ABSTRACT
The secondary negotiator, who monitors and helps manage the live turn-by-turn interaction between the primary negotiator and the person in crisis, plays a vital role during a negotiation. By offering encouragement and suggestions for changing courses of action, secondary negotiators are a pillar of moral support for the negotiation team. Despite their role assisting the primary negotiator in interacting with the person in crisis, they remain firmly ’backstage’. This chapter brings the ’backstage’ role to the forefront by offering a close examination of the kind of interventions they make, and when they make them. We show how a secondary negotiator’s entry into the negotiation displays their ongoing analysis of the primary negotiator’s interaction with the person in crisis. We provide an in-depth look at the relationship between the secondary negotiator’s suggested actions and the primary negotiator’’s implementations (or not) of those actions and offer the first demonstration of what the secondary does during negotiations. By the end of this chapter, readers will have practical strategies for secondary negotiators and understand why generic ’rapport-building’ tactics such as “I care for you!” are not as effective as suggestions precisely fitted to the person in crisis’s current stance in the encounter.
