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How To Become A Great Negotiator

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Negotiations are a fact of life. We constantly negotiate both in personal and professional areas of life.

Still, many people don´t like negotiating, and as such try avoiding it. As a result it could make resolving and/or progressing problematic.

Others, often success-driven managers and businesspeople, are so competitive that only "winning" would make them a great negotiator in their eyes. Causing, of course, the other person to "lose." Helpful? Most likely not!

Applying below-listed four negotiation principles and executing the outlined three-phased negotiation process will significantly increase the quality of your future negotiations.


NEGOTIATION PRINCIPLES

Often negotiations fail when the following 4 key negotiation principles are not being taken into consideration:

Aim At Win-Win Outcomes
Those are the results which satisfy all stakeholders involved. They represent the basis for further business and sustainable relationships.

Stay Always Open-minded
Successful negotiators look at each major aspect from multiple perspectives. They´re prepared for anything.

Focus On Long-Term Business Relationships
With this in mind it´s rather impossible to fleece the other party.

Show Respect And Appreciation
Honoring the other person as equal is crucial to any successful negotiation.


NEGOTIATION PROCESS

A professional negotiation process consists of 3 stages: The preparation phase, the negotiation phase, and the follow-up phase. You need to excel in all three of them in order of becoming a master of negotiation.

Preparation Stage

If you think that negotiating only starts once you meet the other party, then most likely you´ll not chalk up the best possible outcome: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” (Benjamin Franklin).

In this very first phase define your negotiation targets, strategy and objective criteria based on which you later measure the achieved agreement. Be clear about your alternatives and fall back positions; also known as BATNA: Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement.

Crucial to collect all accessible information about the other party and your negotiation counterparts: What are their objectives and potential strategy, what might be their perspective, their motivations, and their opinion on relevant topics? Which is their interest and their reservation price (i.e. when would they walk away)?

Negotiation Stage

During the opening phase of the negotiation stage listen well and frequently ask (open-ended) questions. As a rule of thumb you should listen more than you talk. Use silence as a tactic and mimic your opponent. Sooner or later they will talk. Try to detect commonalities rather than differences to generate mutual engagement and to establish a first basis of trust. In general it is essential to separate the people from the issue. Don´t take things personal. Many people consider negotiations as a kind of game. So, stay relaxed and enjoy playing the game!

When you´re about to start the actual negotiation be brave and bring forward the first proposal. Why should you do that? The opening offer always serves as a reference point. It´s what I call an "unconscious anchor.“ In other words: If you’re selling, be first and start the bidding high. And if you’re buying, start the bidding low.

Often it might be appropriate making two to three equivalent, simultaneous offers. This shows that you understand and respect the other position and possible concerns. Even more importantly, it creates a variety of options and helps avoiding cornering the other side. You should ask for more than what you´re actually looking for. That gives you flexibility and room to maneuver.

Don´t be afraid to give in first. It´s an excellent opportunity to inject an additional layer of trust. When doing it in a pro-active manner you should be able choosing something which has significant meaning to the other party and is of low cost to you. Usually whenever you give you should also take. Every concession you make should involve a trade-off of some kind. By doing so focus on interests rather than positions.

Saying that, and in order to get around cognitive dissonances of your negotiation counterparts, you are well advised to engage in the theatrics of negotiation: e.g. when being attacked or confronted with unreasonable proposals and demands you should look visibly put off, or you even might want to flinch. By the way, that´s the only time when you get "emotional.“

Experienced negotiators are creative solution seekers, they enjoy thinking outside of the box, and they constantly look for ways to broaden the pie instead of haggling over every little detail. However, they also stand their ground, if the other party is not willing to move or if they were to become (too) aggressive. Temporary confrontations are a normal and stimulating ingredient of serious negotiations. That´s life. Consequently good negotiators take their time and let things cool off. They are not in a hurry to close the deal. And – when push comes to shove - they might walk away as they know that reaching no deal is better than a bad deal.

Follow-Up Stage

After you have closed the deal there is still some final – and very important - work to be taken care of. Write and send out the first draft of the minutes to the other party withing 24 hours after the negotiations have finished. Ask the other side for their input and feedback to your minutes and get them finalized by latest 3 days after having agreed on the deal. Minutes should be as short and as clear as possible. They contain what was agreed upon, and list what has to be executed by when and by whom. Finally, you need to walk your talk, i.e. you must stick to the agreed points and make sure that the other party will do so as well.

