Skip to content

UXL Blog

“Creating Successful Leaders”

November 21, 2012 The Strength In Skillful Negotiation

When you hear the word “negotiation,” it’s easy to think of those painfully long meetings between two or more stubborn parties, where everyone walks away unhappy. Take recent events in Congress, for instance. No matter what side you fall on the political spectrum, I think we can all agree that the seemingly endless battles over legislation get frustrating, to say the least.

But Stuart Diamond, Wharton Business School professor and author, thinks that negotiation unfairly gets a bad rap, yet is a crucial tool to achieving success in our daily lives. “It’s just a conversation,” he points out. “You don’t have to give anything up by just talking to someone.”

And that’s just it. Negotiation doesn’t have to mean drawn out, exhausting exchanges. It can be as simple and pleasant as a chat with a server at a restaurant, or a polite conversation with a co-worker. In his book, Getting More, Diamond provides some basic ways to master negotiation skills.

1. Keep Your Goal at the Front of Your Mind. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the middle of negotiation, as many tend to get distracted by emotional impulse. Yet staying close to your goals during negotiation makes things easier for both parties. You’ll be clear-headed and better able to express yourself with clarity and efficiency.

2. Reverse Roles. “You can’t persuade people of anything unless you know the pictures in their heads: their perceptions, sensibilities, needs, how they make commitments, whether they are trustworthy.” You need to have at least some idea of who the other person is. Minimize your own needs and pretend that you’re the least important person in the room. This shows that you are in tune with other people’s needs, and willing to make compromises.

3. Be Constructive, Not Manipulative. “Don’t deceive people.” Building trust is key. You might not get everything you want right away, but being open and honest while negotiating cultivates long-term relationships that yield greater results. If you cut corners, lie or hide your cards, the other party will begin to be suspicious (and rightly so), which is a big problem for good negotiation.

Diamond also makes it clear that negotiation is a flexible, situational process, and that good negotiators are those who know how to utilize their personal strengths to achieve their goals. We shouldn’t act like someone else, for instance, because “people will detect it and you will lose your credibility.” He sees good negotiation skills as tools to help you “learn how to be yourself better.”

Try these ideas out and see what works for you. Become aware of what types of negotiations take place in your standard day, and where. Keep a mental log of how you tend to handle these, and use Diamond’s ideas as reference. See where you could improve, implement a plan, and take action. Good luck!

Stuart Diamond, Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), 6, 7, 19.

Tags:

November 14, 2012 Ways To Kick-Start Creativity

This week I came across an insightful talk on creativity Julie Burnstein gave at a TED Talk conference. As a radio host, Bernstein has interviewed numerous artists, creators and innovators, and began seeing similarities in their take on finding a creative spark. While a bit unconventional, I feel her 4 lessons on creativity ring true for us all:

1. Pay attention to your surroundings. 

“That’s hard to do when you have a leather rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus.”

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own little bubbles that we forget there is a busy, beautiful world all around us, right now. Creative people don’t live in bubbles; they engage with the world. Doing so fuels their work. So keep your eyes open. Opportunities, inspiration and unique ideas surround you at this very moment.

2. Some of life’s difficulties create the best breakthroughs. Difficulty, hardship, and failure boost positive creativity by forcing us to think in new ways. For instance, someone having ongoing trouble finding a job will need to eventually adapt by getting creative. Whether it’s modifying their goals or their strategy, they’ll most certainly need to think in ways they hadn’t before, i.e., creatively.

3. Pushing up against the limits of what you can do will help you discover what you thrive at. Using the example I gave above, it would be easy for this job-seeking person to get discouraged and simply give up, but she doesn’t have to do that. Instead, she should acknowledge her personal limits, which we all have. She has found what doesn’t work for her and now possesses a better sense of where her strengths lie. To put it simply, discovering what we can’t do forces us to look, think, and act creatively with the strengths we have.

4. The embrace of loss.

“In order to create you have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for, looking squarely at rejection and heartbreak, at war and death.”

This morning, I heard a radio story about an entrepreneur with a pretty simple idea: selling soccer balls. But his inspiration came from seeing Afghani children kicking around a wadded up ball of garbage. So, he created a line of virtually indestructible soccer balls to be donated to impoverished communities around the world. While the “loss” of a ball is a much lighter example of the loss many of us encounter in life, it shows how loss itself can act as a catalyst for positive creativity and innovation.

Bernstein concludes as such:

“We all wrestle with experience and challenge, limits and loss. Creativity is essential to all of us whether we’re scientists or teachers, parents or entrepreneurs.”

It’s true. Creativity is attainable and important for us all. Every kind of job relies upon creative people, and more importantly, creativity enables us to successfully navigate through life.

You can watch Julie Burnstein’s full talk here:

4 Lessons In Creativity

“4 Lessons in Creativity,” TED Talks, accessed November 13, 2012. http://www.ted.com/talks/julie_burstein_4_lessons_in_creativity.html

Tags:

November 6, 2012 What’s The Deal With Difficult People?

It’s not uncommon to have met some of your best friends through work. Yet we also know that the workplace is full of people who seem dead set on making things more difficult for everyone around them. In order to maintain a productive and fulfilling work environment, it’s vital to know how to effectively deal with “problem people,” as we will lovingly call them.

The problem person comes in many varieties. There’s the passive-aggressive person, the micro-manager, the hostile one, the egotistical guy/gal, the overly-dramatic one, and the list goes on. Hara Estroff Marano of Psychology Today states that these diverse personalities all share a common trait:

“Their MO is to provoke, then make you feel you have no reason to react—and it’s all your fault to begin with!”

Their power therefore comes from “getting a rise” out of you. Which means that in order to reestablish control in a situation, you must identify when, where and how a problem person is manipulating your emotions.

First, we must step back and try to remain composed during an unpleasant exchange. Doing so gives us the chance to evaluate the situation clearly. “Therein lies your advantage,” says Marano. “It allows you to predict the specific emotional trap being set for you, which is your passport to getting your own power back.” Although it seems counter-intuitive in the moment, keeping calm even while being yelled at demonstrates that the difficult person you’re dealing with has no power over how you react; you alone possess this power.

Next, determine when and where you are most likely to interact with your difficult person, and form a strategy that limits their negative influence on you. Physician Susan Biali provides a few examples of what this looks like:

“Minimize time with problem people. Keep interactions as short as possible.”

Some personality types just don’t mix well, and it may be best for both parties if you restrict face time with your difficult person to business-only exchanges.

“Before any interaction with a difficult person, mentally review the topics that invite attack and make an effort to avoid them.”

In this way, you are withholding fuel they could use to cultivate negativity in the workplace.

Whatever you do, don’t let the problem go unresolved. You may need to confront the person head-on if their behavior continues to hinder your ability to get work done. If this be the case, use “I” statements that seek to show how their behavior effects you, and do your best to be gentle, reasonable and to-the-point. Often, people giving you problems may not be aware that they’re impacting you in a negative way.

Overall, remember that only you control your behavior, your reactions and your emotions. Patience, perspective and a grain of salt go a long way when it comes to effectively dealing with difficult people.

1 “The High Art of Handling Problem People,” last modified July 2, 2012, Psychology Today, accessed November 5, 2012, http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201204/the-high-art-handling-problem-people

Tags: ,