PROFESSOR: In this video, we're going
to talk about intercultural negotiations.
The negotiations that we're going to talk about
are specific to business settings.
But also know that you negotiate in all of your relationships,
whether they're interpersonal, intercultural,
a combination of both, so that what
you learn about negotiation today
is transferable into your other relationships.
We're just going to talk about them in a strictly business
sense.
One of the reasons why intercultural negotiation is
so difficult to accomplish is because we're
so used to negotiating within our own culture
that we assume that the rules that we use to understand how we
ought to negotiate and how we ought to achieve our goals
are going to be the same when we go into new contexts.
And so we imagine that this negotiation process
is going to look very similar to what we're used to, when,
in fact, it's not.
When we negotiate in our own culture,
we know the values of the other person,
or we have a better idea of what goals
they have about the interaction, and what ethical choices
that they're going to make, simply because we have a better
idea of what their cultural background looks like.
So we know that there's all sorts of variation
and we all have different lived experiences, so we do all see
the world in different ways.
It's not all exactly the same.
But when we try to understand the cultural lens of someone
who's more similar to us, the process is a bit easier.
So we're not guaranteed any shared perspectives
when we negotiate interculturally,
so it's a bit more difficult to find those places where
our experiences and the experiences of the person
that we're talking to overlap.
And it's when we find those moments of overlap
that we're able to have more effective communication
because we recognize that we can both understand
the worldview of the other person
when we talk about those shared experiences.
Other important things to consider
when negotiating in intercultural settings
is that you might be writing a contract that's
going to be enforced by two different legal systems.
So if the two different legal systems are vastly different,
that contract may mean very different things depending
on which country or which part of the world
it's being enforced in.
So you want to be aware of that.
And we also want to be aware that while the government
in the US tends to be very separate from business
interactions, they're not necessarily in the boardroom
24/7, that's not necessarily true of other countries.
So you might have government officials
that you have to be interacting with.
You also might be negotiating in a country that's
politically unstable, so things can change really quickly.
These are all important things to consider when looking
at intercultural negotiations.
So it's important to remember that it is about--
being an effective intercultural negotiator
is about much more than just knowing
the values and the beliefs of the group
that you're interacting with.
Because we do a lot of negotiating every day,
we have this idea that we know what it is and we intuitively
know how to accomplish it.
We don't necessarily spend the time thinking
about what the definition means.
So to help us better understand and at least
be on the same page concerning what a negotiation is,
it's important to know that negotiations
are the interaction of two or more parties
who both have common and conflicting interests,
for the purpose of reaching a mutually beneficial agreement.
So negotiations happen when we need to work together
but we have different ideas about how we should achieve
those joint goals that we have.
We engage in negotiation in our everyday lives.
All of the time, we're engaging in negotiations.
So you might have a negotiation with your significant other
when you're trying to decide where you want to go for dinner.
So you both have a common interest in eating a meal,
but you have conflicting ideas about where
you ought to go to eat out.
When your significant other offers
to do the laundry if you pick his or her suggestion,
you have to decide if receiving laundry
for giving in on the dinner choice is beneficial to you.
If it is, you can make this agreement.
And if it's not, you continue in the negotiations
and you decide what you're going to offer
to sweeten the pot so that he or she will pick the place that you
want to go.
What then does it take to be a good negotiator?
Well, first, good negotiators have strong persuasion skills.
So individuals that are highly persuasive
know many different strategies for persuading other people,
and they're able to effectively analyze the situation so
that they can pick the strategies that
are likely to be most effective in a specific context.
Good negotiators are also well-prepared.
So they know what outcome they want,
what outcome their company wants, what they can concede,
when they can concede those things.
And finally, they know what to expect
within the intercultural negotiation setting.
All of this requires doing your homework,
not just on the deal that needs to be made, though.
You have to do your homework about the culture with which
you're making that deal.
So you need to learn about the people you're
making that deal with, not just about what
you need to do to get this deal to go through.
While good negotiators are well-prepared,
they're also flexible and creative when
things don't go as planned.
So a good intercultural negotiator is aware of the fact
that the cultural differences between the individuals involved
in the negotiation are likely to cause problems.
Thus, he or she is flexible and finds creative solutions
when their well-planned preparations don't really
work out.
So they become irrelevant to the negotiation process.
When that happens, strong negotiators
are both flexible and creative and can
find new ways of interacting with the other person
in trying to achieve their goals.
Finally, good negotiators need to have patience.
Things are not going to go as planned.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a plan.
That just means you need to be ready to patiently work
through things with your intercultural conegotiators.
As I've said, negotiation can be stressful
when individuals are coming to negotiation
from the same cultural background.
So again, you can only imagine how stressful things can
get when individuals are coming from different backgrounds
with different perspectives.
So know that intercultural negotiation
can be time-consuming, and as such, it requires people
to really be patient and to be willing to work
through the process of negotiating and coming
to some type of mutual resolution to a problem.
