Chapter 7: Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Skills for Leaders

In this chapter, leaders need strong emotional intelligence and outstanding interpersonal skills. Emotional intelligence also called emotional quotient or EQ. Without emotional intelligence, leaders cannot communicate and connect with others effectively. Our successful interactions with others depend on communication: The basis of any relationship is communication. Without communication – be it sign language, body language, e-mail, or face-to-face conversation.

Appreciating the value of emotional intelligence: The leaders reveal emotional intelligence through their communication ability and style.

Increasing our own self awareness: The first step toward emotional intelligence is self-awareness. What is important to realize is that we can develop our emotional intelligence and improve our leadership communication ability and need to understand strengths and weaknesses first.

Improving nonverbal skills: Nonverbal expressions are usually categorized into one of the following groups: Appearance, Paralanguage, Kinesics, Occulesics, Proxemics, Facial expressions, Olfactics, and Chronomics. The meaning of nonverbal communication involving body language differs substantially from culture to culture.

Improving listening skills: Good listening skills are essential, and the lack of them hinders many people’s careers. Most do not realize that good listening is hard work.

This chapter provides 10 ways to improve listening habits:

-          Stop talking.

-          Stop thinking what you are going to say.

-          Avoid multitasking.

-          Try to empathize with the speaker.

-          Don’t interrupt.

-          Focus on the speaker closely.

-          Do not let appearance distract.

-          Listen for ideas.

-          Listen with an open mind.

-          Pay attention to nonverbal cues.

Motivating and Mentoring: Leaders need to be particularly sensitive to the feelings of others and able to establish ways to motivate and guide them that work with our personality and with theirs.

Networking: Today it is a necessary part of doing business in all professional. All professional work long hours and find breaking away a challenge, but making the time to network offers learning opportunities and help us build the relationships that may be essential to advance in many career areas.

Chapter 6: Graphics and PowerPoint with a Leadership Edge

Graphics will contribute to the success of oral and written communications. This chapter will focus on when and how to use graphics effectively, provide some basic guidelines for designing effective graphics, and deliver some guidance on designing and presenting PowerPoint slides.

Recognizing when to use graphics: Graphics should never be gratuitous; they should always be purposeful. They are not meant to replace the speaker.

Leaders focus specially on the content and design principles that should follow whenever creating data or text chart for leadership presentation: Conveying messages clearly, Selecting the most effective colors and fonts

Selecting the most effective graphic format for data charts: Pie, Bar or Column, Line, Stacked bar, Histogram, and Scatter plot.

Creating meaningful and effective text layouts: Do not put too many word on the slides, Do not have any one bullet as a category, Use hanging indents more than one line, Avoid widow words, Keep text simple but meaningful, and Make sure all bulleted items are parallel in structure.

Making the most of PowerPoint  as a design and presentation tool:  The primary focus is on effective slide design in PowerPoint with the goal of making slides look better so they communicate the content more effectively and provide the presenter leadership edge.

Finally, The leaders should make graphics and PowerPoint work not against, using to support message and PowerPoint as the tool to intended to be.

Chapter 7: Finding and Using Negotiation Power

This chapter focuses on power in negotiation. By power, mean the capabilities negotiators can assembly to give themselves and advantage or increase the probability of achieving their objectives. All negotiators want power; they want to know what they can do to put pressure on the other party, persuade the other to see it their way, get the other to give them what they want, get one up on the other, or change the other’s mind.

Whys is power important to negotiators? - Because it gives one negotiators an advantage over the other party. Negotiators seek power to offset or counterbalance the other’s advantage and gain or sustain one’s own advantage in upcoming negotiation.

A Definition of Power, people have power when they have “the ability to bring about the outcomes they desire” or “the ability to get things done the way (they want) them to be done.

Sources of Power – How people acquire power, Understanding the different ways in which power can be exercised is best accomplished by looking first at the various sources of power. This chapter takes the major sources of power into five different grouping: Information sources of power, Personal sources of power, Power based on position in an organization, Relationship-based sources of power, and Contextual sources of power.

Dealing with Others Who Have More Power, This chapter give some advice to negotiators who are in a low-power position by Michael Watkins’s advice: Never do an all or nothing deal, Make the other party smaller, Make yourself bigger, Build momentum through doing deals in sequence, Use the power of competition to leverage the power, Constrain yourself, Good information, Ask lots of questions, and Do what you can to manage the process.

In conclusion, Negotiators have to know that power can be created in many different ways in many different contexts, and a source of leverage can shift from one category to another over time.

Chapter 6: Communication

This chapter will show you how to examine the process by which negotiators communicate their own interests, positions, and goals and in turn make sense of those of the other party and of the negotiation as a whole.

Most of the communication during negotiation is not about negotiator preferences. Although the blend of integrative versus distributive content varies as a function of the issues being discussed.

