Coaches Need to Be Master Negotiators
Why most coaches lose before the job begins
Principle: Tactical Empathy
Most coaches I know are grateful just to receive the offer.
They don’t negotiate. They’re not comfortable advocating for themselves, and they don’t know that the person on the other side of the table is expecting them to.
They defend it with the same line every time: “I just want to prove myself first.”
This isn’t humility. That’s a failed negotiation.
From the moment you accept a role, negotiation plays a critical role. Salary. Staff. Roles and responsibilities. Reporting structure. But most coaches aren’t taught to negotiate, they’re taught to coach. The assumption is that technical excellence will speak for itself.
It doesn’t.
In Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss defines tactical empathy as “understanding the feelings and mindset of another in the moment and also hearing what is behind those feelings so you increase your influence in all moments that follow. It’s bringing our attention to both the emotional obstacles and the potential pathways to getting an agreement done.”
In a coaching context, it sounds like this:
The performance director keeps blocking your resource requests. You could keep making the case with data. Or you could get curious about what’s actually driving the resistance: budget pressure from above, a previous hire who overpromised, fear of losing control of the athlete programme. Name that. Address what’s underneath. That’s where the dynamic shifts.
The athlete shuts down in a review meeting. Not because the feedback is wrong, but because they’re hearing it as a threat to who they are. Before you can deliver the message, you have to earn your way into the conversation. Tactical empathy is how you do that.
The staff member pushes back on a process change. They’re not resistant. They’re uncertain. And there’s a difference. Hearing the uncertainty first, labelling it, letting it breathe, changes what happens next.
Influence doesn’t start with being right. It starts with making the other person feel genuinely understood.
Perspective: Otto Scharmer’s Four Levels of Listening
Listening is a prerequisite for good negotiation and for good coaching. A poor listener will struggle to apply tactical empathy in any consistent way.
I was introduced to Otto Scharmer’s levels of listening last year. The first three levels describe most of what coaches think of as good listening: downloading (confirming what you already think), factual listening (noticing new data), and empathic listening (seeing through someone else’s eyes).
Level 4 is different.
Scharmer calls it Generative Listening. It goes beyond connecting with the speaker. It involves engaging with the core ideas in a conversation and exploring their potential: where they could go, what they could become. A generative listener drops their ego and the other barriers they usually carry into a room in order to help bring the best possible future into being.
When a speaker and a listener align at this level, the conversation changes. It becomes energised. Outcomes that neither person arrived at alone start to emerge.
Most coaches are practising levels one and two on a good day. Level 4 is a different discipline entirely.
Story: The Obvious Choice
In 2014, Steve Kerr turned down the New York Knicks.
His mentor Phil Jackson had just taken the GM role there. The most celebrated coach in NBA history was building something, and he wanted Kerr alongside him.
Kerr chose the Warriors instead.
By conventional logic, it didn’t add up. The Knicks were the established franchise. The relationship with Jackson was one of the most formative of Kerr’s career. Going to New York was the easy path to explain.
But Kerr had been watching the Warriors before the job even opened. When it did, the conversations he had with ownership and players confirmed what he’d sensed. He wasn’t just listening to the pitch. He was listening to what the pitch revealed: the alignment between what leadership believed and what the players in the building actually felt. He called it the “right fit.”
First season, they won the championship. Four titles in eight years followed.
The difference between the obvious choice and the right one often comes down to what you’re willing to hear in a conversation.
Question:
Tactical empathy only works if you’re genuinely curious about what’s driving the other person.
Where in a current negotiation, with a colleague, an athlete, or a leader, are you responding to the surface rather than what’s underneath it?
Closing Thought:
Coaches are trained to read the game. Fewer are trained to read the room. Tactical empathy closes that gap. Get underneath the words. That’s where influence actually lives.
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens