Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Joshua N. Weiss on my podcast, Negotiate Anything, where we discussed his insightful new book, “Getting Back to the Table: 5 Steps to Reviving Stalled Negotiations.” As a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project, co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative at Harvard University, and director of the MS in Leadership and Negotiation program at Bay Path University, Dr. Weiss has developed an evidence-based model for handling stalled or failed negotiations. His extensive experience as a renowned negotiation and conflict resolution specialist, consultant to international entities and governments, and advisor to the UN Mediation Unit gives him unparalleled expertise in the field. His book empowers individuals to return to the table with increased strength and resilience, carefully learning from the challenges they encountered. The core message is powerful: failing in negotiations is inevitable, but learning and growing from failure is a choice.
During our conversation about how successful negotiators transform failures into learning opportunities, I shared a revealing story about my son, Kai. What made this story particularly compelling was how perfectly it illustrated the principles Dr. Weiss had been researching and teaching—about separating the experience of failure from the emotional burden of shame.
Negotiating Parenthood: Failure, Shame, And How We Teach Children
Kai had made a mistake—failed to complete a task as requested. After I explained the situation and why it needed to be addressed, Kai simply replied, “OK dad, I understand.” Then, without defensiveness or emotional distress, he walked away and immediately began fixing the problem.
What struck me as remarkable was how Kai took “no emotional damage” from the interaction. There was no shame, no guilt, no embarrassment—just a clear recognition that a mistake had been made and needed correction. This stood in stark contrast to how adults typically respond when facing failure, becoming defensive or treating criticism as a personal indictment.
This interaction showcased the success of the intentional parenting approach I had been using with Kai. By separating the mistake from self-worth, Kai could focus entirely on problem-solving rather than managing negative emotions. As we unpacked this story during our podcast conversation, Dr. Weiss and I realized it contained a powerful lesson for all of us about handling failure in negotiations and beyond.
A child does not naturally connect shame with failure. They seem to see failure simply as something that did not work out; they realize they aren’t getting what they want, and then move on with life. They don’t hang onto failure like adults do. As such, there is something exceedingly insightful in this small mindset shift – a true nugget of wisdom worth embracing. When we fail, we often learn from the world around us that we should feel shame and embarrassment as a result. But let’s be very clear — that is indeed a learned behavior, and it actually gets in our way of coping with our failures in the most productive way. Interestingly, the best learning companies and organizations seem to separate these two concepts – perhaps not always overtly — and do not let shame become the overwhelming feeling when someone fails. Quite the contrary, actually.
Psychological Safety And Our Inability To Accept Failure in Negotiation
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School Professor, has done some wonderful work on the subject of learning from failure in organizations. The first key for her is to separate failure and blame, and this is something Dr. Weiss also discusses in his new book. As she elucidates, “Failure and fault are virtually inseparable in most households, organizations, and cultures. Every child learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame. That is why so few organizations have shifted to a culture of psychological safety in which the rewards of learning from failure can be fully realized.”
One of her key pieces of advice is the very concept of psychological safety, but what does that notion really mean when it comes to failure? It means that you develop a learning organization that is devoid of blame and shame, but not responsibility. This is a very important distinction. When failure occurs, a postmortem analysis is needed to understand why it happened and how things can be done differently and better. But if you don’t remove blame, and more importantly the feeling of shame, a person simply cannot learn. Without that separation, they are left to sit with a bruised ego, the deeply personal experience of shame, and embarrassment. There is no learning – only humiliation.
Psychology and Negotiation
There’s another hidden barrier to learning from failure: the way our minds instinctively react. As Dr. Weiss explains, after failure, we often enter an automatic pattern where we blame others or external factors. This mental reflex protects us from the discomfort of shame—but it also prevents us from seeing the valuable lessons in our own actions. Even when we’re eager to grow, our brain’s instinct to shift blame outward can prevent us from recognizing our own role in the outcome.
All that stated, we are often asked, how can an organization really learn from failure and create a culture where it is safe to experiment, be creative, excel in different ways, and sometimes fail?
The core of our answer is to start by separating shame from failure and then create a learning culture. When a failure happens, people will be conditioned to say, “Wow, this happened. Not what we wanted, but we know this occurs from time to time. How can we really learn from this? Let’s get everyone together to analyze this and think about what we can take away so we can grow as an organization.” That kind of conversation requires that the person or people who failed share the details of what transpired so that the postmortem is as accurate as it can be. They are not held out as a problem or as an example – they are lauded for their courage in facing the cold hard facts. And people are reminded that “we have all been there before,” so no judgment.
In the end, separating shame from failure is not an easy thing to do. It requires us to tell ourselves and those around us a different story, but that story is the only path to facing the cold hard facts and genuine sharing, learning, and growing from our failures.
How Negotiation Experts, Trainers, and Professors Should Address The Reality of Negotiation Failures
I bring a distinctive perspective to this conversation about failure and shame in negotiation. As CEO of the American Negotiation Institute and an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law—which currently holds the top-ranked dispute resolution program in the country according to U.S. News & World Report—I teach my students this critical lesson: failure will happen, but great negotiators adjust, adapt, and recover. There’s no such thing as a perfect negotiation, but there absolutely is such a thing as an effective one.
Dr. Weiss, with his background as co-founder of Harvard’s Global Negotiation Initiative and his extensive work with negotiators worldwide, brings complementary expertise. His motivation for writing “Getting Back to the Table” came from recognizing that even the best negotiators in the business fail and make mistakes. Yet there was so much shame attached to failure that people rarely discussed it openly in the industry. Dr. Weiss sought to change that paradigm by creating a framework that not only acknowledges failure but transforms it into a powerful learning opportunity.
Both of us serve as negotiation experts, consultants, and strategic coaches to leaders at some of the largest companies in the world. We’ve seen firsthand how shame can grip even the most experienced negotiators. A significant part of our consulting involves helping clients stay focused and maintain their confidence so they can perform at their best despite experiencing setbacks.
As host of Negotiate Anything, which has produced over 1,500 episodes, I’ve interviewed countless negotiation experts. Yet it wasn’t until my conversation with Dr. Weiss that I realized how rarely negotiation experts discuss shame and failure. We believe that openly sharing our own negotiation failures would be tremendously empowering for the people we teach, helping them realize that even experts face challenges. No negotiator is perfect—and embracing that truth is the first step toward genuine growth and resilience.
Whether working with students just learning to negotiate or executives negotiating multimillion-dollar deals, we’ve observed that everyone struggles with the shame-failure connection. Breaking this link is essential not just for individual growth in negotiation, but for creating organizations that truly learn from experience rather than hiding from it.