Page 98 - DMGT519_Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Notes Style is Critical…

The best approach for negotiation within a team is to adopt a win-win approach, i.e. one in
which both parties feel positive about the situation when the negotiation is concluded. This
helps to maintain a positive working relationship afterwards.
This governs the style of the negotiation. Histrionics and displays of emotion are clearly
inappropriate because they undermine the rational basis of the negotiation and bring a
manipulative aspect to it.
Despite this, emotion can be an important subject of discussion. For a team to function effectively,
the emotional needs of team members must be fairly met. If emotion is not discussed where
needed, the agreement reached can be unsatisfactory and temporary. Be as detached as possible
when discussing your own emotions. Perhaps it would be best to discuss your emotions as if
they belonged to someone else.

Negotiating Successfully…

The negotiation itself is a careful exploration of your position and the other person’s position,
with the goal of finding a mutually acceptable compromise that gives you both as much of what
you want as possible. Note that the other person may quite often have very different goals from
the ones you expect!
In an ideal situation, you will find that the other person wants what you are prepared to give,
and that you are prepared to give what the other person wants.

If this is not the case, and one person must give way, then it is fair for this person to try to
negotiate some form of compensation for doing so. The scale of this compensation will often
depend on the many of the factors we discussed above. Ultimately, both sides should feel
comfortable with the final solution if the agreement is to truly be considered a win-win agreement

4.19 Negotiation Process and Preparation

Negotiation is an art of creating agreement on specific issue between two (or more) parties with
differing views. Negotiation is a live-skill than a mere business technique and that skill is
acquired by learning, training and practising. Everyone has some experience in negotiation, but
in business world, we can not leave negotiation to such inexperience and naive, because prices
of failure are very high. How do you negotiate makes enormous difference in the outcome.
Therefore, all precautions have to be taken to go for professional negotiation.
The success of such negotiation depends on many factors, but the most important is the ability
of the negotiator, who charts out a course of this unpredictable encounter and sends a feeler to
the other side that the process is useful and that they may stand to benefit from it.

Negotiation processes have two vital dimensions—the decision-making processes and different
structures or stages or steps. A ‘route-map’ along with balancing decision-making makes the
face to face meeting go in right direction.

Steps in Negotiation

4.19.1 Preparation

I. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. It is engaging the brain before opening the mouth.
It is like being ready to be comfortable in different situations.

1. Think ahead

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