Manage-Wise

The power of team negotiations

If you have been involved in team negotiations yourself, you no doubt know they can be fraught with difficulties. One person wants to proceed carefully, consulting and checking at every step. Another insists that it’s vital to move quickly in response to a bit of fancy footwork from the opposition. Or you could have two different departments in the organisation back home eyeing each other suspiciously—whose concessions will be first to go?

It’s true that team negotiations can present problems. Sadly, not too many people acknowledge the tremendous benefits to be gained. And I assure you, there are many benefits. Well-organised teams who put in a genuinely co-operative effort always find that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The more I mulled over the advantages of team negotiations the more I became convinced that this chapter was not an optional extra for the book. It was essential. With the business market becoming more globally orientated every day, negotiators will need to be thoroughly skilled in acting both within and through teams. When you start to look closely at successful team negotiations, then compare them to the disasters, (as I have had cause to do on many occasions) the ‘pattern’ for success emerges very quickly.

It’s really so simple. Successful teams are all well-prepared. Not only well prepared in terms of solid research, ‘what-if’ scenarios and all the other essentials we have spoken of as a recipe for success, but well prepared as a team. No evidence here of individuals all beating their own drums. Instead, they are well-orchestrated—in the true meaning of the team. To make sure each member in your team plays a counterpoint to the others, rather than overwhelming them by playing his or her own song, you need to be sure you understand the difference in individuals. By understanding these differences you can use them to your advantage in developing high performance teams.

There are several aspects of team building you need to examine:

• The importance of teams in the negotiation process
• The dynamics of a normal team preparation process
• Problems arising in team negotiations and how to deal with them
• Behaviour of teams in the negotiation process

Why am I so certain that teams are more powerful than individual negotiators? Simply because I know most people honestly want to contribute at work. They want their input as a member of a team to be valued; and it is the same with a negotiation.

Before you start putting up your hand and saying: “But what about..?” Let me say that there are occasions when the most effective way to negotiate will be on your own: A one-to-one negotiation. I’m talking, however, when teams are the way to go!

Team negotiations will increasingly become the most effective way to find mutually acceptable solutions. In the early 1990s when Israel and the Arab worlds met to work out the peace accord, team negotiations undoubtedly worked. After the sabre rattling and a change of government the teams on both sides started to see progress! It’s not hard to find examples every day in the tabloids or on the evening news. Every time there is a major union/management negotiation, you will see two teams hard at work presenting their respective cases, with an abundance of ‘experts’ on both sides.

Some years ago in the military I used to teach leadership skills in outdoor survival activities. Time after time, the group came to realise the benefits of using a co-operative team approach over the sometimes limited resources of individuals. There were always the “gung-ho” participants (yes, close relatives of the “gung-ho” negotiator) who would strive to solve the problems on their own. It was, of course, a set-up. The problems look surprisingly simple at first. The hot-shots didn’t bother with discussions or teamwork—they didn’t need any help, no way, not them. They never succeeded. The activities were sneakily planned so it was impossible to solve the problems by anything other than teamwork.

Those who believed:

• that they sufficient strength and knowledge to succeed on their own,
• that teams simply slowed things down,
• were sentenced to failure.

It is clear, as the late Gary Poppleton always shares, that a champion team will accomplish more than a team full of different champions trying to win as separate individuals.

They learned a valuable lesson by watching a team tackle the problem and solve it. You see, being told that something is so, is not the same as knowing it is so. When active learning takes place, when people learn by doing—they know.

The more you use team negotiations, the more you will realise that:

Teams save both time and human resources when the right people are chosen.

The great team negotiators have learned through experience that team work brings proceedings to a faster, more satisfying conclusion.

I learned a lot in those days of survival training. I saw first-hand, in a totally different arena from that of the business negotiation, that exactly the same principles apply in any problem-solving area.

Teamwork and teams gets results. I learned something even more valuable than that, too. I learned that to be successful, you must deal with the individuals in the team before you deal with the negotiation.

Understanding people

Trying to understand why people act as they do and why people respond to challenge in different ways has kept mankind fascinated for centuries.

What does all this mean to team negotiations? Just this: To build a good team, you need to select people who complement each other.

Value their different communication styles; learn to use their strengths—and you can make a vital contribution to the team’s success.

Excerpt from ‘The Creative Negotiator’ by Stephen Kozicki. Reproduced with permission © 2006, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
Price: Rs 275.
E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com