Chapter 12: Best Practices in Negotiations

Negotiation is an integral part of daily life and the opportunities to negotiate surround us. In this final chapter we reflect on negotiation at a broad level by providing 10 best practices for negotiators who wish to continue to improve their negotiation skills.

10 Best Practices for Negotiators

1.   Be Prepared

Preparation does not have to be a time-consuming or arduous activity, but it should be right at the top of the best practices list of every negotiator.

2.   Diagnose the Fundamental Structure of the Negotiation

Negotiators should make a conscious decision about whether they are facing a fundamentally distributive negotiation, an integrative negotiation, or a blend of the two, and choose their strategies and tactics accordingly. In these situations, money and opportunity are often left on the table.

3.   Identify and Work the BATNA

One of the most important sources of power in a negotiation is the alternatives available to a negotiator if an agreement is not reached. One alternative, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA), is especially important because this is the option that likely will be chosen should an agreement not be reached.

4.   Be Willing to Walk Away

Strong negotiators remember this and are willing to walk away from a negotiation when no agreement is better than a poor agreement or when the process is so offensive that the deal isn’t worth the work.

5.   Master the Key Paradoxes of Negotiation

      Strong negotiators know how to manage these situations.

- Claiming Value versus Creating Value

- Sticking by Your Principles versus Being Resilient to the Flow

- Sticking with the Strategy versus Opportunistic Pursuit of New Options

- Honest and Open versus Closed and Opaque

- Trust versus Distrust

6.   Remember the Intangibles

It is important that negotiators remember the intangible factors while negotiating and remain aware of their potential effects. Intangibles frequently effect negotiation in a negative way, and they often operate out of the negotiator’s awareness.

7.   Actively Manage Coalitions

Coalitions can have very significant effects on the negotiation process and outcome. Three types of coalitions and their potential effects: 1) coalitions against you; 2) coalitions that support you; and 3) loose, undefined coalitions that may materialize either for or against you.

8.   Savor and Protect Your Reputation

Reputations are like eggs – fragile, important to build, easy to break, and very hard to rebuild once broken. Reputations travel fast, and people often know more about you than you think that they do.

9.   Remember That Rationality and Fairness Are Relative

Negotiators are often in the position to collectively define what is right or fair as a part of the negotiation process. Be prepared to negotiate these principles as strongly as you prepare for a discussion of the issues.

10. Continue to Learn from Your Experience

        Negotiation epitomizes lifelong learning. Three steps to process: Plan a personal reflection time after each negotiation, Periodically take a lesson from a trainer or coach, and Keep a personal diary on strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan to work on weaknesses.

Chapter 12: Leadership Through Effective External Relations

A positive public image or reputation affects a company’s ability to achieve all other measures of success. The companies with the best corporate reputations outperform all others. Just as the leaders determine the personality of the organization on the inside, they also shape the outside image. The goal of organizational leaders is to ensure that the company’s ethos is positive – that all external audiences consider the company honorable, trustworthy, and ethical.

This chapter provides guidelines to help manage external relations in day-to-day encounters and in crisis situations so that the organization projects a positive image.

Developing an external relations strategy require a sound communication strategy. Steps to create a strategy for external audiences:

-          Clarify the purpose and strategic objectives.

-          Identify major audiences or stakeholders.

-          Create, refine, and test major messages.

-          Select, limit, and coach the spokesperson(s).

-          Establish the most effective media or forum.

-          Determine the best timing.

-          Monitor the results.

Building and maintaining a positive corporate image: Reputation affects the bottom line, and even the strongest companies will have difficulty damage to their reputations. Leaders of organizations must give high priority to establishing and maintaining a positive corporate image and, today more than ever, that means keeping the public, customers, and all external stakeholders happy.

Working with the news media: Any leader of an organization should know why the media are important, when to talk to them, and how to manage encounters with them. First, understanding the media’s role and importance. Second, deciding when to talk to the media and Finally, Preparing for and delivering a media interview.

Handling crisis communications: A situation requiring crisis communications involves “a specific, unexpected and non-routine event or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and threaten or are perceived to threaten an organization’s high priority goals.”

