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Day: August 29, 2018

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Growth Management Personal Development

Don’t Like Conflict? Here’s How to Stop Avoiding that Dreaded Encounter

If you’ve been managing people for any length of time, you know it’s not always fun. You’ll have great days when you’re cheering about a team member’s win. And, then, you’ll have some truly challenging days. You know what I’m talking about. It’s those days when you have to address an employee performance issue. If you’re conflict-averse, you may be avoiding these encounters.

When you avoid an employee-related problem, you’re damaging your credibility as a manager. Your inaction also demotivates other team members. If they see a co-worker consistently taking long lunches, and not being asked to change their behavior, resentment grows. To stop this problem from getting any worse, take action as advised by Steve Sisler.

In a recent Manage Smarter podcast, Sisler, president of the Behavior Resource Group, discusses how to understand and address your motivations as a conflict-averse individual. He describes one situation involving a manager who didn’t want to ask an employee to stop coming in late.

“A highly altruistic person, this kind of manager [conflict averse] sees the value in other people sooner than they see the value in themselves.” As a result, these managers find it hard to say anything confrontational to someone else.

If you’re not comfortable telling an employee to change their behavior, try a different approach. Since you don’t want to be the ‘bad guy,’ one of Sisler’s suggested workarounds is to blame company policy. Tell the employee that everyone else is coming to work on time, because that’s what the policy requires. So they must follow the policy, too. By bringing in the higher authority, the conflict averse manager escapes having the employee’s resentment directed at them.

Sisler points out that conflict averse individuals often don’t possess the ability to become angry. And anger is often the emotion that drives conflict. In Sisler’s opinion, four energy systems drive human behavior: anger, optimism, fear and patience. If you have too much anger, Sisler points out, you can turn into a manager everyone avoids. Why? Because you’re looking for conflict even there isn’t any.

To succeed as a manager, think about what motivates you. Take a personality assessment and study the results. Then review the motivators of the individuals on your team. Once you have that information, think logically about the best way for you to approach each person in every type of situation. Thinking they want to be treated the same way you want to be treated can easily make things worse in many cases.

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Best Practices Body Language Entrepreneurship Human Resources Investing Management Marketing Negotiations Sales Skills Women In Business

How to be More Powerful When You Negotiate

“Don’t let your obsession with imperfection deposit your dreams in the graveyard of despair.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

“Wow! That was a fantastic negotiation! It’s almost like you had him dancing on a string. How did you learn to become such a powerful negotiator?” Those were the admiring sentiments bestowed on a senior member of a negotiation team by his junior.

Do you know how to be more powerful when you negotiate? There are strategies and techniques you can employ to accomplish that goal. Discover how to implement the following strategies in your negotiations and you’ll become more powerful when you negotiate, too.

Pre-Negotiation:

  • Planning

In every negotiation, your degree of planning determines your degree of success. In your planning stage, think about the strategies you’ll implement and what might cause them to become altered during the negotiation. Consider how you might challenge the opposing negotiator to make him alter his strategy too; the purpose is to get him off his game plan so that he’ll be more susceptible to following your lead. To do this, compile alternative strategies that allow you the flexibility to adapt to unexpected challenges. That’ll help you prioritize their possibility.

  • Practice

It’s stated that practice makes perfect. That’s a half-truth because imperfect practice will only serve to make you more imperfect.

To enhance the possibility that you’ll have a winning negotiation outcome, practice implementing your plan. When possible, practice with individuals that possess skills comparable to the opposing negotiator(s). Attune your attention to things you’d not considered and modify your plan accordingly.

Conflation:

Always be aware of how you arrive at your decisions. In your thought process, don’t conflate disparate situations. If you do, be aware that you’re doing so and why.

By accepting conflated dissimilar information as being valid, you might lend more credence than what’s warranted to the skill level of the other negotiator. That will cause you to negotiate differently than if you’d not assigned him such benefits.

As an example, don’t over inflate your opponent’s skills, just because he’s negotiated multi-million-dollar deals. That doesn’t mean he can out negotiate you in your current situation. Don’t disadvantage yourself by thinking he can.

Mental Agility:

  • Mindset

When considering the mindset you’ll adopt for a negotiation, consider the style and type of negotiator you’ll compete against. Consider the demeanor and mindset you’ll adopt to negotiate with that type of negotiator (i.e. soft, middle, hard). In considering the demeanor you’ll adopt, view yourself as being worthy to negotiate with your counterpart and project the image.

  • Subconscious

Your subconscious mind speaks. Do you know what it’s saying when it does? Pay close attention to the feelings and intuitions you have during a negotiation. In some cases, those feelings will emerge from subconscious thoughts you’re having. That might stem from micro expressions your sensing (Note: Micro expressions last for less than one second. They’re insights that reveal the unrevealed thoughts of someone.)

