Good leaders are invariably effective negotiators. After all, authority has its limits. Some of the people you lead are smarter, more talented and, in some situations, more powerful than you are. In addition, often you’re called to lead people over whom you have no authority, such as members of commissions, boards and other departments in your organization.

To persuade people to follow your lead, you need to appeal to their interests, communicate with them effectively and sell your vision—all of which are part of effective negotiation. These three key aspects of negotiation will improve your power and persuasiveness as a leader.               

1. PRACTICE INTEREST-BASED LEADERSHIP. Why should the people you’re supposed to lead follow you? If you believe that your charisma, your position or your vision is reason enough, you’re in trouble. While these qualities may affect how others relate to you, they won’t compel them to follow you. People follow leaders when they judge that it’s in their best interest to do so.

Just as wise negotiators focus on the other side’s interests, effective leaders seek to understand and satisfy the interests of those they lead. By doing so, they can better achieve organizational goals.

Some individuals care more about shoring up their power in the short term than they do about their units’ long-term health. Others care more about long-term career development than about compensation. When you understand where the other person’s true interests lie, you can then shape your messages and your actions to accommodate those interests in ways that will achieve your leadership goals. 

2. FIND THE RIGHT LEADERSHIP VOICE. Persuasive communication is fundamental to effective leadership—communicating in ways that meet individual concerns, interests and styles. When deciding how to communicate, recognize that the medium you choose reveals something about you and your relationship with the person you are trying to lead.

Suppose that you’re a company CEO trying to persuade your board of directors to support an acquisition. What if you sent each board member a detailed memorandum stating the terms and consequences of the deal? Intentionally or unintentionally, a generic memo could signal that you place little value on members’ opinions, and that you, not they, are running the show.

Instead, you might personally visit each director to explain the acquisition’s importance. A face-to-face meeting shows the individual director that her support is important and that you respect her autonomy and judgment. What’s more, holding such meetings will help you get to know your directors’ individual concerns, structure arrangements that satisfy them, and still allow you to make the acquisition that is important for the company’s future. 

3. NEGOTIATE A VISION FOR THE ORGANIZATION. Popular commentary on corporate leadership presupposes that a company’s vision comes from its CEO. But that’s not necessarily the case. Members located throughout an organization have plenty of thoughts about what the organization is and should be. Thus, the challenge of setting a group’s course lies in forging a single vision out of the multiplicity of visions held by the group’s members.

Leaders at Goldman Sachs, the venerable investment-banking partnership, faced exactly this challenge as they sought to negotiate its transformation into a publicly traded corporation. Over several meetings over several years, starting in 1986, the firm’s management committee failed to convince the partners to proceed. It wasn’t until 1998, when the firm’s two cochairmen engaged in one-on-one conversations with nearly all the firm’s 190 partners, that the partners voted to accept the committee’s recommendation.

As this example shows, the process of articulating a vision is one of negotiation—in particular, multilateral negotiation, which usually requires intensive, face-to-face coalition building.

Like a skilled diplomat, a leader—whether a chief executive officer or a department head—negotiates support from followers by appealing to their interests, communicating with each of them in the right voice and medium, and forging a single compelling vision that all can get behind. 

Jeswald W. Salacuse is a professor of law at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University and a member of the faculty of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. His latest book, Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich and Powerful People (Amacom, 2005), expands on the ideas presented in this article.

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