All organizations, no matter the size, must have a crisis communication plan. Nothing will replace being prepared. When a crisis happens, it is too late to develop a communication strategy and select target audiences, create appropriate message content, determine what media to use or how best to use social media, and choose spokespersons. They cannot ignore the importance of establishing and maintaining a positive reputation or the need manage external relations to keep it.

Chapter 11: Leadership Through Strategic Internal Communication

This chapter focuses on establishing leadership through communicating effectively with an organization’s internal audiences. It describes the strategic role employee communication can play by ensuring that employees are well informed and, therefore, positioned to contribute to the success of the organization.

The leader in this situation will be inspiring cultural change, a transformation in the way group decision makers think about their own operations and behave toward other group leaders.

Communication helps shape the culture of any organization, and effective internal communication is absolutely essential to bring about any transformation in that culture.

In Conclusion, from the day-to-day exchanges to the major efforts associated with organizational change, internal communication is important to success of any organization. The strategy for internal communication consists of the basic components of any effective communication strategy, such as audience analysis, targeted messages, and appropriate media, but it is also much more than processes and products. Leaders need all their leadership communication abilities to inspire, motivate, and guide employees to support their visions and their goals for the organization.

Chapter 11: International and Cross-Cultural Negotiation

This chapter is organized in the following manner. First we discuss the art and science of cross-cultural negotiation. Next, we consider some of the factors that make international negotiation different, including both the environmental context and the immediate context. We discussion of the most frequently studied aspect of international negotiation: the effect of culture, be it national, regional, or organizational.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of culturally responsive strategies available to the international negotiator. Understanding the role of factors in both the environmental and immediate contexts is important to grasping the complexity of international negotiation processes and outcomes.

Recent research finding have provided some specific advice about how to negotiate cross-culturally. Rubin and Sander suggest that during preparation, negotiators should concentrate on understanding three things: (1) their own biases, strengths, and weaknesses; (2) the other negotiators as an individual; and (3) the other negotiator’s cultural context.

Stephen Weiss has proposed a useful way of thinking about the options we have negotiating with someone from another culture. Weiss’s culturally responsive strategies may be arranged into three groups, base on the level of familiarity (low, moderate, high) that a  negotiators has with the other party’s culture. Within each group there are some strategies that the negotiator may use individually (unilateral strategies) and others that involve that participation of the other party (joint strategies).

However, even those with high familiarity with another culture are faced with a daunting task if they want to modify their strategy completely when they deal with the other culture.

Chapter 10: High-Performing Team Leadership

Since teams are now so prevalent in all organizations, leaders need to know how to build and how to manage them to achieve high performance. Most people have experienced successful as well as unsuccessful teams. This chapter will guide leaders through the communication challenges involved in leading a team.

Building an effective team raises both organizational and individual leadership issues. In deciding to use teams across our organization, we will want to look closely at the culture and compensation structure to see if they both support teamwork.

Teams tend to begin their work more effectively if leaders take the time to hold an official launch: Creating the Team Charter, Using Action and Work Plans, Delivering the Results, and Learning from the Team Experience.

Managing the People Side of Teams: teams bring together the best talent available to solve a problem. Team members will get to know each other through day-to-day interactions while working together, the team members can shorten the learning curve by discussing the following information at the first team meeting: Position and responsibilities, Team experiences, Expectations, Personality, and Cultural differences.

Teams need to know how to manage conflict in their overall team activities.

Type of Team Conflict: Analytical, Task, Interpersonal, and Roles.

Approaches to Handling Team Conflict: One on One, Facilitation, and Team.

Virtual teams require special effort, and it should not be taken for granted that people who are effective in traditional teams will also work well in a virtual team setting:  Defining Virtual Teams, Identifying Advantages and Challenges of Virtual Teams, and Addressing the Challenges of Virtual Teams.

This chapter has discussed the best approach to ensuring that all team activities run smoothly so that team achieves its objectives. It has provided team leaders and team facilitators tools to help them build and manage a team. With the right approach, a team can work through the challenges, achieve high performance, and outperform other groups and individuals.

