Getting It Done

Basic stuff, right? Hey, it’s all basic stuff—the problem is getting it done.

One September morning back in 1992, I was sitting in traffic in Queens on the way to work, thinking about how great the weather was and how quiet it had been in the city over the past few days. Bad combination—good weather, quiet times; sure enough, my beeper went off.

The number in the screen belonged to the chief of detectives. One thing I knew before I managed to pull out of traffic and reach a pay phone: He wasn’t calling to ask me to pick up doughnuts on the way in.

Two idiots with guns had decided this would be a fine day to rob a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn, and when things got snarled up, they’d barricaded the doors and taken hostages. Maybe they rented Dog Day Afternoon the night before—could be, since the botched robbery that led to the hostage situation portrayed in the movie took place maybe half a mile from the bank they had entered while I was driving in to work. Just like in the movie, things went sour.

Al Pacino was nowhere to be seen when I pulled up. But the chief of detectives and ten or fifteen other high-ranking bosses were.

“Hey Talk-to-Me, come over here,” said the chief.

Talk-to-Me was one of my nicknames at the time. It was a good one, certainly preferable to others that cannot be reprinted here.

“Listen to this and tell me what you think,” the chief said, taking me aside and laying out the basic situation. The would-be bank robbers had asked for a van. They wanted to put the hostages inside and drive ten blocks to a police station. At that point, they promised to release the hostages.

Several of the chief’s underlings were telling him to go for it. Obviously, they were after his job.

“What do you think?” asked the chief.

Well, I couldn’t tell the chief precisely what I thought, because there were so many expletives involved and he had a shinier badge than I did. But I did make my basic opinion clear. You don’t take a situation that is basically contained and un-contain it. You don’t subject hostages to danger unnecessarily. You absolutely don’t give the bad guys a means of escape.

And if you’re a chief who’s in any way comfortable with your job, you don’t take a shot at giving the dozen or so news crews on the nearby rooftops a chance to do a live version of Disaster at High Noon.

“Something goes wrong and the subjects try to make a run for it, you have a major shoot-out with three hostages right in the middle of it,” I pointed out as diplomatically as I could. “The whole incident will be televised live throughout the nation. Who’s going to be blamed?”

The chief turned pale. He turned and walked back to his so-called advisors. “We are not going to let them drive themselves anywhere,” he said in about as firm a voice as I’ve ever heard.

Now let me point out that the chief—and his advisors—were all pretty intelligent guys. To be the head of detectives in New York City you have to have a range of skills that goes well beyond being a good detective. I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to do it. And even though I love to make fun of them, most of the people giving the chief advice were pretty sharp too. But even in the best force with the top people working together, bad decisions can be made.

What happened—or I should say almost happened—was something I call in my classes “the quick fix syndrome.” We’re going to go into it in a lot of detail in the next chapter, but the thing to realize now is that things are not always as good or as easy as they sound. There is no such thing as a quick fix. Not to pick on them—well, okay, I am picking on them—but in my business, and possibly in yours, quick fixes come when supervisors who have not been trained in the art of hostage negotiation get involved without really understanding the big picture.

Fortunately, the chief was smart enough to trust the system he and others had set up beforehand. They let the negotiators do their job. Ultimately, he had faith in the system and the people he put on the team to carry it out.

You have to have faith in the team and in yourself if you’re going to succeed as a negotiator. Trust the process, even if the negotiation doesn’t seem to be making headway. I’m not saying you can’t review your goal and positions to make sure they’re realistic. Many times that’s necessary. But losing faith in your process and your team is a guaranteed way to fail.

Success doesn’t mean that you get everything you want 100 percent of the time. That’s not success—that’s perfection, and perfect you and I ain’t. Not every negotiation will reach its goal.

Let me repeat: You ain’t going to get what you want every time you negotiate; that’s why you need the guys with the guns, or Plan B. Plan B does not equal failure; it is the alternative.

A successful outcome that meets your goals is possible in most situations you’ll encounter. So if you don’t get it this time, relax, trust yourself, and move on.