So now that we know the personal characteristics
that a good negotiator should have,
it's important to learn about some of the strategies
that we can utilize to become more effective negotiators.
First, to be an effective negotiator,
we have to remember to do our homework.
So we have to learn as much as we possibly can
about the other national culture,
the other organizational culture,
as well as the other culture of the individual.
So if we fully want to be able to understand how to come up
with good strategies for achieving our goals,
we have to know information about all
of those different things so we can truly
understand who we're sending that message to
and how we can make that message most persuasive.
Second, you're going to want to focus on relationships
and building relationships rather than just getting
contracts signed.
So many times, because we're US Americans,
we focus on getting a project completed
on time and under budget.
Time is money, and if we can get things
done quickly and for less money than we thought
we did or we would, we've won.
We've accomplished a goal.
That being said, many other cultures
see negotiation not as getting a contract signed,
but as building a long-term relationship with an individual
from another organization.
So recognizing this focus that other organizations
have on building relationships.
It's important for US American negotiators
to remember that there are benefits
to creating those long-standing business relationships.
And if they come into situations with a bit more
flexibility and a bit more willingness
to concede on their desire to have a contract signed now
and to be enforced 100% the way the contract is written,
they might be able to facilitate some of those good feelings that
enable intercultural relationships
to happen and to flourish.
One of the things we have to do when we build relationships,
however, is meet with individuals face-to-face.
So when building relationships interculturally,
you might need to travel to that culture to have those meetings.
It's not going to be enough to necessarily set up a Skype
interaction or do some type of meeting software, where you all
can join together at the same time.
So you're going to need to meet face-to-face.
When you do that, you're going to get to eat together,
drink together, do activities together.
So maybe they're going to take you to play golf
or to do another activity that's important to them
within their culture.
So while a lot of US Americans don't necessarily value doing
these things in business settings-- again, time is money,
and building relationships takes time and focus away from
the business at hand--
do recognize that doing this is important,
as it enables us to engage in dialogue with the other group
of people, and this can help us facilitate a relationship
with that individual.
Good negotiators also consider the need
that exists behind the position that the other side is
advocating for.
And this requires you to try and understand
why the conegotiator or your conegotiator
is asking for what they're asking for.
In the end, we have to remember that like the iceberg,
there are always things that we can't see.
There are always rationales for what people are doing
that we don't necessarily see.
Those things exist under the surface,
and they're not clearly visible to us at all times,
but we can explore them so that we can fully
understand why people think and do the things that they do.
We also want to be sure that we're not
relying too much on intercultural stereotypes
when we're learning how to do our homework.
So when we're good intercultural negotiators, we do our homework
and we try and learn who the person we're negotiating with
is.
And the problem we can have is sometimes we're
overreliant on what the books say that person ought to be,
and we don't really let that person be an individual.
So it's important to know how people from that culture
tend to behave, but you want to get into that interaction
and then rather quickly let that person change those stereotypes.
So you don't want to rely on what the book said
or how the book said an individual
from the Japanese culture would approach a negotiation
situation.
You want to allow that individual
to let you learn how they approach negotiation situations.
So having that context in the background of your mind
is important because it's going to help
you understand why they see negotiation settings the way
they do.
But you do want to let a person become an individual rather
than keeping them as a cultural stereotype.
In intercultural negotiation, we also
want to be sensitive to timing.
So as we learned earlier, individuals
have different time orientations.
And this can make negotiations difficult
if one person has that monochronic orientation
and assumes that time is money, and the other person
has a more polychronic orientation
and is really focused on building relationships.
Because in the US, we expect things to be done really
quickly, it's important, as US individuals,
that we are willing and able to adjust our expectations for when
work will get done when we're working internationally.
A lot of times, international negotiations
can take a really long time, and so walking in
with the expectation that this is
going to be something quick and easy to accomplish
is likely not going to happen.
So this is going to be one area where you should probably
adjust those expectations from the beginning
so that you can be more successful.
So if you tend to be a fast worker,
it would be advantageous for you to pay attention
to how your conegotiators orient to time
when you arrive in an international setting,
so that you can work to adjust your communication
to their expectations for how long this will take.
Being patient in our international business
and international negotiation situations is a virtue.
You also want to consider the time of year
when you're looking and being sensitive to timing.
So, in the US, not a lot of work gets done on the week between
the Christmas holiday and New Year's.
So, in intercultural settings, that really
wouldn't be a good time for other individuals
to suggest that a meeting happen or that negotiations take place.
The final thing you want to remember
if you're being sensitive to timing
is that time zones might come into play
if you're not meeting face-to-face,
or even if you're meeting face-to-face,
as someone might be jet-lagged or have just arrived
in a new time zone.
Effective intercultural communicators are also flexible.
Because we have a high focus on the importance of time
in the United States and we really
want to accomplish things quickly and efficiently,
we tend to plan things out so we have a plan
for how things ought to happen.
