L12: Leading through Effective External Relations

A positive public image or reputation is very important for company’s ability to achieve all other measures of success. The companies with the best corporate reputations outperform all others. One of the main important jobs of leadership is to manage the public’s perception of an organization to become positive, and in particular, to remain the positive image for the top leader’s personal image. The leaders determine the personality of the organization on the inside, they also shape the outside image. An organization has an ethos, just as an individual does. Therefore, the goal of organizational leaders is to ensure that the company’s ethos is positive, which means audiences consider the company honorable, trustworthy, and ethical. Managing external relations effectively is essential to achieving that goal and essential to leadership communication in any organization.

This chapter is focused on discussion about external relations, which falls into public relations, including press and media management, philanthropic activities, community involvement, investor relations, and external publications. Every organization needs to manage these aspects of external relations very carefully since they all affect the organization’s public ethos and organization’s success.

First of all, organization has to develop communications strategy and framework to make connection with external audiences. For the best strategy, the company has to clarify a central and consistent purpose to audiences. A company’s internal and external image need to be consistent and all the logos, slogans and promotional materials need to reflect the personality of organization. Besides looking at the organization’s ethos, a company has to be able to identify all stakeholders who may be affected by activities or interested in or influenced by its messages and image.

Once all stakeholders are identified, the company has to work hard to develop both general message and specific messages to reach individual groups. Importantly, an organization’s leader need to spend time to ensure that all messages are consistent, honest, clear, and meaningful. The messages also need to be simple and contained enough information to be meaningful to any audience. Moreover, only the right messages cannot reach all audiences if the right person does not deliver them. Therefore, the company needs to select the right spokesperson to deliver the messages. The spokesperson must project a positive ethos for the company and show his credibility to audiences.

In addition, another critical component of external relations is the effective medium to ensure reaching the identified stakeholders. The company needs to get the right medium to communicate with audiences and get into their responses, also at the best timing, not too late before the crisis ruins company’s reputation. At last, for the best strategy, a company has to be able to monitor the result and their reputations constantly. The company should be able to measure specifically the impact of day-to-day and major messages on their major constituencies.

Reputation affects the bottom line, and even the strongest companies will have difficulty surviving damage to their reputations. Leaders of organization must give high priority to establishing and maintaining a positive corporate image and, today more than ever, that means, keeping the public, customers, and all other external stakeholders happy. Organizations must link all communication activities to ensure that what the outside world sees and hears reflects what the inside world lives. Today, the public expects companies to demonstrate social responsibility and to behave ethically in all they do internally and externally.

All leaders of organizations must realize that their companies’ reputations depend on their internal ethos and the perceptions of their many external stakeholders. They cannot ignore the importance of establishing and maintaining a positive reputation or the need to manage external relations to keep it. 

N12: Best Practices in Negotiation

Negotiation is an important part of everyday life and the opportunities to negotiate surround us. For the last chapter, we are discussing 10 ‘best practices’ for negotiators who wish to continue to improve their negotiation skills.

1. Be prepared. Negotiators need to plan and be prepared properly for their negotiations to get the ability to analyze the other party’s more effectively and efficiently as well as to understand the nuances of the concession-making process, and to achieve their negotiation goals. Negotiators have to understand their goal and interest before negotiating and be ready to understand the other party’s communication in order to find an agreement that meets the needs of both parties.

2. Diagnose the fundamental structure of the negotiation. Negotiators should make a conscious decision about whether they are facing a fundamentally distributive negotiation, an integrative negotiation, or a blend of the two, and choose their strategies and tactics that lead to successful negotiation outcomes.

3. Identify and work the BATNA. BATNA is the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. It is very important because it is an option that likely will be chosen should an agreement not be reached. Negotiators need to be vigilant about their BATNA.

4. Be willing to walk away. The goal of most negotiations is achieving a values outcome, not reaching an agreement per se. Strong negotiators remember this and are willing to walk away from a negotiation when no agreement is better than a poor agreement.