Negotiators discuss five different categories of communication that take place during negotiations

-          Offers, Counteroffers, and Motives

-          Information about Alternatives

-          Information about Outcomes

-          Social Accounts

-          Communication about Process

And consider the question of whether more communication is always better than less communication. The tone of the conversation during those first few minutes matters: the more negotiators speak with emphasis, varying vocal pitch and volume, the worse they do and the better the other does.

How people communicate in negotiation: Three aspects related to the “how” of communication:

-          The characteristics of language that communicators use

-          The use of nonverbal communication in negotiation

-          The selection of a communication channel for sending and receiving messages

How to improve communication in negotiation: Three main techniques are available for improving communication in negotiation:

-          The use of question

-          Listening

-          Role reversal

Special communication considerations at the close of negotiations, Negotiators must attend to two key aspects of communication and negotiation simultaneously:

-          The avoidance of fatal mistakes

-          The achieving closure

Chapter 5: Leadership Presentations

This chapter you will learn the skills of a leader are clearest whether informally. “Through their speeches and presentations, managers establish definitions and meaning for their own actions and give others a sense of what the organization is about, where it is at, and what it is up to.”

And this chapter applies the tools and techniques of previous chapters to the art of public speaking. Three “P’s” process: planning, preparing, and presenting.

Planning a presentation, in the planning phase of developing the leader determine strategy, analyze audiences, select the medium and delivery method, and organize and establish logical structure.

Preparing a presentation to achieve the greatest impact, the preparation consists of developing the introduction, body, and conclusion; crating the graphic; testing the flow and logic; editing and proofreading; and practicing.

Presenting effectively and with greater confidence, when it comes time to present, the leader will need to concentrate on delivery style, focusing particularly on eye contact, stance, speech, and overall effect. Since much of the success of the leader presentation will be determined by how audiences perceives us right at the beginning, the leader should be prepared to establish expertise and value to the audience immediately and maintain that positive ethos throughout.

In conclusion, the best way to project a positive ethos is to believe in what we are saying and to be fully prepared. As obvious as it may sound, nothing will take the place of preparation. To deliver an effective presentation we must prepared. When presenting, the leader need to do the following: focus our energy on our audience, create and maintain rapport, adopt a secure stance, establish and maintain eye contact, project and vary our voice, demonstrate our message with gestures, adjust our pace of delivery based on the audience response, and relax and be ourselves.

Chapter 4: Creating Written Leadership Communication

This chapter you will learn that the leader must be able to share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency to others. Professional written communication falls into one of two broad types: correspondence (text message, e-mails, blog posts, memos, and letters) and reports (including proposals, progress reviews, performance reports, and research documentation).

This chapter focuses on helping you create written leadership communication that accomplishes your communication purpose by selecting the most effective communication medium, creating individual and team written communication, organizing the content coherently, conforming to content and formatting expectations in correspondence, including expected content in reports, and formatting written communication effectively.

Interacting with social network is important for us to consider carefully how we want to approach social media and how we wish to present ourselves in these very public. Some of the best strategic practices for using forms of social media: blogs and microblogs.

Organizing the content coherently, A professional audience expects order and logic in a document; they expect it to make sense to them, to be coherent.  To “cohere” means to hold together, which is what we want our communication to do. For social media, our posts, comments, tweets, and the like should “cohere” as well – to a central theme or idea.

Conforming to content and formatting expectations in correspondence, we will determine the actual content of our letters, memos, e-mails, and text messages based on our purpose, strategy, and audience but these types carry some expectations.

Including expected content in reports, Professional audiences also have expectations for longer documents and reports. The reports may be long or short, formal or informal.

Formatting written communication effectively, Formatting is important in creating a professional appearance for all of our written communication. The frequent use of headings and lists to break up the text, separate main ideas, and avoid long blocks of text will make our documents more inviting the audiences.

Chapter 5: Perception, Cognition, and Emotion

This chapter will show you about perception, cognition, and emotion that they are the basic building blocks of all social encounters.

Perception is the process by which individuals connect to their environment or can call that sense-making process: people interpret their environment so that they can respond appropriately.

Frames are important in negotiation because disputes are often nebulous and open to different interpretations as a result of differences in people’s backgrounds. Frames emerge and converge as the parties talk about preferences and priorities and negotiators who understand how they are framing a problem may understand more completely what they are doing.

Negotiators use information to make decisions during the negotiation. It collectively labeled cognitive biases includes:

-          Irrational escalation of commitment

-          Mythical fixed-pie beliefs

-          Anchoring and adjustment

-          Issue framing and risk

-          Availability of information

-          The winner’s curse

-          Overconfidence

-          The law of small numbers

-          Self-serving biases

-          Endowment effect

-          Ignoring other’s cognitions

-          Reactive devaluation

Negotiators have to know the role of mood and emotion based on three characteristics: specificity, intensity, and duration. Emotions play important roles at various stages of negotiation interaction.

In conclusion, you have taken a multifaceted look at the role of perception, cognition, and emotion in negotiation.  Negotiations involve humans who not only deviate from rational judgments, but who inevitably experience and express emotions in circumstances where much is at stake.