How do you negotiate with a narcissist? By negotiating with the pattern instead of the person you wish were present. Concretely: manage the relationship between the deal and their self-image, because the pattern will pay real money to protect the story; never spend their status publicly; expect the agreement to be renegotiated after signing and build that into the structure; and hold boundaries silently through consequences rather than announcements. Above all, arrive able to walk away, because need is the one thing the pattern reads fluently.
I have lectured on this subject for years to Dutch audiences of executives, dealmakers and the occasional divorce lawyer, and the room always contains the same two people: the negotiator who lost a year of his life to a counterparty everyone warned him about, and the sceptic who believes negotiation is negotiation and psychology is decoration. This article is for both. Negotiating across the table from a pronounced narcissistic pattern is a structurally different game, not because the pattern is smarter than you, but because it is playing for a different prize, and until you know what the prize is, every concession you make purchases the wrong thing.
The context here is business: deals, contracts, boardroom conflicts, exits and partnerships. The material rests on the same foundations as the rest of my work on this subject, Rescue the Alpha Wolf with Martin Appelo and Let’s Talk Leadership, and the same disclaimer applies with extra force: we are describing behavioural risk profiles, not diagnosing your counterparty, and if the negotiation in question is your own divorce from an abusive partner, you need a lawyer and a therapist, in that order, not a business article.
What the pattern is actually negotiating for
Standard negotiation theory assumes both parties maximise interests: price, terms, risk, time. The narcissistic pattern maximises something else first: the integrity of its self-image. Underneath the aggression sits the machinery I described in the narcissistic circle: an old deficit in unconditional recognition, compensated by inflation, defended at any cost, because for this structure losing face and losing self are the same event. In Let’s Talk Leadership I recount the founder whose entire negotiation posture collapsed into one honest sentence: “If I’m not right, then who am I?” Hold that sentence while you prepare, because it is sitting across the table from you, wearing a better suit.
Practical consequence one: the pattern will trade substance for story. Deals of real economic value are abandoned because the structure made the counterparty look like the winner; deals of dubious value are signed because the narrative flattered. You can be on the receiving end of this stupidity, or you can price it, structure around it, and occasionally, ethically, let the story cost them and pay you.
Practical consequence two: the relationship is instrumental and the reciprocity you would normally bank, goodwill, remembered favours, the long game, does not accrue. As we put it in Rescue the Alpha Wolf, under the banner of serving the collective, the unpolished alpha wolf serves himself, and whoever stops applauding is removed. Negotiate accordingly: everything you need must live in the structure, nothing in the goodwill.
The seven working rules
1. Separate the deal from the face, and feed the right one. Design every proposal so the substance you need and the story they need travel separately. Give the pattern the announcement, the credit, the visible win, the version of events in which the concession was their statesmanlike idea; keep the covenants, the collateral, the control rights. This is not weakness but routing: you are directing their negotiating energy toward the prize they actually want and away from the one you cannot afford to lose. The polished operators do this instinctively; the rest of us can do it deliberately.
2. Never spend their status in public. Corner the pattern in front of witnesses and you will win the exchange and lose the negotiation; public humiliation converts a commercial dispute into an existential one, and existential disputes have no settlement range. Deliver the hard truths in private, factually, in their interest, exactly the channel discipline I prescribe for executives who work under this pattern. Save your public moments for praise you can afford.
3. Expect the post-signature negotiation. To the pattern, a signed agreement is not an ending but a new opening position; terms will be retested, reinterpreted and selectively remembered, not always cynically, since the projector genuinely re-films the past in flattering light. So build the enforcement into the architecture: milestones with automatic consequences, escrows, third-party verification, and the sequencing of your own obligations behind theirs. A deal with this counterparty is worth exactly its self-executing parts, plus theatre.
4. Hold boundaries with consequences, not announcements. Announced limits are invitations; the pattern tests boundaries as reliably as water finds cracks, and every speech about your red lines hands over a map of them. The working alternative is silent enforcement: the meeting that ends on time without commentary when the theatrics begin, the offer that expires as stated, the escalation you executed rather than threatened. Boundaries the pattern discovers by collision are the only ones it files as real.
