Negotiating a salary increase or a job promotion ranks high on the list of hard conversations to have at work, and it doesn’t get any easier without a plan.

“People think, ‘I’m just going to knock on their door, sit down with them, and noodle around and see where this goes.’ That’s not a plan,” says Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations, information, and decisions. “You want to have a specific goal in mind. People often fail to achieve their conversational goals because they fail to identify their objectives.”

In his latest paper, Schweitzer and his co-authors introduce a framework to help people have more successful conversations by identifying and understanding the motives of each participant. The model is called the “conversational circumplex,” and it maps conversations along two key axes: informational and relational. (See image below.)

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