latin word cliens — “a person who has someone to lean on.” Political representatives of EU countries who wish to achieve desired results quickly come to see advisors from the secretariat as people they can lean on to bring their negotiations to a satisfactory conclusion.

Because their role in the organization influences advisors’ behavior, role theory may help us fully understand their influence in the negotiation process. Using the theatrical metaphor of actors in a play, role theory is based on the assumption that people behave in predictable ways depending on their social roles (Biddle 1986). To analyze the nature of someone's social position within an organization, role theory literature often differentiates between role prescriptions, which are the expectations of external actors, role performance, which relates to the role player's actual behavior, and role conceptions, which concern the actor's own perceptions of his or her appropriate behavior in the role (Juncos and Pomorska 2010).

By asking each of the EU advisors in the study to evaluate various dimensions of their advising style, I sought to better understand their own perceptions of the roles they played as advisors to negotiators in processes that unfold at the European Union Council of Ministers. This knowledge will provide insights into the links between their prescribed roles and their actual behavior as advisors.

Just as advice comes in many forms, advisors to negotiators appear in many guises. Some advisors, like those working at the EU Council, are officially designated as such while others, like Rosalynn Carter, may have no formal role whatsoever. Some, like the anonymous CIA lawyer, are individuals acting on their own, while others, like those from international consulting firms, may represent substantial institutions. Some, like Henry Kissinger who accompanied President Richard Nixon to China to negotiate a new, path‐breaking relationship with the United States, are public figures; others like a boyhood friend of a corporate executive engaged in merger negotiations, remain private figures, no matter how important their contribution to a given negotiation. Such factors as whether an advisor serves in an official or unofficial capacity, for a public or private institution, or acts as an individual or represents a corporate entity can profoundly affect that advisor's role prescription, performance, and conception. Thus a private, unofficial advisor, like a boyhood friend, would probably feel much less constrained by a role prescription in dealing with a client negotiator than would an official public advisor like Kissinger.

Regardless of the form of the advisor's role, negotiators use advisors for two principal reasons: (1) the advisor's actual expertise and (2) the validation that using them provides the negotiator.

We can view the need for expertise from two perspectives: 1) the perspective of the individual negotiator and 2) the perspective of the negotiation system in which the negotiator functions. The most common individualist explanation is that the advisor has expert knowledge that may improve the negotiator's results in the negotiation in which he or she is engaged. The client negotiator is thus in some way deficient and the advisor has the skill or knowledge to remedy that deficiency (Dror 1987). That deficiency in knowledge may be about the substance of the issues under negotiation, the process of conducting negotiations in a way that will allow the client to attain his or her goals, or both.

From an organizational or systemic perspective, advisors to negotiators help groups engaged in the negotiation to reduce the transaction costs of negotiating, particularly in complex multilateral processes such as the ones that prevail at the European Council of Ministers. For example, the Secretariat to the EU Council is a source of expertise both with respect to substance and process. As such, one of its basic purposes is to reduce what are termed the transaction costs of council negotiations, cooperation, and group decision‐making (Dijkstra 2010).

One important way in which the secretariat delivers its support is through the advice that members of its professional staff provide to the chairs of the various councils and ministerial delegations from member states. Because of its central position in the EU Council, the secretariat is generally regarded as knowing more about the collective legislation and policies of EU member states than experts from individual national ministries know about each other (Dijkstra 2010). Moreover, because of its long‐term involvement in EU matters, the secretariat understands well the historical preferences of member states as well as the status of their various ongoing negotiations, knowledge that can be vital in helping the member states reach agreement on policy matters. As a centralized, single repository and processor of this knowledge, the secretariat reduces the transactions costs of concluding agreements and reaching group decisions, compared to the total costs that individual member states would have to pay to gain such expertise independently without the secretariat's support.

In addition to acquiring substantive and procedural expertise from them, negotiators may use advisors to validate a fact, policy, or intention to the other side, to their respective constituents, to potential allies, or even to themselves. The choice of advisor itself can also convey an important message. Sometimes, for example, a negotiator will select a particular advisor to send a signal to the other side in hopes of influencing a favorable action or response from that side. For example, during financial crises, governments seeking economic assistance from international lenders to reform their economies may choose as advisors distinguished foreign economists known for opinions acceptable to such international lenders, not only to gain their financial and economic expertise but also to encourage foreign governments and international organizations to provide aid.