5. Master the key paradoxes of Negotiation. Excellent negotiators should understand that negotiation composes of a set of paradoxes -- seemingly contradictory elements that actually occur together. Negotiators need to handle these paradoxes by striving for balance in these situations.

6. Remember the intangibles. Negotiators need to remember that intangible factors influence their own behavior. Strong emotions and values are the root of many intangibles, so surfacing intangibles may result in the discussion of various fears and anxieties. Therefore, negotiators need to be aware of how both tangible and intangibles factors influence negotiation, and they weigh both factors when evaluating a negotiation outcome.

7. Actively Manage coalitions. Negotiators should recognize three types of coalitions and their potential effects. Strong negotiators assess the presence and strength of coalitions and work to capture the strength of the coalition for their benefit.

8. Savor and protect your reputation.  Negotiators should start negotiation with a positive reputation and should be vigilant in protecting their reputations. Moreover, negotiators should enhance their reputation by acting in a consistency and fair manner. Strong negotiators always seek feedback from others about the way they are perceived and use that information to strengthen their credibility and trustworthiness in the marketplace.

9. Remember that rationality and fairness are relative. Negotiators need to be aware that people tend to view the world in a self-serving manner and define the “rational” thing to do or a “fair” outcome or process in a way that benefit themselves. To manage these perceptions proactively, negotiators need to question their own perceptions of fairness, find external benchmarks and examples that suggest fair outcomes. Lastly, negotiators should illuminate definitions of fairness held by the other party and engage in a dialogue to reach consensus on which standards of fairness apply in a given situation.

10. Continue to learn from your experience. The best negotiators continue to learn from the experience. There are many different variables and factors which make each negotiation different. These differences and learning enhance the ability to negotiate and make negotiators remain sharp. Negotiators should take a moment to analyze each negotiation after it has concludes to review what happened and what they learned. Negotiators should realize  their own strengths and weaknesses and develop a plan to work on weaknesses and become a better negotiators in the future. 

N11: International and Cross-Cultural Negotiation

These days, many companies are not doing business only in the US, but internationally and globally. People travel more frequently to contact with suppliers, partner, or consumers in different country. For many organizations, international negotiation has become usual. Therefore, to succeed in doing international business, it is very important that negotiators understand what they should do when faced with negotiating with someone from another culture.

First of all, there are two contexts that influence on international negotiation: the environmental and immediate context. The environmental context includes political and legal systems, international Economics, foreign governments and Bureaucracies, instability in a country, ideology, culture, and external stakeholders. The immediate context includes relative bargaining power, levels of conflict, and relationship between negotiators, desired outcomes, and immediate stakeholders. These factors are very good devices for guiding our thinking about international negotiation. Negotiators need to understand that these factors influence the negotiation process and can change over time. Therefore, international negotiation needs to be prepared and planned by monitoring the environmental and immediate contexts.

Besides above, culture is one of main factors that influence negotiation process. There are 10 different ways that culture can influence negotiations as following:

-       The way each culture defines negotiation

-       Culture influences the way negotiators perceive an opportunity as distributive versus integrative

-       The criteria used to select who will participate in a negotiation is different across cultures.

-       Cultures differ in the degree to which protocol, or the formality of the relations between the two negotiating parties, is important.

-       Cultures influence how people communicate, both verbally and nonverbally.

-       Cultures largely determine what time means and how it affects negotiations.

-       Cultures vary in the extent to which they are willing to take risks.

-       Groups versus Individuals.

-       Nature of agreements

-       Culture appears to influence the extent to which negotiators display emotions.

Lastly, this chapter concludes that negotiators need to be prepared and advised to be aware of the effects of cultural differences on negotiation and to take them into account when they negotiate. The best way to manage cross-cultural negotiations is to be sensitive to the cultural norms of the other negotiator and to modify one’s strategy to be consistent with behaviors that occur in that culture. 

