Your identity is key: negotiation strategies to build trust

I am from Morocco, which has been useful in most parts of the Middle East. It would help in breaking the ice, showing that I was a part of their community. When I say my dad is Moroccan, they say: “You’re part of us.” I speak very little Arabic, I’m not Muslim and I have been in Morocco once when I was three years old. However, they tell me: “Well, that’s your parent’s fault, not yours, and we’re glad that you’re here now.”

In Yemen, we were in territories that were Ansar Allah’s (the Houthi armed movement) stronghold. When the counterpart saw my surname, he insisted that I called him uncle—and that was basically our access to the territory.

I don’t think I’ve had bad experiences with this, because I’ve mostly worked in the Middle East. Where it wouldn’t have been an asset, I could rely on my French side, like in Kurdish places, because the French had supported the Kurdish struggle. My diversity has been key, it has allowed me to play up some things and downplay others depending on the context.

My identity has almost always been a positive one. As an Arab Muslim woman, it has worked positively in every situation, even in a context like Latin America. In Colombia, for instance, there is no sizable community of Arab-speaking refugees, but there are many Colombians that have Arab descent, and this is a good icebreaker.

The fact that I dress in a modern way conveys that I’m a citizen of the world, not rooted in a single place. This has been helpful. Of course, when I’ve worked in the Arab region, I try to have conversations in Arabic. I also try to be very well prepared on the subject matter, so they know I’m not this Arab expat sitting in Europe that was sent in only because she speaks Arabic. They would have higher expectations of me, but it has nothing to do with gender. I have to show that there is legitimacy, a reason why I was chosen that goes beyond my language ability and my nationality. Then they want to cooperate. I think that if I hadn’t been an Arabic speaker and from the region, I wouldn’t have had that many open doors.

I was traveling in Iraq, and I had a Ministry of Trade officer accompanying me. I told him I wanted to visit the mosques, get closer to his culture, and he was positively surprised. He told me he couldn’t take me then, but that he would the following time. He asked me to bring with me an abaya (a full-length outer garment worn by some Muslim women), and he eventually took me to two Shia shrines. He told me: “I’ll go and pray, you sit here, don’t speak to anyone, look around.” He exposed himself, he went beyond what his work was supposed to be with me, just because I had expressed an interest in getting closer to him.

Then we went to Mosul, and I told him I wanted to go see a monastery. He said he did not have time as we needed to go back to the main offices. He was so sorry for not being able to please me and show the Christian cultural side of his country. He promised to do it next time. This rapport that I created with him helped me open up for my work. I was very junior then, I was scared, traveling with people who want to be the bosses… The fact that I managed to build that trust with him made my work easier with him—he gave me information he wasn’t supposed to give me. As junior as I was, I had more legitimacy than senior people because I had managed to cross the cultural bridge.

I have a Christian Arabic colleague who has a beard. When he recites the Quran, you have no idea how much of a positive impression he leaves. When he talks about the Quran and says he’s a Christian, it comes as a pleasant surprise.

Being aware of a person’s religion is essential. When I went to Ethiopia, where they are very religious, I talked to my Christian colleagues and took quotes from the Bible. It is a sign of respect to the culture and plays a big part in being accepted yourself.

This Christian colleague would always start with a story about the country or the city, about their history or about a site in the city that has a meaning. And it breaks the ice. You’re showing that you “know”, that you read about their country, and they think: “This person did their homework.”

All these countries that went into war, they all have great histories. Look at Iraq, the birth of civilization. In Ethiopia, when you tell people about the great emperor of Habesha who was the first one to give asylum to prophet Mohammad, they love it. Through this, it’s like you’re telling them: “You’re in conflict now, but let’s not forget your amazing history. Look where you come from.”

One of my big steps in building rapport is sharing personal information, but also looking into my counterpart’s life, which means you must ask questions, so they can see you’re interested in them. I’m a very curious person in nature, and that has allowed me to have some great conversations with my counterparts. I learned about football because I knew that the sheikhs would place me on the French map depending on football. Also, football would tone down my womanhood.

I also know a lot about Yemeni poetry. Not because I like it, but because I thought it was a way of breaking the ice in negotiations with tribal leaders. This was me showing I knew about their context, in ways that are not like: “You need water.”

In December 2021, we were negotiating in Tigray where no non-government organisations had access and all the international staff had been evacuated. There had been no humanitarian assistance for two months.

Early January 2022, during the Ethiopian Christmas “Tamkat”, the situation was time-sensitive in Tigray, and all official authorities’ offices were closed for three days. However, with the help of a local tourist guide, I managed to find where the command-post commander was staying.

He was in the middle of the celebration. I approached him and told him in an attempt to break the ice: “You know how you can get more credit to get to heaven? [Because I had asked and been told he was very religious.] If you give me permission to give lifesaving assistance to thousands of people waiting for us.”

He laughed, we talked, I congratulated him for the holiday and we exchanged numbers. Then he told his staff to give us a permission letter; we got access without him even looking at our passports, we only used the organisation’s ID card. I was lucky though; on a normal working day this might not have happened.

Two things have helped me quite a bit in establishing rapport: first, trying to keep a certain level of informality and second, being honest and transparent.

It’s true that I wasn’t dealing with diplomats, but I did deal with ministers. With them, you must maintain politeness and decorum, but cracking a joke from time to time or being a little bit more open when you hesitate about an answer helps. This closeness has allowed me to establish rapport and to end up addressing with an informal “you” (“tu” instead of “vous”) most of my counterparts in francophone Africa. This makes me look sympathetic and not particularly threatening; it makes it look like I don’t have an agenda even though I do.