Similarly, candidates running for political office in the United States will select particular advisors to reassure wealthy donors of the policies they will follow if elected to encourage those donors to finance their campaigns. And corporations engaged in merger negotiation may hire certain investment banks or law firms to serve as their advisors in hope of persuading their own shareholders or their counterparts at the bargaining table of the seriousness of their intent or the soundness of their negotiating positions. Such advisors have “reputational capital” that negotiators seek to invoke in hopes of persuading the other side to reach an agreement on favorable terms.

Negotiators may employ this tactic in good faith or unscrupulously. For example, several years ago, the shadowy Bank of Credit and Commerce International hired a prestigious Washington law firm as an ornamental advisor, primarily to increase the bank's legitimacy in government circles and improve its access to the governmental bureaucracy.

The selection of a particular person to advise a negotiator can also send positive or negative signals to the negotiator's own potential supporters and constituents. For example, selecting a well‐known‐expert who in the past has expressed sympathy for or assisted an adversary may undermine the support of constituents who fear that the advisor will inhibit the negotiator from securing the best possible outcome for the country or organization he or she represents. Thus, effectively analyzing the role of an advisor in a negotiation requires understanding precisely why the negotiator has engaged that particular advisor and considering the specific potential or actual impact that such an advisor may have on the negotiation. For example, the refusal of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, to include any Republicans in his delegation to the Versailles Peace talks in 1919 sent a message to the Republicans in the United States Senate that their interests did not matter and would not be taken account of in the negotiation, an action that led the Republicans to refuse to ratify the agreements that Wilson negotiated at Versailles (McMillan 2002). Wilson's approach to dealing with political adversaries differed sharply from that of President Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War, who instead of isolating his political rivals included them as members of his cabinet (Goodwin 2013). It follows that in selecting a particular advisor, negotiators should consider the nature of the message that such an appointment will communicate both to the other side and to their internal constituents and whether that message will facilitate or complicate the negotiation process.

Finally, negotiators use advisors to validate their own inclinations, positions, and policies to themselves as well as to others. For example, governmental authorities will often commission advisors, individually or as a committee, to provide expert advice on a proposed program or policy to give that proposal added legitimacy with supporters, potential opponents, or both. And negotiators, during negotiations, may turn to an advisor to validate a proposal or action that the negotiator intends to make during the talks. For example, at the Reykjavik Summit of 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev engaged in what appeared to be promising negotiations leading to deep reductions in nuclear weapons. Reagan, however, insisted upon the United States’ right to continue research on a space‐based system, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), to track and destroy incoming missiles during an attack. Gorbachev countered that such research should be limited to the laboratory, not performed in space. Reagan refused. In the midst of this stand‐off between the two leaders, Reagan passed a note to U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, his chief advisor at the talks, asking: “Am I wrong?” Shultz whispered, “No, you are right.” That whispered validation led Reagan to maintain his position on SDI research. He therefore chose to end the summit without an agreement, saying to Schultz, his advisor, “Let's go George, we're leaving” (Stanton 2011: 201–227). Although Reagan would not change his position, armament reduction talks continued between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The following year, the two countries would sign the Intermediate‐Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which abolished an entire class of nuclear weapons but was not linked to the elimination of SDI.

At its most basic, the act of advising is the delivery of information from one person to another — for example, information about where best to hold negotiations between Egypt and Israel or how best to interrogate suspected Al‐Qaida prisoners. But on closer examination, we see that effective advising requires more than delivery of information; it also rests on a relationship between the advisor and the client.

As defined earlier, advising is a communication from one person to another person to help that second person solve a problem or choose a course of action. For that communication to effectively influence the actions of the negotiator to whom it is addressed, a relationship of some sort must first exist between the two people concerned. A relationship is a connection between two or more individuals. A productive working relationship between advisor and client requires some degree of trust and confidence between the two. If a negotiator is to accept and act on advice provided by an advisor, he or she must have confidence in the advisor's technical competence, integrity, and loyalty. Effective advisors understand this dimension of advising and therefore strive to build productive relationships with their clients through their communications with them. Thus, their individual communications may serve to both deliver information and/or to build and strengthen client relationships.