L11: Leadership Through Strategic Internal Communication

Becoming a leader of a group or organization, leaders should treat every employee as someone who deserves to understand what’s going on in the enterprise. Communication with employees is one of the major responsibilities of an organizational leader. Effective internal communication provides organizational direction, employee motivation, as well as the achievement of the vision for the company. Employees are willing to do the best work if they trust and respect their leader.

This chapter focuses on establishing leadership through communicating effectively with an organization’s internal audiences. Leaders firstly have to recognize the strategic and cultural role of employee communication. It explains that employees should be well informed, and the leaders should realize the value of integrating communication into the organization’s overall strategy, planning processes, and day-to-day operations. All internal messages should align with and reinforce the organization’s goals and objectives, with the mission, vision, and guiding principles helping direct and define the culture and the operational, performance, and financial goals helping establish the expected results.

To build effective internal communication, messages need to be clear, consistent, and targeted. Therefore, the model is required as a framework for creating an internal communication strategy. The model should consist of supportive management. It means that all employees in leadership positions model the communication behavior they expect of those they supervise. Also, the model should contain the targeted messages that specific to the audience receiving them. However, only preferred channels to send communication may not reach all employees. The best result to distribute the messages is to communicate internal messages through several different media to reach all employees. Leaders need to look at the media, decide when different situations require different media, and survey employees to determine if they are receiving the intended messages through the selected media. Besides, to measure if the communication is effective, the model should include employee evaluation forms which can evaluate the assessments of the employees.

At last, effective internal communications create an environment where members are engaged in the process, offer ideas that increase customer satisfaction, improve work processes as well as individual performance and experience a greater level of job satisfaction. Good internal communication enables the smooth operation of the organization which depends on the leadership communication abilities to inspire, motivate, and guide employees to support their vision and their goals for the organization.

L10: High-Performing Team Leadership

Team is always better than individual! A team is a group of people coming together to collaborate. Teams usually maximize the organization’s human resources, and help set and achieve better successes. Leaders should not think of themselves as simply managers, supervisors; but rather as ‘team leaders.’ This chapter will guide leader through the communication challenges involved in leading a team. We will learn how to build an effective team, and handle team conflict. In addition, this is one of skills leaders need to build and manage a high-performance team tie directly to their leadership communication ability.

First of all, before building an effective team, organization has to look at the culture and compensation structure if they both support teamwork. Also, we need to determine that a team is the most effective and efficient approach to perform the task, solve the problem, generate the new ideas, or generally move the organization forward. Then, the first responsibilities of a team leader is bringing together team members who have skills that complement rather than duplicate each other. All members need to recognize and accept mutual as well as individual accountability for the team’s work product. Importantly, the team must have specific goals, a purpose that is important to the organization, and a common approach to the work.

Before beginning the team project, leaders should hold an official launch and allow the team to address many of the team work process steps as well as lead them through development of the purpose, goals, and approach so that the team could work more effectively and efficiently. Working in teams can be fantastic if team members work well together. However, if people are pulling in different directions, the experience can be awful. Therefore, a team should the Team Charter which is a document that define the purpose of the team, how it will work, roles and responsibilities for each team members, and what the expected outcomes are. Besides, a team’s performance will depend on the team’s being able to deliver the results of its work. Therefore, delivering a presentation, a report time after time is important.

Despite all the best planning and time spent on process, teams will likely experience conflict. Working on a team in not easy, but the benefits can be very rewarding. Therefore, obtaining the best result can depend on the team’s ability to mange conflict. Conflict includes analytical conflict when team’s constructive disagreement over a project issue or problem; team conflict concerns Tasks, goal, work process, or deliverables; Interpersonal conflict involves members’ personality, diversity, and communication styles; Role conflict can occur if the teams gets off course, or individuals start intruding into one another’s task area.

Therefore, a team leader always has to be prepared to handle team conflict. There are three approaches to manage conflict. One-on-one approach is a resolution procedure that will let the two individuals work out the issues alone. Facilitation approach is to have a third person work with the clashing individuals apart from the team. For this approach, the facilitator should be skilled in managing conflict. Team approach seems to be the best resolution when a team decides all members should meet to solve the problem. All members should have a very specific approach in mind and should select one person to facilitate the discussion.