Final advice: Try to conduct important negotiations in a face-to-face setting. Sure, an excellent preparation, a clear negotiation strategy, and profound knowledge of key negotiation tactics are required to negotiate well. Of paramount importance, however, is the personality of the negotiator. And that´s delivered and reflected best when you can directly look in each others´eyes.

What do you think? Which is your negotiation strategy and which tactics do you like to apply?

A Self-Aware Leader is Not a Self-Obsessed Leader

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I have become very interested in self-awareness as a leader’s capacity to take stock, to reflect, to look at things defining a bigger perspective. I spoke with Multiples Intelligences author, Howard Gardner, for my LEADERSHIP series about understanding what self-awareness is – and isn’t – for effective leadership.
“Understanding and knowing yourself is a significant aspect of leadership. But I would argue that you’re not able to know yourself with any totality. I also don’t think it’s a valuable feature of a good leader to be obsessive about self, about motivation, and so on.
Self-knowledge needs to be with reference to your role as a leader in the company, which can be pretty expansive. If you have a temper, if you make people feel bad, those are things you need to know.
In other words, some self-reflection or self-knowledge matters, but it should be the right kind. You should have the right focus, which has to do with ‘how am I doing in this role?’ Or ‘What do I need for this role?’
One of the paradoxes is that the higher the leader rises in the rank, the less performance feedback she receives. People are afraid to tell her, particularly when she’s making mistakes. A leader can think they’re doing fine, not realizing that actually they’re not.

Of course, the wise leader goes out of his or her way to consult with people who will offer honest feedback. That proves they have the right kind of self-knowledge.”

How do you foster "the right type" of self-awareness at work?

Share your thought in the comments field.

The Focused Leader

The Focused Leader

A primary task of leadership is to direct attention.To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.
Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.
Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.
 
Focusing on Yourself

  Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness—getting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves. But what does that entail? A look at how people focus inward can make this abstract concept more concrete.
 
Self-awareness. 
 Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. Attention given to any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to that part. Tune in to your heartbeat, and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeats has, in fact, become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala, which the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, calls somatic markers. Those messages are sensations that something “feels” right or wrong. Somatic markers simplify decision making by guiding our attention toward better options. They’re hardly foolproof (how often was that feeling that you left the stove on correct?), so the more comprehensively we read them, the better we use our intuition. (See “Are You Skimming This Sidebar?”) 

Are You Skimming This Sidebar?

Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most successful traders (whose annual income averaged £500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts. They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautious, and took fewer risks. The least successful traders (whose income averaged only £100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their guts. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled.

Creating a Culture of Quality

Creating a Culture of Quality

In most industries, quality has never mattered more. New technologies have empowered customers to seek out and compare an endless array of products from around the globe. Shoppers can click to find objective data compiled by experts at organizations such as Consumer Reports and J.D. Power and go online to read user-generated reviews at sites such as Amazon; together, these sources provide an early warning system that alerts the public to quality problems. And when customers are unhappy with a product or service, they can use social media to broadcast their displeasure. In surveys, 26% of consumers say they have used social media to air grievances about a company and its products. And this issue isn’t limited to the consumer space—75% of B2B customers say they rely on word of mouth, including social media, when making purchase decisions.
 
But just as companies’ margin for error has decreased, the likelihood of error has risen. In many industries, cycle times are compressing. During the recovery from the Great Recession, output gains have outpaced employment growth, and employees report straining to keep up with demands.
As a result of these pressures, managers must find a new approach to quality—one that moves beyond the traditional “total quality management” tools of the past quarter century. For two years CEB has conducted research exploring how companies can create a culture in which employees “live” quality in all their actions—where they are passionate about quality as a personal value rather than simply obeying an edict from on high. We define a “true culture of quality” as an environment in which employees not only follow quality guidelines but also consistently see others taking quality-focused actions, hear others talking about quality, and feel quality all around them.
 
