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.

Relationships in Negotation

            One major way that context affects negotiation is that people are in relationships that have a past, present and future. Existing relationships can shape negotiations in a positive or negative way. Many negotiations concern how we work and live together over time and how to coordinate action and share responsibilities or how to manage problems that have arisen in the relationship.

            A relationship is the meaning assigned by two or more individual to their connectedness or coexistence.

            There are three important rules for negotiating in a relationship: Don’t rush prenegotiation, recognize a long-term business deal as a continuing negotiation and consider mediation or conciliation.

            Reputation, trust and justice are three elements that become more critical and pronounced when they occur within a relationship negotiations.

            Within relationships we see parties shift their focus considerably moving away from a sole focus on price and exchange to also attend to the future of the relationship. By doing this the trust between party’s increases and they build strong positive reputations.

Ethics in Negotiation

Ethics are broadly applied social standards for what is right and what is wrong in a particular situation or a process for setting those standards. They differ form morals, which are individual and personal belief of what is right, and what is wrong.

There are consequences of unethical conduct. A negotiator who employs an unethical tactic will experience consequences that may be positive or negative, based on three aspects of the situation: whether the tactic is effective, how the other person and audience will evaluate the tactic and how the negotiator evaluates the tactic.

Negotiators overlook the fact that although unethical conduct will get them what they want in the short run, these same tactics will lead them to tarnished reputations and diminished effectiveness in the long run.

Emontional Intelligence & Mind Map

Leaders need strong interpersonal skills and an understanding of and appreciation for cultural diversity. Without these skills, leaders cannot communicate with and manage others effectively. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand you own emotions and those of other people. This helps a leader to understand cultural literacy. Cultural literacy means being literate or knowledgeable about the fundamental differences across cultures.

            Emotional intelligence and cultural literacy are necessary skills that allow you to interact with and lead other effectively and the key to interacting with others and managing relationship successfully is communication.

            The first step toward emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Realizing the value of cultural differences is a key component of emotional intelligence. By understanding cultural diversity you can communicate with all of the different audiences that form the complexion of the world’s corporation today.

            In summary, your emotional intelligence and cultural understanding will affect your leadership in meeting and in teams, as it affects your leadership communication overall.

Using Graphics and PowerPoint for a Leadership Edge & Mind Map

Leaders must know how and when to use graphics. Graphics are used to improve a presentation or document.

            Graphics should be purposeful and reinforce your message, provide a road map to the structure of the presentation, illustrate relationships and concepts visually, support assertions, emphasize important ideas and maintain and enhance interest.

            To convey messages clearly and effectively your charts should be simple but meaningful and include only one main message per chart or slide.

            PowerPoint is used as a tool to communicate your content more effectively. PowerPoint slides should enhance to presentation not dominate it.

In summary, graphics and PowerPoint provide a leadership edge. Knowing how to deliver messages effectively with words and pictures is a powerful combination and also an advantage.