5. Regulate yourself; the provocation is the strategy. The rage, the charm, the sudden deadline, the insult wrapped in a joke: these are not emotional weather but negotiation instruments, deployed to move you from thinking to reacting. Affective contagion, which I describe in Let’s Talk Leadership as the mechanism by which a leader’s state becomes the room’s state, is here being used on purpose. Your counter-instrument is dull and decisive: slow the tempo, take the break, decide nothing in the heat, and treat each provocation as information about which of your positions is working. The calmest nervous system in the room is, over any multi-round negotiation, the compounding advantage.
6. Bring an audience they cannot afford to disappoint, or remove the one they are performing for. The pattern behaves differently under observation by people whose regard it needs: investors, the chair, the industry press, the golf club. Sometimes the move is to widen the room, putting the deal’s reasonableness on a stage where unreasonableness has reputational cost. Sometimes it is the opposite: the pattern is escalating because its own lieutenants are watching, and the productive conversation only becomes possible one-to-one. Read which performance you are in, and change the theatre, not the script.
7. Arrive able to walk, and let it show quietly. Need is the one signal the pattern reads with perfect accuracy, and it prices need ruthlessly. The prepared alternative, the genuine one, changes your smell in the room; this is the same load-bearing wall I prescribe everywhere this pattern appears, because it works everywhere this pattern appears. The negotiator who would rather leave than lose himself cannot be farmed, and the pattern, sensing this early, frequently and abruptly becomes reasonable, which tells you everything about what the previous unreasonableness was for.
The meta-rule
Everything above compresses into one sentence: stop negotiating with the person you wish were present. The wish is the vulnerability. Negotiators lose to this pattern not because they lack technique but because they keep extending the reciprocity the structure cannot return, then feel betrayed on schedule, then either capitulate or explode, both of which the pattern converts into advantage. Respect the adaptive intelligence across the table, as I wrote in Let’s Talk Leadership about coaching the same profile: the armour is not stupidity, it is a lifetime’s engineering. Deal with the engineering. Leave the person to their coach.
The quotable version: a narcissist across the table will sell you the substance surprisingly cheaply, provided you let them keep the story; the expensive mistake is fighting for both.
Frequently asked questions
Is it ethical to “feed the ego” to close a deal? Managing a counterparty’s face is standard negotiation practice across every culture on earth; with this profile it is simply load-bearing. The ethical line is deception about substance. Letting someone own the narrative of a deal whose terms are honest is diplomacy, not fraud.
What if the narcissist is on my own side of the table? Then rules two, four and five apply internally, and your preparation must include pre-agreed mandates and private channels for correcting course, because a public disagreement inside your own delegation is a gift your counterparty will unwrap immediately. The senior-executive survival guide covers the standing version of this problem.
They agreed yesterday and deny it today. Are they lying? Sometimes strategically; often the projector has sincerely re-filmed the scene. The distinction matters less than the remedy, which is identical: contemporaneous written confirmation of every material point, and architecture that does not depend on their memory.
Does everything here apply to ordinary tough negotiators? Much of it is simply sound practice under pressure. The difference in degree becomes a difference in kind on three points: the priority of face over substance, the post-signature renegotiation reflex, and the absence of accruing goodwill. When you observe those three, switch frameworks.
When should I refuse to negotiate at all? When the pattern’s prize has become the conflict itself, when each round is purchasing narrative rather than converging on terms, or when the relationship cost of winning exceeds the value of the win. Walking away is not the failure mode of this negotiation; staying too long is.
Arvid Buit is a master executive coach (ICF, EMCC, APECS, Marshall Goldsmith SCC), founder of TRUE Leadership, and author of Let’s Talk Leadership, Red de Alfawolf (with Martin Appelo) and Wahlberg. He lectures on leadership and narcissism, including the psychology of negotiation. Organisational psychology for professional contexts, not clinical or legal advice. The full field guide · About the coaching practice