At last, this chapter has discussed the best approach to ensuring that all team activities run smoothly so that the team achieves its objectives. However, teams can prevent most team conflict by clarifying and agreeing on their project purposes and goals, defining team members roles and responsibilities and establishing and following team and meeting ground rules, developing a communication protocol and devoting time to improving their group emotional intelligence. Team leader needs to well plan and be prepared for the conflict. Leading a team presents some challenges, but with the right approach, a team can work through the challenges, achieve high performance, and outperform other groups and individual. This is why a team is better than an individual. 

L09: Meetings: Leadership and Productivity

According to A Harvard Business Review article, professionals agree that as much as 50% of that meeting time is unproductive and that up to 25% of meeting time is spent discussing irrelevant issues. That’s why leaders need to be able to plan and conduct the meeting effectively and productively. Doing so requires leadership communication skills and is important in setting precedent for the rest of the organization.

This chapter will help leaders and other meeting planners conduct productive meeting by firstly determining when a meeting is the best forum for achieving the required result; establishing objectives, outcomes, and agenda; performing essential planning; clarifying roles and establishing ground rules; using common problem-solving techniques; managing meeting problems; and ensuring that follow-up occurs.

First of all, leaders need to come up with the clear communication purpose and strategy, as well as analyze the audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what they want to accomplish. Meeting could often have many objectives. However, effective meeting usually have to have only one main overall purpose. Importantly, to make the meeting more productive, leader can write out the purpose and objectives very specifically, then, to start the meeting, tell the audience the intentions of the meeting. To determine topics for the agenda, leaders need to estimate the time it will take to cover each topic and accomplish each objective as realistically as possible. After that, it is important to invite the right attendees who can contribute to achieving the meeting objectives. Then, leaders needs to consider the best setting for the kind of meeting, setting a time for the meeting which is appropriate for every member’s schedule and commitments. Before beginning the meeting, information is also needed to provide to all attendees so that they can prepare further information to facilitate the discussion and accomplish the meeting objectives.

In order to run the meeting smoothly and efficiently, all attendees should corporate and know the decision-making approach. Usually, the leader is a person who sets the tone and creates the decision-making approach for the organization. However, some issues may arise despite the best planning and meeting processes. All meeting leaders and facilitators have to be prepared to handle all problems in ways that not interfere with the meeting objectives or those of the broader organization. The most two common problems that can interfere with creativity are negative thinking and resistance to the ideas of others or changes of any kind. The best way to stop negativity is to establish a ground rule outlawing it, and to solve the resistance to ideas, the person may offer an opposing idea or present roadblocks. For some purposes, the leader may want to encourage the contrary ideas and even encourage someone to play devil’s advocate to inspire better ideas as the group argues the pros and cons. Furthermore, when the common meeting problems turn into direct conflict, facilitators need to be more aggressive in their tactics. They must be prepared to manage the conflicts and the people involved before they interrupt meeting progress and in some case even intrude into the overall working environment.

Even though leaders understand the importance of cultural differences, since meeting conflict may arise from cultural differences, leaders will want to be aware of some of the specific issues related to meeting. Leaders should recognize some of these potential issues that will help in managing many of them. No one can know enough about every culture to prevent the misunderstanding situation, but we can be aware of the differences and lead or facilitate the meeting in such a way that we help participants feel more comfortable. It may be dangerous to generalize about personalities and how people will behave in a given situation, but being aware of some of the differences is the most important to help us lead and manage the meeting more effectively. 