The survey of European Council advisors asked respondents the extent to which their goal in giving advice was to deliver information or to build a relationship with their clients on member state delegations. It asked them to rate this on a single five‐point scale with “deliver information” at 1 on the scale and “build relationship” at 5. Thus advisors who place greater emphasis on the information delivery aspects of their advising function would have rated that characteristic a 1, 1.5, or 2, while those who place more stress on the relational dimensions would have assigned that element a 4, 4.5, or 5 rating. Overall, the largest group of respondents (42 percent) gave equal or nearly equal weight (rated between 2.5 and 3.5 on the 5 point scale) to both information delivery and relationship building in their advising style. And if one interprets a rating of 2 as recognition that some not insignificant amount of relationship building is involved in advising, then sixty‐five of the EU advisors, that is, fully 92 percent of the group surveyed, attached at least some significant importance to relationships in their professional work. Thus, it is clear that the EU advisors as a group did not see their work as advisors to entail the delivery of information alone.

While a similar proportion of male and female advisors (22 percent of the men and 18 percent of the women) tended to classify their main advising goal as “building a relationship” (rating between 4 and 5), a larger proportion of male advisors (50 percent) than female advisors (26 percent) tended to emphasize the delivery of information over relationship building. This result would seem to support the findings of scholars who have reported that women give greater weight to relationship building in the process of negotiation than do men (e.g., Kolb and Coolidge 1991).

With respect to the three regional groups mentioned earlier, a larger percentage of advisors from the Eastern European region (47 percent) classified their advising goal as “deliver information” (1–2) than did those from the other groups, while only 41percent of the advisors from Northern Europe and 28 percent of the advisors from the Mediterranean Region chose similarly. On the other hand, a larger proportion of Northern European advisors (30 percent) classified their advising goal as relationship building (4–5) than did those from the other two groups, with only 5 percent of Eastern European advisors and 20 percent of Mediterranean advisors choosing similarly.

In my discussions with the advisors, they made it clear that as a group they attach importance to creating relationships with their clients because they believe that the existence of a good relationship between advisor and client would lead clients to accept advisors’ advice more readily. This in turn, they believe, would influence client behavior more effectively in negotiations and policy making at the council. In role theory terms, the existence of a relationship between the negotiator and the advisor may allow the latter to more easily redefine role prescriptions and thus change role expectations and role performance to more closely align with her or his own preferences.

Relationship building takes time; consequently, one might hypothesize that advisors disposed to spending more time on the advising process might also have a tendency to build relationships. The survey of EU advisors asked them to assess their “sensitivity to time,” that is, the degree to which they felt constrained by time limitations in the advising process. Most advisors (69 percent) considered themselves to have a high time sensitivity, rating themselves on this element between a 1 and 2 on the survey. A regression analysis of survey results on time sensitivity and primary goal orientation (deliver information versus build relationship) revealed that time sensitivity correlated positively to goal setting at the significance level of 1 percent (p‐value of 0.005), which indicates that the advisors who set the goal as “relationship building” are more likely to have low time sensitivity.

A higher percentage of advisors from the Eastern European group (89 percent) considered themselves to have a high time sensitivity than did those from the Northern European (63 percent) and Mediterranean European (60 percent) groups. As noted above, the Eastern European advisors also collectively attached less importance to relationship building in the advising process. It may be that their greater time sensitivity made them somewhat less disposed than advisors from other EU regions to invest time in relationship building.⁴

Ideally, the relationship between advisor and client is one characterized by the client's high degree of trust and confidence in the advice and behavior of the advisor. As Sir Francis Bacon wrote in his seminal essay Of Counsel, “the greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel” (Bacon 1982: 54).

The development of a relationship of trust and confidence between advisor and negotiator is built first on the client's faith in the advisor's technical competence. Technical competence alone, however, is not enough to create the needed trust between advisor and negotiator. The negotiator must also see the advisor as impartial and believe that his or her advice is unbiased, especially in multilateral settings like the EU Council, where the advisor often plays the role of a mediator or “honest broker” with respect to contentious issues.