Regarding honesty and transparency, I feel like a lot of people in negotiation, particularly men, have a fixed idea of how male negotiators ought to behave—stern, with strong handshakes. I try to go a little bit to the opposite of this. I would not show all my cards, but at some point, I would say: “I’m putting this on the table because my boss has asked me to.” I would not divulge any critical information, but I have used this as a tactic to also establish the trust.

The Health Office had decided to close our mental health clinic arguing that we didn’t have a license. Some guy from the municipality came to the clinic, there was some shouting, he threatened to close the clinic and asked for all our names.

So, I went to the municipality with the program coordinator—I was translating for him—and the municipality guy started shouting again. The coordinator noticed that the tone of the counterpart had started to come down when I was talking to him in Arabic, so he told me to deal with him. When you see that someone is so furious you need to read the signs. I knew that, in that area, when you “butter people up”, it goes well. My dialect and accent were different than his, but my attitude and my face calmed him down. He said: “You know how to speak. You are not like the staff in your clinic. They don’t respect anyone.”

I told him I understood, I apologised on their behalf: “They maybe didn’t know who you were, they are new.” The matter of language and how you speak to them meant a lot, so I focused on that every time I talked to him. He kept repeating the same issue about our staff, I kept apologising. I was not convinced, but you need to adapt your personality. I am not very patient usually, but I was trying to project that. I knew it was a long-term relationship because I would need to renew the license after some months. Each holiday I used to send a happy holidays message, I called often. Then, when I handed the task to someone else, I told them all this.

He ended up giving us a week to get the license instead of three days. Initially, they had wanted us to pay in a retrospective manner, which they also dropped.

When I’m not in my country, I go through with a low profile, being very respectful of the local culture. I ask the translator what to do, what the local customs are: do we look people in the eye? Do we shake hands? All these things you want to know before and not after the meeting. It is important to be very open to listen and to take the negotiation step by step, paying attention to reassure the counterpart about the presence of the non-governmental organisation and the distribution. The first objective is to create a climate of trust, to develop bridges.

I always pay close attention to religion or spiritual beliefs and to the local culture. You lay low, and you listen. When my interpreter was translating, I was paying a lot of attention to the non-verbal language of my counterpart. It was fascinating. After 9 months in Afghanistan, I developed this capacity to better read non-verbal language, which I later applied in Pakistan. According to my experience with local tribes, if you get to have a clear and direct eye to eye contact with your counterpart, you know they will agree or are telling the truth. But if the counterpart is moving a lot and saying “Inshallah”…

Sometimes you’re able to really prepare, but sometimes you just don’t have that luxury because you don’t know who’s going to show up on your counterpart’s side. When I can prepare, I discuss with the local staff what we know, and I would complement that with observations and my own research. In a first meeting I’m more on a listening mode, I take notes on how they behave. I would be in a discussion with a counterpart and have a colleague doing some chit chat with the other members of the counterpart’s team or the population (if possible) to get more detailed information and observe the environment.

I always try to get information from different sources, because everyone has an agenda even if it’s not deliberate. If it’s somebody in power, I do think about how my engagement with him or her will be observed by others. We shouldn’t be seen as too close or friendly, but rather cordial and respectful, still with some distance. I’ve seen colleagues who go very far in an attempt to build relationships without due consideration to the perception issue.

Our counterpart was a doctor, and I noticed he was very proud in naming himself as such. So, I told him about the universities I had studied in, mentioning people he knew there… I told him I moved to another university because of the war. I told him about my relatives, who have some educational and social weight in our city. That helped us; it’s not like it’s “anybody” coming to talk to him.

I was also able to adapt quickly to any subject he brought up: orphans, internally displaced people, selection criteria, agriculture, water availability. That gave us an opportunity to talk more.

It is essential to rely on your national colleagues. The first people I would get close to in a new mission would be the national staff. They are the ones who can tell you what you need to know, protect you, open the door for you to understand how the local culture works. When negotiating, you need to understand what the language means, what that word in that sentence means, what that specific face means.

The optics are also extremely important. I had a boss in Sudan who had a huge desk in a huge office. I never realized why until I understood that he was the one negotiating, so he needed to show that he was in power.

What matters are also the optics of how you dress; you need to assimilate your dressing to the local context. I cover my body to respect the culture of the place, because my legitimacy starts form the respect I get from this people, and they care a lot about clothes and manners.

If I hear a rumor that my counterpart is a difficult person, then I have to be more thoughtful. Personality makes a big difference. Often, when we have gotten a very tough negotiator, we would choose to use me—as an international—because it gives us time during the translations to think more. It helps to have that lag, where they need to think, and we can justify ourselves by saying: “This was probably lost in translation.” It becomes a strategy in itself. If we go in speaking Arabic from the beginning, chances are the negotiation can flounder within 10 minutes.

For instance, we have this international male staff who speaks Arabic, and his temperament may be similar to that of the counterpart. When the counterpart gets upset and angry, the chances of our negotiator getting upset or angry are quite high. In this case, we force it so that the non-Arabic speaking person becomes the lead, and like that we can have time. If the interlocutor is upset, we would say: “So sorry, we misunderstood what you said, can you explain it again?” And things simmer down. It gives us a longer negotiation time, while with an Arabic speaking person there wouldn’t be that lag.