Wall Street Journal Article titled Art of Persuasion Becomes Key talks about recent changes due to globalization that has elevated the need for managers to improve their influencing skill. Today, managers work more often with peers where lines of authority that aren’t clear or doesn’t exist. Large problems need help from personnel from other divisions. Globalization has spread different divisions of a large organization in different country managed by country managers with differing priorities.
To get help from different divisions, the leader/manager needs to persuade the country managers and align everyone’s priority. To do that, it becomes very important to have a companywide shared vision. Everyone in the organization needs to understand how their company makes profit. In other words competitive advantages and core competencies need to be communicated to everyone. That shared knowledge will enable everyone to understand their priorities and will be willing to make tradeoffs when asked to collaborate.
Following are persuasive/negotiation pointers according to the WSJ article
- Build a Shared Vision
- Negotiate collaboratively
- Make Tradeoffs
- Know who can help achieve your goal
- Build and maintain your network
The article misses an important element in negotiation in the global environment – cross cultural negotiation. I think it’s also important to possess Cultural Intelligence (CQ) to facilitate cross cultural negotiation. What works in US with respect to persuasion will not work in Malaysia or Argentina or Russia. Each culture is different and that has an influence on individuals from those nations/cultures. We need to be ‘mindful’ of different cultures if we want to be affective in cross cultural negotiation skill.
To get the holistic view to improve negotiation and persuasion skills (including cross –cultural negotiation), I use the resources by Leigh Thompson professor at Kellogg School of Management. In one of her books titled Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, Leigh Thompson talks about “expanding the pie of resource”. Any negotiation that is internal to the organization is never a zero-sum game – meaning in an internal negotiation, one’s win is not necessarily other’s loss. If we improve our creative thinking, build trust and relationship within the organizations, we can propose a ‘win-win’ strategy for negotiation. If we consider the resource we are negotiating as a pie. If we need more than half the pie in a traditional sense the other person should get less than half the pie. But Leigh Thompson talks about creative negotiation to strive to split the pie where both the party gets more than half their share. This is the concept of “expanding the pie of resource”.
Soft skills like negotiation, communication will be increasingly sought after in this “War for talent”. Mastery of those skills will differentiate individual Project Managers in this era of Globalization.