L08: Cross-Cultural Literacy and Communication

These days, because of the globalization, multicultural and highly diverse workforce, leaders are required to understand the cultural diversity, which is called cross-cultural literacy. Understanding cross-cultural literacy means being literate or knowledgeable about the fundamental differences across cultures. It is very important that leaders have to realize the value of cultural differences which is a key component of emotional intelligence. In today world, organizations seek diversity to become competitive, and leaders need to be better educated about culture to lead effectively and to take full advantage of the value diversity provides. In addition, understanding the cultural differences enhances leader’s ability to interact appropriately with internal and external audiences, as well as greatly improves leader’s interpersonal skills and ability to communicate effectively with today’s diverse workplace.

Having said that, leaders first need to know what the meaning of culture is. For anthropologists, culture is ‘the way of life of a people, or the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes, and material things.’ It is the way people make sense of and give meaning to their world. It is also the frame of reference and the behavior patterns of groups of people. It includes social and physical characteristics, gender, age, profession, organizational function, and company structure and style. Therefore, when taking about communicating across cultures, culture is a fuzzy set of attitudes, beliefs, behavioral conventions, and basic assumptions and values that are shared by a group of people, and that influence each member’s behavior and his/her interpretations of the meaning of other people’s behavior.

Then, after learning the definition of culture, leaders also need to recognize major cultural differences which they encounter in leading organizations in order to better understand the diverse audiences they are communicating with in the universal level. In this chapter, there are provided frameworks and questions to help easily recognize major cultural differences. There are seven variables which are important to and applicable across all cultures and help leaders making distinctions about culture as followings:

1. Context : context emphasizes on what is going on outside and inside individuals

that influences the way they interact with others and understand the words and behavior of others.

2. Information flow. The importance of context in a culture, high or low, influences

how individuals approach exchanges of information and determines how messages flow between people and levels in organizations. It also controls who initiates communication and with whom, what kinds of messages are sent, what channels are preferred and how formal or informal the exchange of information will be. 

3. Time.
4. Language. Language has been described as the ‘central influence on culture and

one of the most highly charged symbols of a culture or a nation.’ In international business negotiations, we should always consider hiring our own interpreter; even if we feel fairly comfortable with the language, to avoid any misunderstandings or a contractual agreement we did not intend.

5. Power and equality. Cultures differ tremendously in how they view power and

equality. Some believe in strict hierarchies with clear distinctions between levels and formalized respect for people at the higher levels of an organization. Other see everyone as equal.

6. Collectivism versus individualism. Cultural emphasis on context, on how

information is shared, and how power is viewed are influenced by how individualistic and collectivistic a culture is.

7. Spirituality and tradition : include religion and traditional values. The religion

and tradition value is an important variable in determining behavior and how individuals will communicate and interpret messages.

Understanding each of these variables would provide leaders the platform on audiences analysis and help leaders to determine the strategy for communicating and interacting effectively with people from other cultures. 

N10: Multiple Parties and Teams

This chapter is discussed about a multiparty negotiation which is negotiation process in where more than two parties are working together to reach a collective objective. In the multiparty negotiation process, each party has his own preferences and priorities. Therefore, a meeting is required to make a discussion about the best options for everybody and make a collective decision. This is a multiparty negotiation that involves unique dynamics in a collective decision-making process.

However, the process is not that easy to manage. There are factors that make multiparty negotiations more difficult to manage than one-on-one negotiation. First of all, Number of parties make the negotiation become bigger and create challenges for managing several different perspectives. It is difficult to ensure that each party has enough time to speak his own preference and be heard. Secondly, informational and computational complexity brings in more issues, more perspectives on issues, and more total information. Increasing the number of parties make the negotiation situation less lucid, and more demanding. Many people involving in a decision-making also create social complexity. The social environment would change from a one-on-one dialogue to a small-group discussion. As a result, all the dynamics of small groups begin to affect the way the negotiators behave, and participate. Besides, when more parties are involved in a negotiation, the process individual has to follow is more complicated. Parties take longer time to present the issues and it takes longer to reach the negotiation objective. The parties may have to negotiate a new process that allows them to coordinate their actions more effectively. Finally, multiparty negotiations are more strategically complex than two-party ones. The negotiator must consider the strategies of all the other parties at the table and decide whether to deal with each of them separately or as a group.

