Misattribution of Motive Can Kill (Business) Relationships

A decade ago I was in the heat of a deal negotiation with a large company when they suddenly went silent for a week.  I was furious.  I thought they were trying to string us (startup) along to see if we might back off from some of our deal terms as the deal dragged on.  Only much later did I learn that their deal team simply got pulled into a 50x bigger deal.  And no-one bothered to let us know the reason for the delay (maybe there was some concern about rumors of a larger deal leaking).  It was then that I understood how the mistake of misattributing motive almost killed the whole thing.

The challenge with overcoming this mistake is that it seems to me to be largely rooted in emotional responses.  This appears especially true, when the action in question can easily be misattributed to a nefarious motive, such as greed.  In these situations it is super important to breathe, take time out and remind oneself that there might be fairly benign alternative explanations at work.  It also puts a real premium on having either established a trust relationship in the first place, where one can simply pick up the phone and have a conversation, or having some kind of back channel that can be used to better understand the real motive.

As or possibly more important is to realize that others are equally likely to make this mistake.  So one’s own actions will often be subject to misattribution of motive by others.   Because this is one step removed, it is harder and I am afraid this still happens to me.  In a much more recent negotiation I did not say something because I thought it was obvious – in fact I considered it the basis of the entire discussion.  The other side instead attributed my silence on this point to a lack of conviction on the merits of the transaction.  Needless to say, the outcome wound up being a bit of a disappointment for everyone involved.  It requires a lot of extra effort, but I am now trying to put myself into the shoes of the other side and look at my own actions and statements through from that perspective.  Of course again it really helps to have a trust relationship so that over-communicating is a way to address this issue.

I wrote all of this based on a recent business relationship experience, but the same applies for personal relationships (where it may or may not be more obvious).