Even more important is a negotiator's belief that his or her advisor is loyal and working in the best interests of the negotiator and the organization or country the negotiator represents. That stance is important in influencing negotiators to accept advice offered by their advisors. For example, in the negotiation of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, the director‐general of the Legal Service, a division of the Council Secretariat, took the initiative to prepare an entire draft treaty, based on prior EU constitutional negotiations but with some crucial modifications, and presented it to the June 2007 session of the European Council. That draft would become the basis of the negotiation leading to the Treaty of Lisbon, an agreement that would eventually serve as the EU's current constitution (Goebel 2011). The action by the director‐general of the Legal Service reduced the transaction costs of negotiating a new constitutional basis for the union compared to the costs for a process in which individual states would have produced their own separate draft treaties. The willingness of the council, as a client, to accept the director‐general's draft as a basis for negotiating the Treaty of Lisbon depended on the member states’ confidence in his impartiality and technical competence. In role theory terms, this also illustrates a case in which the client, the council membership, allowed an advisor to redefine his role prescription in order to facilitate the work of the group.

For an advisor to preserve the necessary air of impartiality, he or she must not be viewed publicly as the driving force in the negotiations — he or she must not be seen as overshadowing or usurping the work of the negotiators, who, after all, are the political representatives of sovereign states. Thus in many instances, for an advisor to be effective, she or he must remain an unobtrusive helper. This is why, for example, that to protect its status of impartiality, the General Secretariat of the EU Council of Ministers has carefully remained out of the limelight and has not publicly made its role in negotiations evident. Because of the political sensitivities in many EU member countries about unelected EU bureaucrats making policy for member state populations, the council advisors are concerned that they not be seen as preempting or overtly influencing the policy negotiations being conducted by national delegations at EU Council meetings. According to one observer, the secretariat has preferred to be the eminence grise to the presidency of the union (Dijkstra 2010), a term which one English language dictionary defines as “a powerful advisor… who operates secretly or unofficially.” The council's veiled presence is also reflected by the relative paucity of academic scholarship on the secretariat and its role in EU negotiations.

Many other kinds of advisors face a similar imperative, that they not overshadow or pre‐empt their client negotiators. An advisor who becomes too public a figure may ultimately impair his or her effectiveness in two ways. First, such action may damage his or her relationship with the client, who may resent being overshadowed and publicly diminished in status. Second, the legitimacy of the negotiated result may later be called into question by the negotiator's constituents or organization, who see it not as the authorized work of the negotiator but as the unauthorized meddling of the advisor.

The nature of the relationship between advisor and client can influence negotiation outcomes. Negotiators should therefore understand their relationship with their own advisors as well as the relationship existing between the negotiators and their advisors on the other side of the bargaining table. In certain instances, that knowledge may enable a negotiator to use the other side's advisors as sources of information or to influence negotiators on the other side. For example, at the Camp David talks, President Carter, faced with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's intransigence and rigidity, began conversations with two of Begin's advisors, Israeli minister of defense Ezer Weizman and Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan, in hopes of better understanding and perhaps finding a way to soften Begin's negotiating position (Wright 2014). Later, Dayan helped persuade Begin to accept the treaty that emerged from the talks by suggesting to the Americans a formula that addressed Begin's desire for Israel to hold on to Egyptian oil in the Sinai. Dayan suggested that Carter propose that Egypt promise in the treaty to supply Israel with oil and that the U.S. guarantee Israel's petroleum needs for fifteen years (Wright 2014). Dayan's suggestion overcame Begin's resistance and the parties reached agreement. The lesson of these examples is clear: in developing their strategies and tactics, negotiators must consider the other side's advisors and not just their own.

The structure of the relationship between negotiator and advisor has two basic dimensions: formal and substantive. I will consider each one separately.

Advisors to negotiators may either be official or unofficial. Official advisors are those who have been designated as such by the organization or group on whose behalf the negotiator works. Thus all of the advisors employed by the EU Council Secretariat are official advisors, as was the CIA lawyer who participated in the discussions concerning how to interrogate suspected terrorists.

