We continue our series on new elite negotiation skills, and today we focus on teamwork.
Once we understand these new sources and influences on team negotiation, so much of current coaching material becomes outdated.
Training and motivating an elite negotiating team requires a dashboard of knowledge and skills that anticipate and react to actual events, not a template of things to say and magic words of inspiration.
In South African negotiation practice, the single biggest leadership error lies with workplace and team diversity.
Diversity, as a range of these contributing disciplines have shown us, across a range of laboratories from factory floors to boardrooms to litigation, has no inherent magic in itself.
The misapplication of diversity as compliance exercise in South African workplaces, and consequently in negotiation practices and strategies, has caused an unfair and unhelpful assessment of certain diversity outcomes, and this has an impact on appointments, promotions and training.
This, in turn, impacts elite traditions and skills such as negotiation practices, and the time, cost and patience necessary to build high-end, sustained, adequately funded negotiation programmes and teams.
Diversity in negotiation teams, as is the case elsewhere, is rocket fuel for performance and excellence.
But only if the underlying levers and motivations are clearly understood and applied in a focused, disciplined manner.
A troubling level of current team negotiation advice amounts to little more than organised groupthink.
Teach the team the ABC way, and send them off to battle. This works, but in an extremely limited and underpowered way.
The tremendous power available in the skilful unlocking of true team negotiating potential will remain locked away behind those approaches.
Here we again reach for the synergy between negotiation and conflict practice, especially the expansive conceptualisation of conflict.
Disagreements between team members, different personalities, different goals, cultures, work ethics, ambitions, anxieties, strengths, biases and all of that amount to conflict that can be used to the benefit of each and every individual, and the team itself.
The pressures of elite negotiation, when placed on a team where conflict incompetence is present, becomes an accident waiting to happen, underperforming at best.
That same pressure, placed on a team that understands how conflict and negotiation work together, derives an ongoing benefit to its practice and goals.
You can contact Andre Vlok at andre@conflict1.co.za