We interviewed the quality function leaders at more than 60 multinational corporations, conducted an extensive review of academic and practitioner research, and surveyed more than 850 employees in a range of functions and industries and at all levels of seniority. Some of what we learned surprised us. Most notably, many of the traditional strategies used to increase quality—monetary incentives, training, and sharing of best practices, for instance—have little effect. Instead, we found, companies that take a grassroots, peer-driven approach develop a culture of quality, resulting in employees who make fewer mistakes—and the companies spend far less time and money correcting mistakes.
 
Going Beyond Rules

What embeds quality deep in a company’s culture? And how, precisely, does an organization benefit as a result? These questions were at the heart of our “culture of quality” survey.
A minority of the employees we surveyed believe their company has succeeded in making quality a core value: Roughly 60% said they work in an environment without a culture of quality, especially when it comes to having peers who go “above and beyond.” Such companies are missing out on significant benefits. Employees who ranked their company in the top quintile in terms of quality reported addressing 46% fewer mistakes in their daily work than employees in bottom-quintile companies. In our surveys, employees report that it takes two hours, on average, to correct a mistake. Assuming an hourly wage of $42.55 (the median for CEB client companies), a bottom-quintile firm with 26,300 employees (the median head count) spends nearly $774 million a year to resolve errors, many of them preventable—$350 million more than a top-quintile firm. Although figures will vary according to industry and company, here’s a broad rule of thumb: For every 5,000 employees, moving from the bottom to the top quintile would save a company $67 million annually. 

We also studied quality-improvement actions in eight different categories and conducted regression analyses to understand the relationship between those actions and employees’ appraisals of how rigorously their company focuses on quality. We found little or no correlation between the use of standard tools and the achievement of a culture of quality. We are not suggesting that companies abandon those tools; however, they should use them to support rules-based quality measures, not as the underpinnings of a true culture of quality.
We pinpointed four factors that drive quality as a cultural value: leadership emphasis, message credibility, peer involvement, and employee ownership of quality issues. Our research indicates that companies could do much better with all four. Nearly half the employees surveyed reported insufficient leadership emphasis on quality, and only 10% found their company’s quality messages credible. Just 38% reported high levels of peer involvement, while 20% said that their company has created a sense of employee empowerment and ownership for quality outcomes.

The Differences Between Successful People and Unsuccessful People

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A few weeks ago I received a postcard in the mail from the CEO of Petra Coach,  the creator of Align Software and a fellow member of Entrepreneurs Organization. I've never met him, but Andy Bailey and his postcard that I hung up on my wall have already had a profound effect on me, reinforcing values I believe in and reminding me on a daily basis of the attitudes and habits that I know I need to embrace in order to become successful.
Below are the 16 differences between successful people and unsuccessful people that Andy Bailey and the postcard claim, followed by a picture of the postcard itself:

1. Embrace change vs. Fear change
Embracing change is one of the hardest things a person can do. With the world moving so fast and constantly changing, and technology accelerating faster than ever, we need to embrace what’s coming and adapt, rather than fear it, deny it or hide from it.

2. Want others to succeed vs. Secretly hope others fail
When you’re in an organization with a group of people, in order to be successful, you all have to be successful. We need to want to see our co-workers succeed and grow. If you wish for their demise, why even work with them at all?

3. Exude joy vs. Exude anger
In business and in life, it’s always better to be happy and exude that joy to others. It becomes contagious and encourages other to exude their joy as well. When people are happier they tend to be more focused and successful. If a person exudes anger, it puts everyone around them in a horrible, unmotivated mood and little success comes from it.

4. Accept responsibly for your failures vs. Blame others for your failures
Where there are ups, there are most always downs. Being a leader and successful businessperson means always having to accept responsibility for your failures. Blaming others solves nothing; it just puts other people down and absolutely no good comes from it.

5. Talk about ideas vs. Talk about people
What did we all learn in high school? Gossip gets you nowhere. Much of the time it’s false and most of the time it's negative. Instead of gossiping about people, successful people talk about ideas. Sharing ideas with others will only make them better.

6. Share data & info vs. Hoard data & info
As we all learned in kindergarten, sharing is caring. In social media, in business and in life, sharing is important to be successful. When you share you info and data with others, you can get others involved in what you are doing to achieve success. Hoarding data and info is selfish and short-sighted.

7. Give people all the credit for their victories vs. Take all the credit from others
Teamwork is a key to success. When working with others, don’t take credit from their ideas. Letting others have their own victories and moments to shine motivates them and in the long term, the better they perform, the better you'll look anyway.