Various unofficial and unauthorized persons, on the other hand, may seek to advise negotiators, either for altruistic or self‐serving reasons. Rosalynn Carter was an unofficial, but nonetheless very influential advisor, to her husband Jimmy, and she clearly assumed that role out of a desire to help her husband solve a difficult diplomatic problem. But other individuals may assume the role of advisor to a negotiator for self‐serving reasons, a tactic often used by lobbyists for special interests. The use of unofficial advisors in negotiations, therefore, has potential benefits as well as potential costs. The principal benefit is that it may expose the negotiator to new and creative ideas that may lead to a successful resolution, as was the case with Rosalynn Carter's advice concerning the use of Camp David for peace negotiations. In addition, in cases in which the choice of a particular person as an official advisor may send an undesired message to the other side or to a negotiator's own constituents, using such person as an unofficial advisor may blunt or minimize such negative effects. But in certain circumstances the use of unofficial advisors can be seen as unjustified or improper interference in the negotiation, thereby subjecting the negotiator's efforts to attack and even de‐legitimizing the entire process and ultimately its results.

While the precise nature of the substantive relationship between advisor and negotiator may take many variations, it essentially tends to follow one of three basic structural models: the advisor as director; the advisor as servant; and the advisor as partner. Let's consider each briefly.

In this model, the advisor tends to take control of the negotiating process, directing the negotiator on how to act to achieve success in the negotiation. In the advisor's mind (and sometimes in the negotiator's), the negotiator need only follow the advisor's directives to satisfactorily conclude the talks. In this model, the client is an empty vessel to be filled with the advisor's wisdom. Indeed, advisors to negotiators sometimes see themselves as conducting negotiations through their clients. Of the seventy‐one EU advisors surveyed, only two (less than 3 percent) tended to favor or to see themselves in a director relationship with their clients (rating between 4 and 5). That so few favor this model no doubt reflects their status as international civil servants whose clients often have power derived from their political positions in their home countries.

Rather than act as a director in the advising process, the advisor may instead play the role of a servant, responding to the client's numerous demands for help and guidance in the negotiation. Here the client fully controls the negotiation and may limit the advisor's participation to specific questions and issues. Sometimes, negotiators may have several advisors, particularly for more important negotiations. In such situations, the resulting competition among advisors for the negotiator's attention further underscores their roles as servants.

At Camp David, Sadat clearly saw his advisors, not as partners, but as servants, which the members of his delegation recognized. When one of the Egyptian team members complained that Sadat was keeping them in the dark and negotiating behind their backs, Boutros Boutros‐Ghali, Egypt's minister of state for foreign affairs who later became Secretary‐General of the United Nations, reminded the team of their servant status, stressing that their only function at Camp David was to support Sadat. “We must offer al‐Rayyyis our advice,” he said, using the Egyptian word for “the Chief,” “but the final decision is his” (Wright 2014: 52). This incident exemplified a situation in which the role prescribed for the advisor by the client, President Sadat, conflicted with the role expectations of the members of his team — and the role preference of the president clearly prevailed.

In the survey, twelve (17 percent) of the EU advisors favored or saw themselves as servants in their relationships with their clients, perhaps reflecting their status as international civil servants as well as the secretariat's formal institutional role, which is to assist the member states. But the advisor's representation of a supranational organization with powers over many aspects of member states’ activities may discourage the notion that they are servants of their clients, the member states, rather than servants of the European Union.

In certain situations, advisors and their clients may conduct a negotiation as partners. The essence of any partnership is co‐ownership and joint participation. When advisor and client function as partners, they jointly manage the advising process and work together to solve the problem. At the same time, the negotiator has ultimate responsibility and decision‐making authority for the negotiation issues. Because of their mutual trust and confidence, the advisor and client draw on a common pool of knowledge and skills to resolve the negotiating problem.

Rosalynn Carter, who sometimes attended cabinet meetings, certainly had a partnership relationship with her husband. Other examples of a partnership relationship between negotiators and advisors include President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, his brother, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Reagan and Shultz at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986, and President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker during the Gulf War in 1990 to 1991.