And when things don't go to plan because schedules
change or governments get involved
or people don't do what they promise,
it's important that we remain flexible and open to changing
the way that we get our work done.
When negotiating internationally,
we're going to undoubtedly find ourselves
in unfamiliar situations.
And so we can freak out and we can panic
and we can lose in the negotiation,
or we can, again, try and remember
that we need to stay flexible, be
open to the different things that are happening to us,
and trying to understand why those things are occurring.
So really being flexible involves going with the flow
and not allowing the cultural differences
that are occurring within the meeting
to throw you for too much of a loop.
You also want to learn how to listen.
So US American speakers tend to be very direct and aggressive.
We value directness and we value competition in this country.
So when we converse with other people,
we try and win in those conversations.
And you win by being able to get your message
across to the other person in a very clear and concise way.
As such, we're taught that talking is what's important,
and paying attention to message production is what's important.
We don't necessarily focus as much on teaching individuals
how to be good listeners.
So a lot of the cognitive effort we spend in conversation
focuses on constructing messages rather than
interpreting messages.
If you learn to actively listen, however,
and you try and understand your conegotiator when you're
in interaction with him or her, you
might find yourself better able to secure the things
that your organization wants because through listening,
you've learned about the issues, and you're
able to convince the other people that you're talking
with that you fully understand where things are headed
or what their perspective is.
So you can get them to be more flexible because you
can show that you understand what they're advocating for
and you've seen what's below the water on that iceberg.
You get why they're saying what they're saying, why they
want the things that they want.
Also, you can convince them that you're
trustworthy and worthy of entering
into a long-term relationship with when you pay attention
to listening and listening to what they're saying.
So just some strategies you can use
to become a better listener-- working
to hear all messages and not just the ones
that you agree with.
Sometimes when we are listening, we dismiss the things
that we don't believe or we don't agree with as unimportant.
We call this cognitive dissonance.
So if something doesn't align with how we look at the world,
we don't really pay attention to that portion of the message.
So we don't want to do that in intercultural business settings
because we want to hear all those messages because, likely,
a lot of things that are shared aren't going to align
with how we see the world.
We also want to learn to listen to the whole message
before we provide a response.
So as US Americans, we like to help
other people solve problems.
And a consequence of this is that sometimes we
don't let them share their full perspective before we interject.
So good listeners let their conversational partners share
everything, and then they interject with their advice
or with their commentary.
So let the other person give their full message
before you start talking.
You also want to focus on the message and not the presentation
of that message.
So presentation is important to how a message is perceived
and how effective a message is.
But it's far more important to focus on what's being said
rather than the number of times an individual said "um" or "uh"
while delivering that message, or the lack of an effective
PowerPoint that coincided with the message.
Focusing on those things takes your cognitive energy away
from trying to understand what that message is.
So it's far more beneficial for you
to just focus on the message and not
how that message comes to you.
You also want to make sure you're
asking open-ended questions so that the speaker is
able to elaborate and really share
their perspective on things or their position on things.
Likewise, you want to stay in the moment.
A lot of times, when we're listening,
our minds can wander and go elsewhere.
And so you really want to use cognitive effort to try and stay
in the moment and try and understand what's being said
and why those things are important.
As a good listener, you might ask that a colleague come along
with you to help you listen to what's going on.
So this is going to ensure that more than one person is
listening to what's happening.
And then through dialogue, the two of you
can come to better understand what actually
happened in the interaction.
So if you happen to miss something,
maybe he or she picked up on it, or maybe through discussion,
you can come to understand the motivation that
was behind some of those messages, in different ways
than you would have if you were the only person listening
to them.
Finally, active listeners take notes.
So you don't take notes by writing down every single thing
that a person is saying.
Rather, you take notes by writing down those things that
are important.
If you have good note-taking skills,
you can better distinguish between what's
important and unimportant in a conversation.
And then you have a good record of the things
that you need to pay attention to.
Likewise, as your conversational partner sees you writing things
down, that's, again, going to show care and concern
about the relationship.
That's going to build trust and hopefully enable
more open communication between all parties.
I've said this many times, but to be effective in negotiation
in intercultural situations, you have
to learn about your own culture as well as the culture
that you're visiting.
There is, however, another culture that you
should pay attention to.
So you also want to pay attention to the views
that your conegotiator has about your culture.
You want to consider how that person perceives you.
You want to consider how that person perceives you
so that you can better understand
how to interpret the messages that they're sending your way.
Finally, strong intercultural negotiators
act ethically and with integrity so that they can
build trusting relationships.
They accept that multinational connections are needed
to be successful in a global market,
and they work to be trustworthy so that their relationships can
grow.
All right, so this video gave a detailed look
at how to become a better intercultural negotiator.
These skills are going to be useful to consider
when you work on the cross-cultural negotiation
activity on Monday.