Reading Body Language:

When deciphering body language, you must establish a baseline to compare to. You can establish the baseline of the other negotiator by observing gestures he emits in non-stressful environments. Look for gestures that indicate his happiness (i.e. the degree of felicity), sadness (i.e. stooped shoulders, down-turned face), indecisiveness (i.e. hand to forehead, slight erratic movement). If you can’t establish his baseline, due to whatever prevents you from doing so, compare his actions in the negotiation to what’s normal in such situations. Once you establish that baseline, you can use it to compare his future actions/reactions.

In every negotiation, there are advantages to be had. If you know how to enhance those advantages by the strategies you implement, you’ll have a greater chance of a successful negotiation outcome … and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Sunday Negotiation Insight” click here http://www.TheMasterNegotiator.com/greg-williams/

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Best Practices Growth Management Personal Development Technology

Four Big Brands Blindsided by Accelerated Change

It’s one of life’s universal lessons: Look both ways before crossing the street. Parents have been impressing its importance on every generation since Henry Ford tinkered with the internal combustion engine. However, many of us forgot that good advice, or assumed it didn’t apply, when crossing from one decade of business into the next.

From the 1970s into the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the prevailing assumption was that the future would be relatively similar to the past, and that major changes only took place over long stretches of time, which provided plenty of leeway to adjust.

We stepped off the curb, looking straight ahead—and wham! Individuals and organizations were blindsided by massive changes. It happened to big companies like IBM, Motorola, Research In Motion, Sears and countless others.

Four Big Brands That Were Blindsided

IBM. The original computer giant was late to act on the Hard Trends shaping the future of computing and missed the huge need for personal computers, entering the market late. Then in 2005, IBM sold its personal computer portfolio of products, including the popular ThinkPad brand, to Lenovo, which is now the world’s largest personal computing vendor. IBM was also late to embrace the Hard Trends of increasing use of mobility and the cloud.

Motorola. Similarly, the historic telecommunications company failed to anticipate exponential changes of the early 21st century, though it had many telecom firsts—first car radio, first handheld mobile phones in the early 1970s and the first smartphone using the Google Android OS. Unfortunately, the Motorola Mobility branch relied on being Agile, reacting after a disruption occurs, while leading companies were Anticipatory, using Hard Trends to see the future first and jump ahead and stay there.

Research In Motion. The company’s BlackBerry was the undisputed leader in business mobility, with a highly usable mini keyboard and tight integration of mobile email and calendar functionality. When Apple released the first iPhone, Research In Motion’s leadership failed to see the new future Apple had enabled and focused instead on making improvements instead of embracing the Hard Trends that were shaping the future of mobility and taking its loyal user base into the smartphone future.

Sears. Widely considered the first “everything” store, Sears had a winning business strategy: a notoriously large selection of goods in a catalog that was mailed to just about everyone. Products that were ordered were delivered right to the customer’s home. Like many big brands blindsided by game-changing Hard Trends followed by disruptive innovation, Sears didn’t see how serious competition had become—for both brick and mortars like Walmart and online-only retailer Amazon. Their past success and organizational ego limited their view of the future.

Based on these and other painful experiences, the prevailing assumption was dramatically adjusted: Change is speeding up—get used to it. But then with each passing decade, crossing the street of change became an exercise in advanced risk analysis. Dodging oncoming traffic was the name of the game.

Seeing Change Is Only Part of the Solution

Spotting technology-driven change provides only part of the solution, however. Literally thousands of important high-tech breakthroughs are zooming at us from left and right. Not only do we need to carefully look both ways, it is essential to actually see and understand the ramifications of what’s coming.

Hopping out of the way in a panic or jumping onboard the next new thing isn’t the answer; nor is taking a wait-and-see attitude. By reinventing how welookat technology-driven change, it is possible to reinvent the way we thinkabout change. Once that happens, the reinvention of how we actin response to change takes place.

Look. Think. Act. These distinct steps are the key to both finding and profiting from the many new opportunities that are headed our way.

Look at the Hard Trends that willhappen and the game-changing opportunities they represent. Look at the Soft Trends that might happen and the opportunities to influence them.

Think about your list of opportunities and refine them into a few Must-Do actions.

Pick at least one opportunity and act on it now, because if you don’t do it, someone else will!

Today, agility—reacting quickly after a problem occurs or after a disruption disrupts, is not good enough. It’s time to learn how to become Anticipatory, using Hard Trends to anticipate disruptions beforethey happen, turning disruption and change into a choice.

If you would like to learn more, check out my latest bestseller, The Anticipatory Organization: How to Turn Change and Disruption Into Opportunity and Advantage.