Among the EU advisors surveyed, 80 percent (fifty‐seven respondents) indicated a clear preference for a partnership relationship with the people they advise (a rating of 2.5 or higher). Within that group, forty‐three people (61 percent of the total survey) indicated an overwhelming preference for that model, with a rating of 3.5 or higher. These results indicate preferences — the extent to which such partnership relationships actually exist between EU advisors and their member state clients or to which negotiators from member states actually perceive EU Council advisors as their partners in negotiations is unclear. The challenges faced by EU advisors in creating satisfactory working relationships with their clients was a recurring theme of discussions in the “Art of Advice” class.

The precise nature of an advisor–client relationship depends on a variety of factors, including the experiences and personalities of the advisor and the negotiator, the nature of the issues to be negotiated, the organizational setting in which the advising and the negotiating take place, the personal and communication style of the advisor, the type of social relationship existing between advisor and negotiator, and the prescriptions of the advisor's role, as well as the advisor's own conception of his or her role. Thus, the pre‐existing close personal relationships between Baker and Bush, who were old friends, John and Robert Kennedy, who were brothers, and spouses Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were the strong foundations upon which these negotiation partnerships were built, and clearly shaped each advisor's role.

The relationship between advisor and client may change over time, resulting in a change in the advisor's role. For instance, an advisor to corporate negotiators may begin in the servant role and then, later, as the clients develop confidence in the advisor, attain the status of partner. Conversely, clients of a high powered, politically connected advisor who assumes the role of director may eventually relegate that advisor to a servant if his or her advice or advising method proves unhelpful. European Union advisors, particularly, face the problem of changing relationships because the composition and leadership roles of EU member state delegations at the council are subject to constant change.

Even within a single negotiation, the role of an advisor may shift depending on the issues in which he or she has particular expertise, or the unfolding dynamics may motivate a role shift. It is crucial that such shifts are mutually recognized and accepted. Otherwise, the disjuncture will undermine the advice.

All advisors carry out their tasks with a particular style, and that style can have an impact on the way in which a negotiator perceives, evaluates, and uses the advice given. “Style” in this sense means the way in which the advisor engages in the process of advising the client. Among the factors that may influence advising style are the advisor's (1) personal style, that is, the degree to which his or her interactions with a client are formal or informal; (2) communication style, that is, the degree to which his or her manner of communicating tends to be direct or indirect; (3) emotional expression, that is, the advisor's tendency to express herself or himself emotionally; and (4) propensity for risk taking, that is, the degree to which the advisor is willing to divulge information, try new approaches, and tolerate uncertainties. The survey questionnaire asked the EU advisors to rate themselves on each of these four elements. In addition, because advising usually takes place within an organization, the survey also asked the advisors for their preferences with respect to organizational leadership. These results shed further light on the role that advisors play in the process of negotiation.

Personal style concerns the way an advisor talks, relates to, and interacts with others. Background and culture strongly influence personal style. In the survey, the EU advisors were asked to rate the formality of their personal style on a scale of five, with 1 being the most informal and 5 being the most formal.

On the whole, the advisors surveyed lean toward informality. Of the seventy advisors responding to this question more than half (forty, 57 percent) rated themselves quite low on the formality scale at between 1 and 2. Only four respondents (6 percent) rated themselves as 4, and none reported ratings higher than that. Twenty‐six advisors (37 percent) rated themselves between 2.5 and 3.5, indicating personal styles mid‐way between formal and informal.

The advisors may believe that informality best enables them to build a strong relationship with the client, which, as noted earlier, they recognize as crucial to their success as advisors. A regression analysis of the survey data shows a correlation between an emphasis on relationship building as a goal and a preference for an informal personal style.⁵

Methods of communication vary among individuals and cultures. Some emphasize direct and simple methods of communication, while others rely on indirect and more complex methods. The latter may use circumlocutions, figurative forms of speech, facial expressions, gestures and other forms of body language (Salacuse 2003: 100). The survey asked the EU advisors to evaluate their communication style on a scale of 1 (direct) to 5 (indirect).

