Our Insights
Practicing Before the Pressure: Building Negotiation Skills that Stick
The literature of Leadership Development has many advocates for an approach characterised as ‘learning on the job’. Strong voices that tell us that the best way for leaders to hone their skills is through the visceral, first-hand practice of leadership itself. I’ve got some sympathy for this viewpoint, there are some parts of leadership development that benefit from an ‘in at the deep-end approach’. Not least that it’s a great way of recognising the adaptability and resilience needed to do the job well, and it blows away the idea that you can learn leadership straight from a book. But I’d suggest that there are other parts of the leadership role that need to be developed through a structured process of learning, and high on this list is negotiation. The very last place I’d want my leaders to be learning negotiation is during a negotiation. Being effective in developing leadership negotiation skills gives us a real challenge as designers and practitioners, “how can any learning environment authentically build the factionalism, passion and jeopardy that are the essence of important negotiations?”The answer is that they can’t - no simulation or role play can build that level of intensity. It's a requirement that needs a different kind of solution. What we need is an approach that allows us to work towards a set of learning objectives that cover: Developing effective approaches to interest-based negotiation that go beyond win-lose mindsets. Anticipating the actions and intentions of the other parties in order to enable proactive negotiation. Observing and reflecting on the role that personality plays in negotiation. Rehearsing the skills needed to deliberately and productively raise and lower the tension during negotiations. Recognising the needs of all parties at key stages in a negotiation. An accessible and effective approach that will deliver these potential learning objectives is this: a. structure an experiential learning experience that encourages participants to care about the result and be so engaged that they go beyond role playing and demonstrate authentic patterns of behaviour b. then structure an honest and open performance review that allows every participant to put themselves into the shoes of the other side For requirement a. it’s clear that there is a need to choose an experience that best reflects the type of negotiation in which the participants are likely to be engaged i.e. reflecting their workplace role and responsibility. At RSVP Design we would probably select T-trade for senior leaders, Post-it or Minefield at management level and Hollow Square for those needing fairly basic negotiation skills. For requirement b. it is important to structure a post-activity debrief that allows each person or group who has been involved to ask questions of the other party. The facilitator can do this in an open manner by inviting questions such as “Is there anything you would like to ask the other group(s)?” Alternatively the facilitator can ask each person or group “What do you think that the other group was trying to achieve? What was their strategy?” then asking whether this was indeed the case. Either of these structures, used as part of a debrief, allows the participants to make informed connections between the intentions and behaviours of those who were across the negotiating table. The insights that we’re trying to achieve are about building understanding of positive intent during negotiation. It’s very rare that people in negotiations behave in a way that doesn’t have a positive intent, and trying to understand what this is is an extremely useful way of thinking i.e. ask yourself this question “(Stated in the positive) What is this person trying to achieve?” The result is that rather than answers such as “They are trying to stop me achieving the position I’ve given them” you end up with a positively stated, and usually more specific, alternative such as “They are trying to achieve a compromise result that’s somewhere between our positions”. Learning to negotiate effectively needs quality practice. It’s a multi-person, multi-positional, dynamic exchange that places great demands on the levels of interpersonal insight that each party brings to the table. As previously stated, the very last place that I’d want my leaders to be learning negotiation is in a negotiation, so I’m a very strong advocate of investing in their development.
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Are you developing teams beyond a culture of blame?
Even a cursory browse through the huge volume of literature about great teams will reveal that there's an understandable interest in how they just seem to 'get it right'. There often follows a prescription to help other teams follow that path to success. We read about aligning individual contribution, solution-focused communication, building a team-climate that encourages risk-taking, etc, etc. There's an overwhelming focus on developing the positive actions and attributes that facilitate the evolution of good teams into high performance teams. However, there's an observation I want to make at this point - I've worked in a teambuilding role for many years, and most of my engagements have required me to work with the negative attributes of a client team - any approach that simply reinforces the positives doesn't cut it when you're looking to make a team great. Over my career I’ve worked with a lot of great teams, across a broad range of sectors and geographies, and I want to suggest a further, little-recognised, attribute of a great team - how they deal, individually and collectively, with getting it wrong. It’s a bit of a cliche, but great teams really do view mistakes as opportunities to get better. Not in some overly demonstrative way that advertises what an unusual occurrence this is, but in a way that efficiently deals with the mistake, then moves quickly to a positive focus on the learning that has become available through the mistake. It’s that rapid shift from focusing on the mistake to focusing on the learning that is so impressive in how a great team operates. Here’s the sequence that they accelerate through when one or more team members detects a mistake: Recognise the mistake (early) Own the mistake (collectively) Alert everybody who will be affected (pre-emptively) Do what is possible towards recovery (proportionately) Learn from the mistake (positively) There's a growing pressure, driven by both social and mainstream media, to 'name names' and 'find culprits'; we are led to believe that having somebody or something to blame offers a degree of closure. This is very often deflection, shifting our attention away from what's really happening, or away from possible (but difficult) solutions. In the workplace this inevitably has negative implications and moves a team further away from any greatness they might achieve. Take a look at this sequence again. The highly inefficient and destructive phase of “attributing blame” doesn’t appear anywhere. Even