What do Great Rainmakers Have in Common With Great Hostage Negotiators?

Intuition.

Yet, is intuition something magical, that you’re born with? Can you grow it? Is it nature or nurture?

Daniel Kahneman is the brilliant author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” . Professor Kahneman is the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for his work (aided by Amos Tversky) developing Prospect Theory. (Prospect Theory describes how human behavior is driven by loss.) In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Professor Kahneman relays the story of a Fire Commander who was in a burning house with his men when he suddenly began shouting for everyone to get out immediately. His men, though they didn’t perceive the need to exit, followed his orders. They all got out just before the floor collapsed.

Incredible intuition? Great instincts? Almost a sixth sense for danger? That magic intuition equated to finely tuned recognition. The Fire Commander later described that he felt intense heat on his ears. The heat he felt versus the fire that he heard (and saw) didn’t add up. The center of the fire was in the basement below where they all stood. Intuition equals finely tuned recognition.

With great rainmakers and great hostage negotiators, recognition is of deep, hidden or unspoken emotional drivers. I stumbled over the book “How to Become a Rainmaker” a few years ago while I was browsing the business section of a book store. I like reviewing it occasionally to refresh my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel peoples decisions.

You can intentionally take the time to build your intuition. Here are some of the examples of people who are more than salespeople; they are rainmakers in their professions:

• A babysitter sells: A relaxed evening and a neat house.
• A furnace or natural gas salesperson sells: Warm cozy rooms.
• The locksmith sells: Security for valuables.
• A plumber sells: A clean, dry basement (saving a thousand dollar rug).

These benefits are emotion driven, “feeling” benefits. Some have protection from the potential losses attached to them. These are exactly the sorts of things that my hostage negotiation training taught me to look for in a completely different realm with different stakes. But they are the same types of emotional drivers.

I, personally find my recognition of these subtle and complex emotional drivers to be a perishable skill. I also find that my recognition of them is improved the more I stop at the beginning of any negotiation to look for them.

What do great rainmakers have in common with great hostage negotiators? What they have in common is a well-developed intuition that is actually just an intentionally trained recognition of emotional drivers.