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March 24, 2018

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Communication skills for business executives

ENTERING the Soho Grand Hotel lobby in his most conservative suit, Stan brimmed with confidence as he approached an important potential customer, Vice President Sugimoto of MTV Japan. Spotting the stylishly attired Sugimoto chatting with some musicians, Stan approached him with a deep bow and traditional Japanese greetings of respect. When he heard Sugimoto’s reply — “What’s up with that, my man?” — Stan felt a sinking sensation in his gut.

As Stan understood in hindsight, he needlessly raised cultural barriers between himself and Sugimoto that night. He should have realized — based on Sugimoto’s employer, his hotel choice and even his clothes — that his awkward attempt at traditional Japanese manners would only embarrass his guest.

Most of us can identify with Stan’s faux pas. In our era of diversity and globalization, respect for cultural differences is constantly stressed. Yet our counterparts are complex people who won’t necessarily follow their cultural scripts. Sometimes culture matters a lot, sometimes not at all!

Deadlines, distractions, emotional stress, accountability — all these factors make negotiators more likely to rely on cultural schemas rather than considering a problem from multiple angles. An understanding of these triggering factors can help you cope with culture at the bargaining table.

As members of organizations and families, we all know from experience that even people with identical backgrounds can have vastly differing negotiating styles and values. Nonetheless, we continue to be intrigued by the idea that distinct patterns emerge between negotiators from different cultures.

Be aware, cultural differences in a negotiation don’t hinge precisely on where a negotiator happens to have been born. Rather, they depend on what that negotiator actually does at the bargaining table. The ability to engage in constructive communication — by revealing and interpreting information — matters much more than a negotiator’s passport.

Even with a common language and the best of intentions, negotiators from different cultures face special challenges. Try following these guidelines when preparing for talks with someone from a different culture:

Enlist an adviser from your counterpart’s culture.

You should learn who your negotiating partner will be and find out some details about her background and experience. If you discover that the person with whom you are likely to be negotiating has little or no international or cross-cultural experience, consider enlisting someone from his culture to serve as your “second” during the negotiation. Rather than deferring to this adviser during talks, plan out signals in advance to indicate when you should take a break for additional advice.

Pay close attention to unfolding negotiation dynamics.

Listen carefully during talks. If you’re unsatisfied with the answers you receive, reframe your questions and try again. If you’re unsure about what the other side said, repeat what you think you heard. It’s safe to assume that people living and working in different cultural settings often view or interpret the same events differently. But in our era of globalization, it’s also true that we have more in common on the person-to-person level than you might expect. Don’t ignore your intuition and mind your manners.

Deal with translators

Because translation complicates negotiation, executives should manage and plan for it as they would any other tactical element in deal making. Based on his book “The Global Negotiator: Making, Managing and Mending Deals Around the World in the Twenty-First Century,” Jeswald Salacuse has developed some simple rules that can help you negotiate more effectively in translation, two of which we summarize here:

Hire your own translator and make your choice carefully.

Hiring a mediocre interpreter can wreak unintentional havoc. Several years ago, an American negotiating team in China was astounded when its simple request to bring three typewriters into the country was rejected by government officials on the other side of the table. Only after an hour of wrangling did it become clear that the interpreter had mistranslated the English word “typewriter” as the Chinese word “stenographer.”

Stay on guard.

Some interpreters, because of personal interests or ego, will try to take control of negotiations or slant them in a particular way. This risk may be especially high if the interpreter also works as a middleman, agent, or business consultant and is hoping for future business opportunities from your deal. You need to guard against such power plays by learning enough about your translator to determine potential conflicts of interest and by staying alert throughout talks to ensure that your translator is not adding in personal business advice.

Team approach

According to conventional wisdom, when it comes to negotiation, there’s strength in numbers. Indeed, several experimental studies have supported the notion that you should bring at least one other person from your organization to the bargaining table if you can. On average, this research has found that teams exchange more information than solo negotiators, make more accurate judgments of the other side, and create more value, resulting in greater profits compared to individuals.

What explains these intriguing findings? The researchers hypothesize that in collective cultures, negotiating teams focus on developing relationships, both within the team and across the table, and thus are less likely to challenge each other. The result is greater harmony — and less of the friction that is needed to generate novel alternatives.




 

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