8. Set goals and life plans vs. Do not set goals
You can't possibly be successful without knowing where you're going in life. A life vision board, 10 year plan, 3 year forecast, annual strategic plan, and daily goal lists are are useful tools of the mega-successful people in your life. Get your vision and goals down on paper!

9. Keep a journal vs. Say you keep a journal but don’t
Keeping a journal is a great way to jot down quick ideas or thoughts that come to mind that are not worth forgetting. Writing them down can lead to something even greater. You can even use mobile apps or your Notes function in your phone. But don’t fool yourself by saying you keep a journal and not following through.

10. Read every day vs. Watch TV every day
Reading every day educates you on new subjects. Whether you are reading a blog, your favorite magazine or a good book, you can learn and become more knowledgeable as you read. Watching television, on the other hand, may be good entertainment or an escape, but you'll rarely get anything out of TV to help you become more successful.

11. Operate from a transformational perspective vs. Operate from a transactional perspective
Transformational leaders go above and beyond to reach success on another level. They focus on team building, motivation and collaboration across organizations. They're always looking ahead to see how they can transform themselves and others, instead of looking to just make a sale or generate more revenue or get something out of the way.

12. Continuously learn vs. Fly by the seat of your pants
Continuously learning and improving is the only way to grow. You can be a step above your competition and become more flexible because you know more. If you just fly by the seat of your pants, you could be passing up opportunities that prevent you from learning (and growing!)

13. Compliment others vs. Criticize others
Complimenting someone is always a great way to show someone you care. A compliment gives a natural boost of energy to someone, and is an act of kindness that makes you feel better as well. Criticizing produces negativity and leads to nothing good.

14. Forgive others vs. Hold a grudge
Everybody makes mistakes; it’s human. The only way to get past the mistake is to forgive and move on. Dwelling on anger only makes things worse - for you.

15. Keep a “To-Be” list vs. Don’t know what you want to be
A “To-Be” list is a great way to strategize for the future. I want to be an elected official one day. I want to be a TED speaker. I want to be the CEO of a public company. I want to be a great father and husband. Unsuccessful people have no idea what they want to be. If you don’t know what you want to be, how can you achieve success? What do you want to be?

16. Have Gratitude vs Don't appreciate others and the world around you.
Moments of gratitude, each and every one, transform my life each day- and unquestionably have made me more successful and more happy. The people who you are grateful for are often the ones who have a huge part in your success. Be sure to thank everyone you come in contact with and walk with a spirit of gratitude and appreciation and even wonder, about the world around you. Gratitude is the ultimate key to being successful in business and in life.


Now it's your turn. Which of these 16 items resonate most with you? What makes you successful in today’s business world or in life? Please let me know your thoughts in the Comments section below!

I believe you are doing great! How has your week been?

Do you have any activities lined up for the weekend already?

Well, I am aware many people like to visit places
and attend events during weekends.

Now, let me ask you, have you ever been to the
National Stadium during a big match or any major
public event? Do you see the huge crowd?

The population of our country is over 150 million
and just like the crowd you see at the Stadium
or a public event, a lot of people are just lost in
the crowd or rather numbered with the crowd.
Nothing stands them out; nothing distinguishes
them. They are simply just part of the crowd.

If you are in a business with 10 other competitors,
what would make you stand out?

When someone comes to your house or
company for the first time, do you think
they would like to come back?

WHERE POWER LIE?

A pleasant day to you.

I hope you are excelling in all areas.

It is almost unbelievable to discover that
we have spent two months already out of twelve.
Ten to go, incredible!

How productive has the last two months been for you?
How will you maximize the remaining ten?

Do you know that your tomorrow is already been formed today?

I am always mindful of how I maximize each day.
I try to ensure that daily, I do something that would
lead me to the fulfillment of my dreams  because
that is my personal responsibility.

So, I want to advise you to invest in today’s
opportunities so you can realize your dreams.
Your future is in your hands.

Knowledge is power. What you know today
will invariably determine who you will become tomorrow.

So let me ask you…

Can the knowledge you have today fulfill
your dreams for tomorrow?

If not, there are so many things you still need
to learn and I am willing to teach you.

Remember, you cannot achieve greater results
tomorrow by doing the same things you did yesterday.

Step out from the ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary.