[Leadership] Chapter 10: Leading through Effective External Relations

Leadership Communication

Chapter 10

This chapter focuses on leading through effective external relations that include developing an external relations strategy, building and maintaining a positive corporate image, working with the news media, and handling crisis communication.
Effective external relations require a sound communication strategy. You can use the communication strategy framework. With the framework in mind, you can take the following steps 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 your spokesperson(s).
5. Establish the most effective media or forum.
6. Determine the best timing.
7. Monitor the results.

Building and maintaining a positive corporate image require having an external relations strategy that is vigilant, vigorous, and comprehensive. It involves developing a strategy for managing the press and media, making meaningful and sincere philanthropic contributions, being actively involved in the community, obeying all of the legal and regulatory requirements of investor relations, and ensuring all external communication vehicles carry honest, clear, consistent, and meaningful message to all stakeholders.

To increase chances for favorable treatment, it is important for a company to establish a positive relationship with the media and for every senior manager to know how to work effectively with them. Any leader of an organization should know why the media are important, when to talk to them, and how to manage encounters with them.
Most companies will face a crisis so they should know how to handle with it. Although establishing positive relationships with external audiences prior to a crisis will help in all but the extreme situations, no amount of goodwill can guarantee the positive coverage that is necessary to avoid permanent damage to a company’s reputation. The following guidelines will help companies respond appropriately in most crisis situations.

1. Develop a general crisis communication plan and communicate it.
2. Once the crisis, respond quickly.
3. Make sure you have the right people ready to respond and that they all respond with the same message.
4. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
5. Do not overlook the value of the Web.
6. Revisit your crisis communication plan frequently.
7. Build in a way to monitor the coverage.
8. Perform a post crisis evaluation.

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 necessity of effectively managing external relations to obtain and keep it.

[Leadership] Chapter 9: Establishing Leadership through Strategic Internal Communication

Leadership Communication

Chapter 9

Recognizing the strategic role of employee communication For employee communication to play a strategic role in organization, the leader must realize its importance in accomplishing the company’s strategic objectives and performance goals and integrate it into the company’s overall strategy and business processes. Your communication to employees needs to support the strategy and the performance goals, and all communication with them needs to position them to help you achieve those goals. Therefore, you should think about how best to accomplish the following basic employee communication objectives:

1. Educate employees in the company vision and strategic goals.
2. Motivate employee support for the company’s strategy.
3. Encourage higher performance and discretionary effort.
4. Limit misunderstandings and rumors that may damage productivity.
5. Align employees behind the company’s performance objectives and position them to help achieve them.

Assessing employee communication effectiveness. Before developing an internal communication strategy, you may want to use the scorecard to uncover how your organization stands in relation to the best practices for internal communication.

Establishing effective internal communications. The effective internal communication consists of the following:

1. Supportive management—managers should model the communication behavior they expect of their employees.
2. Targeted messages—effective communication depends on making all messages specific to the audience receiving them.
3. Effective media/forum—companies may need to communicate internal messages through several different media to reach all employees.
4. Well-positioned staff—the communication staff must be positioned close to the most important business issues and decisions and involved in the strategic and business planing processes for internal communication to be fully effective.
5. Ongoing assessment—you need to demonstrate clearly that you consider good communication to be valuable and important.

Using missions and divisions to strengthen internal communication
- Understanding the importance of missions and visions—effective mission and vision statements can :
1) inspire individual action, determine behavior, and fuel motivation.
2) Establish a firm foundation of goals, standard and objectives to guide corporate planner and managers.
3) Satisfy both the company’s need for efficiency and the employees’ need for group identity.
4) provide direction, which is particularly important in times of change, to keep everone moving toward the same goals.

- Defining missions and visions: Mission—a statement of the reason a company exists that is intended primarily for internal use. ; Visions—describe an inspiring new reality, achievable in a well-understood and reasonable time frame.

- Ensuring the mission and vision are effective—can be helpful in guiding employees.

- Building an effective mission and vision. There are three approaches to building a vision:
1) CEO/leadership developed
2) Leader-senior team visioning
3) Bottom-up visioning.

You might take the following steps in a leader-led, interactive, employee-involved approach to building a mission and a vision:
1. Create initial draft—bring the right employees, usually a cross section of organizational leaders, together to create the initial draft of the mission and vision.
2. Clarify the meaning.
3. Tell the world in 25 words or less what you are and what you want to become.
4. Develop the strategic objectives to make the vision specific and actionable.
5. Hold cascading meetings with employees to test the mission and the vision.

Designing and implementing effective change communication
- Detemining the scope of the change communication program
- Structuring a communication program for major change

[Leadership] Chapter 8: Building and Leading High Performing Teams

Leadership Communication

Chapter 8

This chapter focuses on business leaders need to know how to build and how to manage them to achieve high performance. Most businesspeople have experienced successful as well as unsuccessful teams. Building an effective team raises both organizational and individual leadership issues. If you are thinking of forming a team for specific tasks, you first 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 your company forward in some way.
Once you have told the selected team members that they are on your team, you should schedule a launch or kick-off meeting so establishing the necessary team work processes are important. Although most teams will probably want to jump right into the work without spending the necessary time on process issues, leading them through development of the purpose, goals, and approach (the commitment side of the team basics framework) will help your team work more efficiently and effectively. In this section, you will learn how to address the issues of goals, purpose, and approach in your team launch by creating a team charter, action plan, and work plan.
Teams bring together the best talent available to solve a problem; however, some times these talented people clash. Just as emotional intelligence is important for individuals, it is also important for groups. One way to improve the team’s emotional intelligence or ability to work together smoothly is for the team to take time to know something about each other’s current situation, work experiences, expectations, personality, and cultural differences. This knowledge may not result in team bonding or friendships, which are more the by product of teams than the goal, but since these softer issues influence how the person behaves as a team member, the knowledge can help the team avoid conflict and help you as the leader anticipate any problems or performance roadblocks. Although team members will get to know each other through day-to-day interactions while working together, the team members can shorten the learning curve by discussing the following information at the first team meeting:

1. Position and responsibilities
2. Team experience
3. Expectation
4. Personal
5. Cultural difference

Despite all of the best planning and time spent getting to know each other, teams will likely experience conflict. Some of it will be useful and some not, but the odds are that it will occur. As Katzenbach writes, an effective team is “about hard work, conflict, integration, and collective results.” Working on a team is not easy, but the benefits can be very rewarding for the team members, and the results can be much better for the company. Obtaining the best results can depend on the team’s ability to manage conflict. Just as individuals and teams must be able to disagree in meetings, teams need to know how to manage conflict in their overall team activities.

Types of team conflict; internal team conflict will usually be one of four types:
1. Analytical (team’s constructive disagreement over a project issue or problem)
2. Task (goal, work process, deliverables)
3. Interpersonal (personality, diversity, communication styles)
4. Roles (leadership, responsibilities, power struggles)

Approaches to handling team conflict; most teams will use one of the following three approaches to managing conflict:

1. One on one: Individuals involved work it out between themselves.
2. Facilitation: Individuals involved work with a facilitator (mediator).
3. Team: Individuals involved discuss it with the entire team.

More and more companies are using virtual teams to connect their personal in offices around the globe. Although virtual teams are common, many companies do not know to ensure that they function as effectively as a co-located team would. Virtual teams require special effort, and it should not be taken for granted that people who are effective in traditional teams will also work well in a virtual team setting. There are marked differences.

Traditional team:
• Face-to-face
• Communications primarily in person
• Limited by time and distance

Virtual team:
• Geographically dispersed
• Communicating through technology
• Unrestrained by distance and time

This chapter has discussed the best approach to ensuring all team activities run smoothly so that the team achieves its objectives. It has provided team leaders and team facilitators tools to help them build and manage a team. No doubt, 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.”

[Leadership] Chapter 7: Leading Productive Management Meeting

Leadership Communication

Chapter 7

The leaders need to be able to plan and conduct effective, productive meetings. Doing so requires leadership communication skills and is important in setting the precedent for the rest of the organization. To avoid creating a negative atmosphere around meetings in the company, we need avoid the seven deadly sins of meeting.
1. People don’t take meeting seriously
2. Meetings are too long
3. People wander off the topic
4. Nothing happens once the meeting ends
5. People don’t tell the truth
6. Meetings are always missing important information
7. Meetings never get better
Communication purpose and strategy should come first in planning meetings, as in all communication situations. We need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what we want to accomplish. The care that people give to defining the purpose and objectives will determine the success of the meeting. We need to write out the purposes and objectives very specifically: then, to start the meeting, tell the audience our intentions.
The agenda should follow directly from the objectives and end products and contain the information regarding the topic. In determining the agenda topics and the meeting tasks, we need to consider the time it will take to cover each topic or more important, to accomplish each objective then add et least 5 minutes to each topic to allow for transition.
The attendees are should be the ones who can contribute to achieving the objectives. The selected attendees will usually include the decision makers, the budget holder, those who must take action on the decision, those with expert knowledge affecting the decision, and representation from those affected by the decision. To the differences arising from national, regional, and functional cultures, we should encounter differences caused by personality.

[Negotiation] Chapter 9: Managing Difficult Negotiations: Individual Approaches

Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 9

It is not uncommon for negotiations, especially distributive ones, to become contentious to the point of breakdown. In extreme cases, conflict escalates and interpersonal enmity increases. Negotiations are “difficult to resolve” to the extent that the process of conflict resolution is characterized by the following dynamics:

- The atmosphere is charged with anger, frustration, and resentment. Mistrust and hostility are directed at the opposing negotiator.
-Channels of communication, previously used to exchange information and supporting arguments for each party’s position, are now closed or constrained.
- The original issues at stake have become blurred and ill defined, and perhaps new issues have been added.
- The parties tend to perceive great differences in their respective positions. Conflict heightens the magnitude of these differences and minimizes areas of perceived commonality and agreement.
- As anger and tension increase, the parties become more locked in to their initial negotiating positions.
- If there is more than one person on a side, those on the same side tend to view each other favorably.

The five major conflict-reduction strategies that can be uses to resolve impasses:

- Reducing tension and synchronizing the de-escalation of hostility.
- Improving the accuracy of communication, particularly improving each party’s understanding of the other’s perspective.
- Controlling the number and size of issues in the discussion.
- Establishing a common ground on which the parties can find a basis for agreement.
- Enhancing the desirability of the options and alternatives that each party presents to the other.

Another major difficulty that inhibits parties from reaching agreement is that as conflict intensifies, the size and number of the issues expand. The problem for negotiators in escalated impasses, therefore, is to develop strategies to contain issue proliferation and reduce the negotiation to manageable proportions.

“Fractionating” is a method of issue control that involves dividing a large conflict into smaller parts. Fractionating can involve several actions: reducing the number of parties on each side; controlling the number of substantive issues involved; stating issues in concrete terms rather than as principles; restricting the precedents involved, both procedural and substantive; searching for ways to narrow the big issues; and depersonalizing issues, separating them from the parties advocating them.

Parties in escalated conflict tend to magnify perceived differences and to minimize perceived similarities. The parties tend to see themselves as further apart and having less in common than may actually be the case. Therefore, another action that parties can take to de-escalade conflict is to establish common ground and focus on common objectives. Several approaches are possible: establishing common goals, aligning against common enemies, agreeing to follow a common procedure, or establishing a common framework for approaching the negotiation problem.

The tools discussed are broad in function and in application, and they represent self-help for negotiators 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.

[Negotiation] Chapter 8: Global Negotiation

Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 8

The number of global negotiations is increasing rapidly. People today travel more frequently and farther, and business is more international in scope and extent than ever before. For many people and organizations, global negotiations have become the norm rather than an exortic activity that occurs only occasionally.

The American negotiating style Lebel tend to constrain our thinking and expectations such that we may perceive more consistency in the other person than actually exists, and labels may lock us into perceiving the other party’s behavior in a historically dated manner.
- How Non-Americans describe the American style. Tomy Koh, the former ambassador from singapore to the United States, noted The strengths of the American negotiators: 1) good preparations, 2) clear and plain speaking, 3) a focus on pragmatism over doctrine, 4) strong ability to recognize the other party’s perspective, 5) good understanding of the concession-making process, and 6) candid and straightforward communication.
- How American perspective on the American negotiating style. McDonald noted the weaknesses of American negotiators : 1) impatience, 2) arrogance, 3) poor listening skill, 4) insolarity, 5) legalism, and 6) naivete. On the other hand, he perceive the strengths of American negotiators: 1) friendliness, 2) fairness and honesty, 3) flexibility, 4) innovativeness, 5) pragmatism, 6) preparedness, and 7) cooperativeness.

What makes cross-border negotiations different?

There are two overall contexts that have an influence on cross-border negotiations:

1. Environmental context – includes “forces in the environment that are beyond the control of either party” that influence the negotiation. There are six factors that make global negotiations more challenging than domestic negotiations: Political and legal pluralism, international economics, foreign governments and bureaucracies, instability, ideology, culture, and external stakeholders.
2. Immediate context
· Relative bargaining power – one factor in cross-border negotiations that has received considerable research attention is the relative bargaqining power of the two parties in the negotiation.
· Levels of conflict – influence the negotiation process and outcome.
· Relationship between negotiators – the history of relations between the parties will influence the current negotiation.
· Immediate stakeholders

Hofstede’s dimensions of culture Hofstede’s research defines culture as the shared values and beliefs held hy members of a group, and is consideres the most comprehensive and extensive program of research on cultural dimensions in international business. He concludeed that foyr dimensions could summarize cultural differences: 1) individualism or colectivism , 2) power distance, 3) masculinity/femininity, and 4) ubcertainty avoidance.

How do cultural differences influence negotiations? Foster, drawing work by Weiss and Stripp, suggest that culture can influence negotiations across borders in eight different ways: 1) definition of negotiation, 2) selection of negotiators, 3) Protocol, 4) communication, 5) time, 6)risk propensity, 7)groups versus individuals, and 8) nature of agreements.

Culturally responsive negotiation strategies Several factors indicate that cross-border negotiators should not make large modifications to their approach:
1. Negotiators may not be able to modify their approach effectively.
2. Even if negotiators can modify their approach effectively, it does not mean that this will translate automatically into better negotiation outcome for their side.
3. Research suggests that negotiators may naturally negotiate differently when they are with people from their own culture than they are with people from other cultures.
4. Research gy Francis suggest that moderate adaptation may be more effective than “acting as the Romams do”

According to Weiss, when choosing a strategy, negotiators should be aware of their own and the other’s party’s culture in general, understand the specific factors in the current relationship, and predict or try to influence the other party’s approach. Weiss’s culturally responsive strategies may be arranged into three groups, based on the level of familiarity( low, moderate, high) that negotiator has with the other ‘s culture.
- Low familiarity : Employ agents or advisers, Bring in mediator(joint strategy), and induce the other party to use your approach.
- Moderate familiarity : Adapt to other party’s approach(unilateral strategy), and coordinate adjustment(joint strategy).
- High familiarity : Embrace the other party’s approach, improvise an approach, and effect symphony.

[Negotiation] Chapter 7: Ethics in Negotiation

Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 7

The effective negotiator must recognize when the questions are relevent and what factors must be considered to answer them. There are several major ethical questions that arise in negotiation:
1. What are ethics and how do they apply to negotiation?
2. What major types of rthical and unethical conduct are likely to coccur in negotiation?
3. How can negotiators deal with the other party’s use of deception?

What are ethics and why do they apply to negotiation?
Ethics proceed from particular philosophies, which support to a)define the nature of the world in which we live, and b) prescribe rules for living togrther. There are four type of ethics: 1)end-result ethics: in that the rightness of an action in determined by evaluating the pros and cons of its consequences, 2) rule ethics: in that the rightness of an action is determined by existing lawa and contemporary social standards that define what is right and wrong and where the line is., 3) social contract ethics: in that the rightness of an action is based on the customs and norms of a particular society or community., and 4) personalistic ethics: in that the rightness of an action is based on one’s own conscience and moral standards.

How do negotiators choose to use ethical or unethical tactics?
· Ethical tactics in negotiation are mostly about truth telling – concerned with standards of truth telling—how honest, candid, and disclosing a negotiator should be.
· Typologies of deceptive tactics – seen as inappropriate and unethical in negotiation.

Intentions and motives to use deceptive tactics
· The motivation to behave unethically
· The consequences of unethical conduct – based on whether the tactic is effective; how the other person, constituencies, and audiences evaluate the tactic; and how the negotiator evaluates the tactics.
· Explanations and justifications – the primary purpose is to rationalize, explain, or excuse the behavior—to verbalize some good, legitimate reason why this tactic was necessary.

How can negotiators deal with the other party’s use of deception?
· Asking probing questions about the other’s position, point of view, information, and so on may help you uncover the key information that was omitted.
· Recognize the tactic – ignore the tactic, ask questions, “call” the tactic, respond in kind, and discuss what you see and offer to help the other party change to move honest behaviors.

