Best Practices in Negotiations

Negotiation is a part of our everyday life. Negotiation is a skill involving analysis and communication that everyone can learn. This chapter reflects on the ten best practices for negotiators who want to improve the negotiation skills. They are:

1.      Be prepared

2.      Diagnose the fundamental structure of the negotiation

3.      Identify and work the BATNA

4.      Be willing to walk away

5.      Master paradoxes

6.      Remember intangibles

7.      Actively manage coalitions

8.      Savor and protect your reputation

9.      Remember that rationality and the fairness are relative

10.  Continue to learn from you experiences

In conclusion, negotiators that take time to pause and reflect on their negotiations will find that they continue to refine their skills and that they remain sharp and focused for their future negotiations.

Leading through Effective External Relations

Effective external relations require a sound communication strategy. There are steps that you can take to create a strategy for external audiences:

1. Clarify your purpose and strategic objectives
2. Identify your major audiences or stakeholders
3. Create, refine and test your major messages
4. Select limit and coach you spokesperson
5. Establish the most effective media or forum
6. Determine the best timing

7.      Monitor results.

            Messages aimed at external audiences are far more vulnerable to interference interruptions and barriers than messages to internal audiences.

      You should be able to prevent the interruption and overcome the barriers to reach your external audiences successfully if you ensure all of your external messages conform to the following criteria:

§  Honest

§  Clear

§  Consistent

§  Meaningful

In conclusion, all leaders of organizations must realize that their companies reputation depend on their internal ethos and the perception of their many external stakeholders. They must maintain a positive reputation and effectively manage external relations in order to obtain and keep it.

Leadership through Strategic Internal Communication

The role of strategic communication is to ensure that you employees are equipped to make the greatest possible contribution to the success of your organization. For a employee to play a strategic role in an organization the leader must realize its importance in accomplishing the companies strategic objectives and performance goals and integrate it into the company’s over all strategy and business process.
In any good communication strategy it is important to ensure that your internal communication supports and assists in accomplishing your company strategy. Effective communication consists of the following:
1.Supportive management
2.Target messages
3.Effective media forum
4.Well-positioned staff
5.On-going assessment
Leadership communication must include how best to create and deliver these core messages to ensure they are strong and meaningful and not simply feeble slogans.
Effective mission and vision statements are important to a company for the following reasons:
1.Inspire individual action, determine behavior and fuel motivation
2.Establish a firm foundation of goals, standards and objectives to guide corporate planners and managers
3.Satisfy both the companies’ need for efficiency and the employee’s need for group identity.
4.Provide direction, which is particularly important in time of change to keep everyone moving toward the same goals.
In summary, good internal communication holds an organization together. Good internal communication provides the direction needed to reach strategic and financial goals and encourage productivity.

International and Cross-Cultural Negotiation

There are two overall contexts, which have an influence on international negations that have been identified by Phatak and Habib: the environmental context and the immediate context. The environmental context includes environmental forces that neither negotiator controls that influence the negotiation. The immediate context includes factors over which negotiators appear to have some control.

There are six factors in environmental context that make international negotiations more challenging than domestic negotiations: political and legal pluralism, international economics, foreign governments and bureaucracies, instability, ideology and culture.

These factors can act or limit or constrain organizations the operate internationally, and it is important that negotiators understand and appreciate their effects.

The immediate context factors that can have an important influence on negotiation are: relative bargaining power, levels of conflict, relationship between negotiators, desired outcomes and immediate stakeholders.

These models are good devices for guiding our thinking about international negotiation.

The most studied aspect of international negotiation is culture. It is important to recognize that even though culture describes group-level characteristics, it doesn’t mean that every member will share those characteristics equally. There are two important ways that culture has been conceptualized: culture as shared values and culture as dialectic.

Cultural differences have influenced negation in several different ways: Definition of negotiation, negotiation opportunity, selection of negotiators, protocol, communication, time sensitivity, risk propensity, nature of agreements and emotionalism.

The psychological processes of negotiators will also influence negotiation strategies and the pattern of interaction between negotiators and culture has an influence on these processes.

In conclusion, the challenge for every international negotiator is to understand the simultaneous, multiple influences of several factors on the negotiation process and outcome and to update this understanding regularly as circumstances change.

High Performance Leadership Teams

            Teams are prevalent in all organizations; business leaders need to know how to build and how to manage them to achieve high performance.

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

            Deciding to form a team is a process very similar to deciding to call a meeting. Both meetings and teams can alienate participants if they are not clearly the best approach.

            After you have decided that a team is necessary you will then have to decided how to form that team. It’s a good idea to form teams based on functional responsibilities.

            Team members want to learn from the experience of being on the team, which calls for reflecting on the teamwork processes. Teams working together over an extended period of time should build in periodic processes.

            Despite all the best planning and time spent getting to know each other, teams will likely experience conflict. Obtaining the best results can depend on the team ability to manage conflict.

            In conclusion, leading a team and working on a team present some challenges, but with the right approach a team can work through the challenges, achieve high performance and in the end outperform other groups and individuals. 

Mulitple Parties & Teams

      The negotiation process changes significantly when there are multiple parties involved. Multiparty negotiation is one where there are more than two parties that are working together to achieve a collective objective.

            Multiparty negotiations differ from two party deliberations in several important ways: Number of parties, informational and computational complexity, social complexity, procedural complexity and strategic complexity.

            Multiparty negotiation looks a lot like group decision-making because it involves a group of parties trying to reach a common solution in a situation were the parties preferences may diverge.

            There are three key stages that characterize multilateral negotiations: prenegotiation, actual negotiation and managing the agreement.

            In multiparty negotiations groups must generate many ideas and approaches to a problem, which usually creates conflict.

            When done well conflict is a natural part of these relationships when done poorly, conflict actively disrupts all these processes.

            In addition to monitoring the discussion norms and managing the conflict processes effectively the parties also need to manage the decision rules, the way the group will decide what to do.

            Finally, if the objective is consensus or the best quality solution, negotiators should not strive to achieve it all at once. Rather, they should strive for a first agreement that can be revised, upgraded and improved.

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

Cross-Cultural Literacy and Communication

There are two overall contexts, which have an influence on international negations that have been identified by Phatak and Habib: the environmental context and the immediate context. The environmental context includes environmental forces that neither negotiator controls that influence the negotiation. The immediate context includes factors over which negotiators appear to have some control.

            There are six factors in environmental context that make international negotiations more challenging than domestic negotiations: political and legal pluralism, international economics, foreign governments and bureaucracies, instability, ideology and culture.

            These factors can act or limit or constrain organizations the operate internationally, and it is important that negotiators understand and appreciate their effects.

            The immediate context factors that can have an important influence on negotiation are: relative bargaining power, levels of conflict, relationship between negotiators, desired outcomes and immediate stakeholders.

            These models are good devices for guiding our thinking about international negotiation.

            The most studied aspect of international negotiation is culture. It is important to recognize that even though culture describes group-level characteristics, it doesn’t mean that every member will share those characteristics equally. There are two important ways that culture has been conceptualized: culture as shared values and culture as dialectic.

            Cultural differences have influenced negation in several different ways: Definition of negotiation, negotiation opportunity, selection of negotiators, protocol, communication, time sensitivity, risk propensity, nature of agreements and emotionalism.

            The psychological processes of negotiators will also influence negotiation strategies and the pattern of interaction between negotiators and culture has an influence on these processes.

            In conclusion, the challenge for every international negotiator is to understand the simultaneous, multiple influences of several factors on the negotiation process and outcome and to update this understanding regularly as circumstances change.