Chapter 9: Meetings: Leadership and Productivity

This chapter will help leaders and other meeting planners avoid the seven deadly sins of meetings.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Meetings

1.       People don’t take meetings seriously.

2.       Meetings are too long.

3.       People wander off the topic.

4.       Nothing happens once the meeting ends.

5.       People don’t tell the truth.

6.       Meetings are always missing important information, so they postpone critical decisions.

7.       Meetings never get better.

Meetings can be small or large, internal or external, frequent or infrequent. Meeting leaders or planners need to define a clear purpose and analyze the audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what they want to accomplish.

Meetings often have multiple objectives, but effective meetings, like good presentations and e-mails, usually have one main overall purpose. The purpose of an informational meeting could be as significant as introducing a new vision or as mundane as providing a progress report intended to expedite a project.

In determining the agenda topics and the meeting tasks, leaders need to estimate the time it will take to cover each topic and accomplish each objective as realistically as possible.

Selecting the right attendees is important to the success of a meeting. The attendees we invite should be the ones who can contribute to achieving our objectives.

Leaders will want to consider the best setting for the kind of meeting they plan to lead. The setting considerations should include locations, equipment, and layout of the room.

The meeting will be more productivity if the attendees know and use common problem-solving tools: Deciding on the Decision-Making Approach, Clarifying Leader and Attendees Roles and Responsibilities, Establishing Meeting Ground Rules, and Using Common Problem-Solving Approach.

Leaders will be able to stop or at least minimize most of the usual meetings problem by careful planning and by developing and enforcing ground rules. Skilled facilitators should be prepared to (1) handle some of the most common meeting problems, (2) manage meeting conflict, and (3) deal with issues arising from cultural differences.

Ensuring That Meetings Lead to Action: Assign specific tasks to specific people, Review all actions and responsibilities at the end of the meeting, Provide a meeting summary with assigned deliverable included, and Follow up on action items in a reasonable time.

Chapter 10: Multiple Parties and Teams

The purpose of this chapter is to understand how the negotiation process changes when there are more than two parties at the table simultaneously. Most of what has been addressed in earlier chapters assumed a “one-on-one” negotiation situation. In this chapter, we examine how dynamics change when groups, teams, and task forces have to present individual views and come to a collective agreement about a problem, plan, or future course of action.

We define a multiparty negotiation as one in which more than two parties are working together to achieve a collective objective. We show the ways that multiparty negotiation are complex and highly susceptible to breakdown and show that managing them effectively requires a conscious commitment from the parties and a facilitators as they work toward an effective multiparty agreement.

Differences between Two-Party Negotiations and Multiparty Negotiations

-          Number of Parties: multiparty have more negotiators at the table.

-          Informational and Computational Complexity: more issues, more perspectives on issues, and more total information are introduced.

-          Social Complexity: the social environment changes from a one-on-one dialogue to a small-group discussion.

-          Procedural Complexity: multiparty negotiations are more complex than two-party ones is that the process they have to follow is more complicated.

-          Strategic Complexity: multiparty negotiations are more strategically complex than two-party ones.

What is an Effective Group?

1.       Test assumptions and inferences.

2.       Share as much relevant information as possible.

3.       Focus on interests, not positions.

4.       Explain the reasons behind one's statements, questions, and answers.

5.       Be specific - Use examples.

6.       Agree on the meaning of important words.

7.       Disagree openly with any member of the group.

8.       Make statements, then invite questions and comments.

9.       Jointly design ways to test disagreements and solutions.

10.   Discuss undiscussable issues.

11.   Keep the discussion focused.

12.   Do not take cheap shots or otherwise distract the group.

13.   Expect to have all members participate in all phases of the process.

14.   Exchange relevant information with nongroup members.

15.   Make decisions by consensus.

16.   Conduct a self-critique.

Managing Multiparty Negotiations: there are three key stages that characterize multilateral negotiations: the prenegotiation stage, managing the actual negotiations, and managing the agreement stage.

If these issues are raised and thoughtfully considered, the parties involved are considerably more likely to feel better about the process and to arrive at an effective outcome than if these factors are left to chance.