The respondents indicated a clear preference for a more direct communication style. Of the seventy respondents, more than three‐quarters of them (fifty‐five, 76 percent) rated themselves between 1 and 2. This was a clear preference among all the regional groups, with slightly more of the advisors from the Northern European (85 percent) and Eastern European regions (79 percent) rating their styles as “direct” than did the Mediterranean advisors (68 percent), but the differences among the three regional groups were not statistically significant. With regard to distribution according to gender, more female advisors (thirty‐two out of thirty‐eight, 84 percent) seemed to classify themselves as direct communicators than did their male counterparts (twenty‐two out of thirty‐two, 69 percent).

Here again, we might expect advisors’ preferred communication styles to be influenced by the degree to which they value building relationships with their clients. A regression analysis of the survey data supports this expectation, revealing a strong correlation between favoring a direct communication style and having a preference for building relationships.⁶ It also shows that advisors who identified themselves as “directors” tend to see themselves as having a direct communication style, while those who identified themselves as “servants” are more likely to see their communication style as indirect.

An interesting additional dimension of communication style concerns the medium that advisors prefer to use in communicating with their clients. The two most basic categories of communication method are, of course, oral and written. The survey therefore asked the advisors to rank their communication method preference on a scale of 1 (oral) to 5 (written). Slightly more than half (thirty‐six, 51 percent) gave equal weight (ratings of 2.5–3.5) to both forms, while one‐third (twenty‐two, 31 percent) tended to prefer oral communications (ratings of 1–2) and 18 percent (thirteen) tended to prefer writing (ratings of 4–5).

A regression analysis showed a strong correlation between preferences for direct communication and the oral medium, and between preferences for indirect forms and written communication. The analysis found no significant differences in the communication medium preferences according to region or gender.

Advisors, being human, may express their emotions while advising their clients. They may also consider the appropriate expression of emotions to be part of their communication style and indeed view such expression as enhancing their effectiveness as negotiation advisors. The survey, asked the EU advisors to rate their tendency for emotional expression from 1 (high) to 5 (low).

The results show a standard normal distribution (bell curve) as follows. Seventeen of the seventy‐one respondents (23 percent) rated themselves as highly emotionally expressive (ratings of 1.0–2.0). Thirty‐one of the respondents (44 percent) rated themselves as moderately emotionally expressive (ratings of 2.5 to 3.5). And twenty‐three of the respondents (32 percent) rated themselves less emotionally expressive (ratings of 3.5–5.0).

With respect to regional tendencies, almost half (42 percent) of the Eastern European advisors classified themselves as having lower levels of emotional expression (4–5), while only 20 percent of the Mediterranean European advisors ranked themselves similarly. In addition, a larger proportion (28 percent) of Mediterranean advisors rated themselves as having high emotional expression while only 11 percent of the Eastern European advisors put themselves in that category. A regression analysis found these results to be statistically significant.⁷

In addition, the advisors who emphasize relationship building seem to be more emotionally expressive. A regression analysis of the survey data revealed a strong correlation between an expressed interest in building relationships with clients and having a more emotionally expressive style.

The negotiation process nearly always confronts negotiators and their advisors with risks — risks that arise out of the need to divulge information, to try new approaches to problems, to trust the other side, or to tolerate uncertainties in a proposed course of action. A willingness to take risks is therefore an important element of both the negotiator's and advisor's styles. In the survey, the EU advisors rated themselves on a five‐point scale with respect to their willingness to take risks, with 1 being a high inclination to take risks and 5 being a low risk tolerance.

The risk preference among the seventy‐one advisors was relatively evenly distributed. Nearly one third of the advisors (twenty‐three, 32 percent) consider themselves to be high risk takers, with ratings between 1 and 2. An almost equal number (twenty‐two, 30 percent) rated themselves as low risk takers (ratings of 4–5).

A higher percentage of female advisors (39 percent) classified themselves as low risk takers than did their male counterparts (16 percent). Both men and women, however, were almost equally likely to report themselves as high risk takers (31 percent vs. 34 percent). Among the three regional groups, 42 percent of the Eastern European advisors and 33 percent of the Northern European advisors rated themselves as high risk takers, while 24 percent of Mediterranean advisors gave themselves a similar rating.

