What Alia Bhatt Can Teach Us About Negotiation
Two films, one lead actor, and the two things that actually decide high-stakes conversations
Last week, I spent three hours with 34 women leaders from PSUs across the country – Assistant Managers to General Managers – working through what actually fails in a high-stakes negotiation.
Being a movie-buff, the interactions slowly took me to two of my favourite movies, and both, unexpectedly, have the same lead actor. It struck me later that this wasn’t a coincidence I was forcing onto the material – both films are, underneath their very different plots, studies in the same discipline: knowing where you stand, and knowing who’s standing with you.
Assessing your position before and during your negotiation: In Raazi, Sehmat doesn’t win by being the loudest voice in the room. She wins because she knows exactly where she stands before she says a word. Her every gesture, every silence, is calculated against one question: what does this room currently believe about me, and is that belief working for me or against me?
Most of us skip this. We rehearse what we’ll say and never interrogate the position we’re walking in with. We treat negotiation as a script problem – as though the right sentence, delivered with enough conviction, will carry the room. It is, more often, a reconnaissance problem. Before you’ve said anything, the room has already formed a read on you: your seniority relative to theirs, whether you’re perceived as a stakeholder or a supplicant, whether your ask is expected or a surprise. That read either works in your favour or against it, and most people walk into the conversation without ever having checked which. I won’t say that content is easy, but it is definitely the easier part.
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It’s also, conveniently, the part that gets you caught if the process was never sound to begin with. You can have the perfect line and still lose, because the line was never the thing doing the work – position was.
Espionage and negotiation share that occupational hazard – both are unforgiving of good lines delivered from the wrong position.
A well-argued case from a poorly understood position is just a confident version of the same mistake.
Choosing and investing in building a network of strong allies: In Darlings, Badru keeps missing the cues in front of her, mistaking accommodation for strategy. Every time the situation calls for a boundary, she offers an explanation instead, hoping that understanding the other person well enough will eventually substitute for confronting them. It’s her mother, Shamshu, who sees what she can’t. She is not there to comfort Badru, but to make her see what’s at stake. She probes Badru further to question her accommodating and avoiding style of conflict resolution, refusing to let the pattern go unnamed just because naming it is uncomfortable.
That’s what a credible ally does before a negotiation. She doesn’t cheer you on; she tells you the truth about the position you’re actually in, even when that truth is less flattering than the story you’d rather believe about yourself.
We talk about these relationships as personal support systems, something separate from professional life, filed under “emotional support” rather than “strategy.” They’re better understood as infrastructure, vouching for you when you’re not in the room, correcting your read of it when you are, catching the blind spot you can’t see precisely because it’s yours. These have to be built in a timely, deliberate and strategic manner, well before you need them. You can’t just wait for the crisis to find out who’s going to pull you up. By then, you’re not building the relationship, you’re auditioning for it, under the worst possible conditions.
Where the two meet
Position and allies aren’t really two separate lessons. They’re the same lesson from two angles. Knowing where you stand is a solitary act of discipline; having someone who can tell you when you’ve got it wrong is what keeps that discipline honest. Sehmat operates largely alone, and the film is unambiguous about the cost of that. Badru isn’t alone, and the film is equally unambiguous about what that changes.
If you’re a strong woman, find a stronger one. Queen bees, together, are considerably harder to negotiate with – which, it turns out, is rather the point.