[Negotiation] Chapter 6: Finding and Using Negotiation Leverage

Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 6

This chapter focuses on leverage in negotiation. By leverage, we mean the tools negotiators can use to give themselves and advantage or increase the probability of achieving their objective. Leverage is often used synonymously with power. Most negotiators believe that power is important in negotiation, because it gives one negotiator an advantage over the other party. Negotiators who have this advantage usually want to use it to secure a negotiation usually arises from one of two perception:
1. The negotiator believes he or she currently has less leverage than the other parties, so he or she seek power to offset or counterbalance that advantage.
2. The negotiator believes he or she needs more leverage than the other party to increase the probability of securing a desired outcome.
In general, negotiators who don’t care about their power or who have matched power—equally high or low—will find that their deliberation proceed with greater ease and simplicity toward a mutually satisfying and acceptable outcome. Power is implicated in the use of many negotiation tactics, such as hinting to the other party that you have good alternatives (a strong BATNA) in order to increase your leverage.
In general, people have power when they have “the ability to bring about outcomes they desire” or “the ability to get things done the way them to be done.” Three sources of power: information and expertise control over resources, and the location within an organizational structure (which leads to either formal authority or informal power based on where one is located relative to flows of information or resources).
The concept of leverage in relation to the use of power and influence. It is important to be clear about the distinction between the two. We treat power as the potential to alter the attitudes and behaviors of others that an individual brings to a given situation. Influence, on the other hand, can be though of as power in action—the actual messages and tactics an individual undertakes in order to change the attitudes and/or behaviors of others. A very large number of influence (leverage) tools that one could use in negotiation. These tools were considered in two broad categories: influence that occurs through the central route to persuasion, and influence that occurs through the peripheral route to persuasion.
In the final section of the chapter, we focuses on how to receiver—the target of influence—either can shape and direct what the sender is communicating, or can intellectually resist the persuasive effects of the message. Effective negotiators are skilled not only at crafting persuasive messages, but also at playing the role of skilled “consumers” of the messages that others direct their way.

[Negotiation] Chapter 5: Perception, Cognition, and Communication

Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 5

Perception, cognition, and communication are fundamental processes that govern how individuals construct and interpret the interaction that takes place in a negotiation. Reduced to its essence, negotiation is a form of interpersonal communication, which itself is a subset of the broader category of human perception and communication. Perception and cognition are the basic building blocks of all social encounters, including negotiation, in the sense that our social actions are guided by the way we perceive and analyze the other party, the situation, and our own interests and positions.

Negotiators approach each negotiation guided by their perceptions of past situations and current attitudes and behaviors. Perception is the process by which individuals connect to their environment. Perception is a “sense-making” process; people interpret their environment so that they can respond appropriately. In any given negotiation, the perceiver’s own needs, desires, motivations, and personal experiences may create a predisposition about the other party. Such predispositions are most problematic when they lead to biases and errors in perception and subsequent communication.

Stereotyping and halo effects are examples of perceptual distortion by generalization: small amounts of perceptual information are used to draw large conclusions about individuals. Selective perception and projection are, in contrast, examples of perceptual distortion by the anticipation of encountering certain attributes and qualities in another person. Stereotyping is a very common distortion of the perceptual process. Stereotyping occurs when one individual assigns attributes to another solely on the basis of the other’s membership in a particular social and demographic group. Halo effects in perception are similar to stereotypes. Halo effects occur when people generalize about a variety of attributes based on the knowledge of one attribute of an individual and are as common as stereotypes in negotiation. Selective perception occurs when the perceiver singles out certain information that supports or reinforces a prior belief, and filters out information that does not confirm that belief. Projection occurs when people ascribe to others the characteristics or feelings that they possess themselves. People have a need to see themselves as consistent and good.

Another key issue in perception and negotiation is framing. A frame is the subjective mechanism through which people evaluate and make sense out of situations, leading them to pursue or avoid subsequent actions.

Rather than being perfect processors of information, it is quite clear that negotiators have a tendency to make systematic errors when they process information. These errors, collectively labeled cognitive biases, tend to impede negotiator performance; they include the irrational escalation of commitment, the mythical belief that the issues under negotiation are all fixed-pie, the process of anchoring and adjustment in decision making, issue and problem framing, the availability of information, the winner’s curse, negotiators overconfidence, the law of small numbers, self-serving biases, the endowment effect, the tendency to ignore others’ cognitions, and the process of relative devaluation.

Misperceptions and cognitive biases arise automatically and out of conscious awareness as negotiators gather and process information. Negotiators may apply several different frames to the same negotiation. When different negotiators apply different, or mismatched, frames, they will find the bargaining process ambiguous and frustrating. In such situations, it may become necessary to reframe the negotiation systematically, to assist the other party in reframing the negotiation, or to establish a common frame or set of frames within which the negotiation may be conducted more productively. Negotiators can also reframe by trying to perceive or understand the situation in a different way or from a different perspective.

Given the many ways that communication can be disrupted and distorted, we can only marvel at the extent to which negotiators can actually understand each other. Failures and distortions in perception, cognition, and communication are the most dominant contributors to breakdowns and failures in negotiation.

As negotiations come to a close, negotiators must attend to two key aspects of communication and negotiation simultaneously: the avoidance of fatal mistakes and the achievement of satisfactory closure in a constructive manner.