Because advisors work as part of a team whose function is to conduct negotiations, the survey asked respondents for their preferences with respect to the team's organization. Specifically, it asked whether they prefer a team based on one leader (ranking between 1 and 2 on the survey questionnaire), consensus decision making (ranking between 4 and 5), or some combination of the two (ranking between 2.5 and 3.5).

The preferences among the seventy‐one advisors were nearly evenly distributed, with twenty‐two (31 percent) opting for one leader, twenty‐seven (38) favoring consensus decision making, and twenty‐two (31 percent) preferring some combination of the two.

The survey did find significant differences among regional groups. Thus more advisors from Mediterranean Europe (40 percent) preferred a team structure with a single leader (rating of 1–2), compared to 22 percent and 32 percent from Northern and Eastern Europe respectively. One the other hand, substantially more Northern European advisors (56 percent) opted for consensus team organization (rating of 4–5) than did advisors from Mediterranean Europe (28 percent) or Eastern Europe (26 percent).⁸

In this article, I have examined the role of advisors in negotiation processes and suggest ways that such knowledge may be useful to scholars, negotiators, and advisors. Without knowledge of the advisory roles of, for example, Rosalynn Carter, Ezor Weisman, and Moshe Dayan at Camp David, one cannot fully understand how the outcome there was reached. To focus only on the actions of the three principal protagonists — Begin, Sadat, and Carter — paints an incomplete and distorted picture of what happened in that negotiation. Similarly, to focus on Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit without understanding the role of his chief advisor George Shultz or on President George H. W. Bush without examining the role of his old friend Secretary of State James Baker during the events leading to the Gulf War is to miss crucial parts of the story of those two important negotiations.

In studying any significant negotiation, scholars, practitioners, and teachers should therefore consider not only the content of the actual advice given but also the following seven elements: (1) the identity of important advisors and their relationships with negotiators in the negotiation and group decision making process under study; (2) the structure of that relationship; (3) the nature of the respective roles played by negotiators and advisors, particularly how members of each group perceived the prescription of their role expectations and their role performance; (4) the resources that the advisor brought to the negotiating table; (5) the means of influence that the advisor employed to advise the negotiator; (6) the nature of interactions between one side's advisors and the negotiators and advisors on the other side of the table; and finally (7) the advising style of the advisors in question. An examination of these seven factors may lead scholars of negotiation toward new insights into why negotiators have behaved in particular ways and thus yield a richer explanation of how a negotiation achieved the results that it did.

For negotiation practitioners, incorporating knowledge about advisors into their preparation, strategies, and tactics may enable them to achieve better results. Practitioners should therefore consider carefully the following seven elements as they undertake their tasks: (1) the kinds of advisors, formal or informal, who should be used in a given negotiation, the resources that such people will bring to the negotiation, and how those resources will help to achieve desired results; (2) the interests — personal, organizational, and professional — of potential advisors and how those interests will affect their role performance, positively or negatively; (3) the precise nature of the desired relationship with advisors and the specific roles they should play to achieve desired results in the negotiation; (4) the kinds of messages, positive or negative, that choosing a particular advisor sends to the other side and to the negotiator's constituents; (5) the identity of the advisors on the other side and the nature of their relationships with the negotiators they advise; (6) the nature of the strategies to be used to get to know the other side's advisors and to determine to what extent a negotiator, like Jimmy Carter at Camp David, may use the other side's advisors as channels of communication to that side or as sources of information; and finally (7) the conditions under which it would be useful to delegate preparatory, procedural, or technical issues to negotiations between advisors, rather than between the parties’ formally designated negotiators.

And finally, for advisors to negotiators, it may be helpful to think of their tasks within the framework of role theory, in particular to articulate the role expectations, role performance, and role conceptions of the positions they occupy. At the same time, it is important to realize that roles change over time and the process of role transformation may confront the advisor and the negotiator with role conflicts that they will need to manage in order to adjust to changing circumstances. They should also consider that — even in the context of international organizations such as the European Union that are committed to internationalism – the advisors’ own national and ethnic cultures are likely to have some influence on the way they do their jobs.

Listed below are ten important traits of a person's communication style and approach. Each trait demonstrates a wide range of variations, which can be organized along a continuum, as has been done below. With respect to each trait, indicate with an X where your own communication style and approach to advising tends to fall along each continuum.