during the last phase of ‘Learning from the mistake (positively)’ the word positively tells you what you need to know - there’s no room for the regressive steps involved in determining whose fault it is. That’s not to say that the source of the mistake isn’t identified; in order to learn we need to understand the causes of what went wrong, and if that’s about an individual’s actions then that needs to be recognised. However, the focus is on the future (i.e. the available learning) rather than the past (i.e. the attribution of blame.) The blame-game is endemic in organisations, so one of the things that impresses me most about great teams is the way that they have broken free of its negativity. So how have they done it? A large part of it is about leadership, and we read a lot about leaders having the courage to encourage risk-taking in their teams. However, achieving a team culture which truly embraces this risk-taking depends on every one of the team-members accepting this as their team norm. If even one of those members still wants to play the blame-game, it restricts the rest of the team from making the leap towards learning. Clearly, we need a way to demonstrate the benefits of focusing on the learning instead of the mistake, and to practice the post-mistake sequence of actions set out above. The transition to reframing mistakes as learning opportunities is about rehearsal. Experiential learning tools offer a way of exploring mistakes, both individual and collective, and rehearsing a way of rapidly shifting to a positive learning-focus. In the RSVP Design portfolio Simmetrics has been a go-to exercise through which groups can be encouraged to explore their customary behaviours in mistake situations. In this fast-paced activity mistakes are inevitable, so we facilitate with a view to identifying both the behavioural responses, and also the quantitative pay-back of having a structured and rehearsed response to those mistakes. A further tool that can be used to explore this area of learning, Matrix builds on the learning developed in Simmetrics by giving participants a greater range of tactics they can deploy to respond to perceived mistakes, and also to respond to the chance factors introduced by other people working towards their own goals and objectives. Escaping the blame-game isn’t easy, but neither is developing great teams. Finding the time and space to rehearse the skills and attitudes we need to become a great team is a good place to start on that journey.
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How to build trust: The Trust Equation in practice
The trust equation or trust formula in practice: "Hard to build, easy to destroy"Thats the type of response I often get when working with managers or leaders and exploring the concept of trust. It seems to me that trust, real trust, in people in positions of authority is a rapidly diminishing thing and that blame and suspicion are, perhaps with justification, default positions for many who feel let down by organisations and people in whom they have invested their trust.I have to admit that I haven really defined trustworthiness in a simple, accessible way that gives my learners a real sense of the behaviours that can be adopted to build trust. However, working in Poland I was introduced to Charles H. Greens Trust Equation (How come I've missed this?) which immediately gives me a way of thinking about building trust in terms of simple, behavioural changes. The equation is very easy in theory:Trustworthiness = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy ÷ Self-Orientation.Credibility is related to what people say: the extent to which they demonstrate knowledge and understanding about their subject, speak with conviction and make us feel confident that they are in command of their subject matter and competent in applying their expertise.Reliability is related to what people do: the extent to which they follow through on promises, meet deadlines, deliver against targets, achieve agreed quality standards and go the extra mile to ensure that they have completed their undertakings.Intimacy is related to the safety and security we feel in a relationship: the extent to which confidentiality is maintained, the confidence we have in opening up more personal aspects of ourselves and our emotional concerns and the belief that our values will be respected.Self-orientation (the single denominator in this equation) refers to the person’s focus. In particular, whether the person’s focus is primarily on him or herself, or on the other person. We might say, “I can’t trust her on this deal — I don’t think she cares enough about me, she’s focused on what she gets out of it.” Or more commonly, “I don’t trust him — I think he’s too concerned about how he’s appearing, so he’s not really paying attention”. Increasing the other three elements (C+R+I) will increase perceived trustworthiness, but increasing the size of the single denominator reduces the trustworthiness immediately. In order to increase trustworthiness, self-orientation needs to be reduced. We see this happen when, for example, a teacher focuses entirely on the needs of a learner, rather than the teachers desire to teach a specific lesson. We see it when the supplier really listens to what a client wants, empathises and offers a solution that is based on what the client has asked for. Low self-orientation allows focus on another, making the other person feel valued and cared for, which increases the levels of your demonstrated trustworthiness and therefore a persons willingness to place their trust in you.The Trust Equation offers a memorable way of thinking about the behaviours needed to bring about trust. Each element is easy to understand. People trust other people. They tend not to trust organisations or businesses or hierarchies: they might trust their manager whilst being sceptical of management in general. If you feel trust is lacking in any of your relationships, have a look at each of the 4 elements of the equation and ask yourself which of them you need to work on most!For more information about physical and virtual experiential learning exercises in which elements of trust can be explored and rehearsed in practice, see below:Learning Support Relationships ModuleThis module focuses on helping individuals become more effective at building and using strong relationships that help them learn successfully.Post-iTBuilding relationships between teams engaged on the same task but working at a distance from each other (time and space).MosaicBuild trust through understanding that others can have different perspectives and insights based on viewing the same situation. MinefieldUse this activity to help uncover any trust issues that prevent collaboration and achieving a successful outcome. Learning SquaredUse either Broken Squares or Hollow Square to build trust through shared experience in these timeless and extremely popular group problem solving activities For more information on the Trust Equation, CLICK HERE
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