Since there are many parties involve in the negotiation and the process is complex, negotiator should know the effective ways to deal with it. There are three main stages that characterize multilateral negotiations: prenegotiation, actual negotiation, and managing the agreement. In the prenegotiation stage, the parties would deal with participants, coalitions, defining group member roles, understanding the costs and consequences of no agreement, and learning the issues and constructing an Agenda. In the formal negotiation stage and managing the group process and outcome, to ensure a high-quality group decision, the parties have to appoint an appropriate Chair, use and restructure the Agenda, Ensure a diversity of information and perspectives, ensure consideration of all the available information, manage conflict effectively, review and manage the decision rules, strive for a first agreement, and manage problem team members. At last, in the agreement phase, four key problem-solving steps are to select the best solution, to develop an action plan, implement the action plan, and evaluate the just-completed process.

At last, multiparty negotiation is like a group decision making in which all members are trying to reach a common solution in the situation but the parties’ preferences may be different. Therefore, parties need to understand thoughtfully its process, develop strategies to deal with the issues, and understand how to make their group as an effective group.

N09: Relationships in Negotiation

In this chapter, we address situations where negotiations become especially difficult, often to the point of stalemate or breakdown. As we have noted several times negotiation is a conflict management process, and all conflict situations have the potential for becoming derailed. As the title suggests that nature of negotiations are difficult to resolve, the causes of stalemate, impasse, or breakdown. The specific actions that the parties can take jointly to try to move the conflict back to a level where successful negotiation and conflict resolution can ensure.

In the first section, this chapter discussed about the nature of the negotiation, examine the causes of stalemate, impasse, or breakdown, and explore the characteristics of the difficult negotiations, including characteristics of the parties, the types of issues involved, and the process in play. Initially, we need to know the characteristics of the negotiations which are difficult to resolve. The process of conflict resolution is characterized by the atmosphere, channels of communication, unclear definition of original issues, the great differences in the respective positions, the locked initial negotiating positions, and the hidden dissension in the same group or side.

The tools that we discussed are broad in function and in application, and they represent self-help for negotiators in dealing with stalled or problematic exchanges. None of these methods and remedies is a panacea, and each should be chosen and applied with sensitivity to the needs and limitations of the situations and of the negotiators involved. A truly confrontational breakdown, especially one that involves agreements of great impact or importance, sometimes justifies the introduction of individuals or agencies who themselves are not party to the dispute.

N08: Ethics in Negotiation

At the beginning, this chapter mentions about the strengths and weaknesses of the American negotiator in the international political arena as follow: The strengths: Good preparation, Clear and plain speaking, A focus on pragmatism over doctrine, Strong ability to recognize the other party’s perspective and to recognize that negotiations do not have to be win-lose, Good understanding of the concession-making process, and Candid and straightforward communication. The weakness: Serious intergovernmental agency conflicts, the separation of political power between the presidency and congress.

The influence of interest groups on negotiations, media interference, negotiator impatience, and cultural insensitivity, the negotiators from different cultures/countries use different negotiation strategies and communication patterns when negotiating intra-culturally than when negotiating cross-culturally. The culture of the negotiator appears to be an important predictor of both the negotiation process that will occur and how the chosen negotiation strategies will influence negotiation outcomes. This chapter explained about two overall contexts which have an influence on cross border negotiations: the environmental context, and the immediate context. The environmental context is beyond control.

There are some factors that make global negotiations more challenging than domestic negotiations: political and legal pluralism, international economics, foreign governments and bureaucracies, instability, ideology, culture, and stakeholder. The immediate context includes the factors which the negotiators have influence and control. These factors are as follow: relative bargaining power, levels of conflict, relationship between negotiators, desired outcome, and immediate stakeholders. The negotiation processes and outcomes are influenced by many factors, and that the influence of these factors can change in magnitude over time. The challenge for every global 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.