Summarize Leadership Chapter 8 : Building & Leading High-Performing Teams

This chapter focuses on business leaders need to know how to build and how to manage them to achieve high performance. Most businesspeople have experienced successful as well as unsuccessful teams. Building an effective team raises both organizational and individual leadership issues. If you are thinking of forming a team for specific tasks, you first need to determine that a team is the most effective and efficient approach to perform the task, solve the problem, generate the new ideas, or generally move your company forward in some way.
Once you have told the selected team members that they are on your team, you should schedule a launch or kick-off meeting so establishing the necessary team work processes are important. Although most teams will probably want to jump right into the work without spending the necessary time on process issues, leading them through development of the purpose, goals, and approach (the commitment side of the team basics framework) will help your team work more efficiently and effectively. In this section, you will learn how to address the issues of goals, purpose, and approach in your team launch by creating a team charter, action plan, and work plan.
Teams bring together the best talent available to solve a problem; however, some times these talented people clash. Just as emotional intelligence is important for individuals, it is also important for groups. One way to improve the team’s emotional intelligence or ability to work together smoothly is for the team to take time to know something about each other’s current situation, work experiences, expectations, personality, and cultural differences. This knowledge may not result in team bonding or friendships, which are more the by product of teams than the goal, but since these softer issues influence how the person behaves as a team member, the knowledge can help the team avoid conflict and help you as the leader anticipate any problems or performance roadblocks. Although team members will get to know each other through day-to-day interactions while working together, the team members can shorten the learning curve by discussing the following information at the first team meeting:
1. Position and responsibilities
2. Team experience
3. Expectation
4. Personal
5. Cultural difference
Despite all of the best planning and time spent getting to know each other, teams will likely experience conflict. Some of it will be useful and some not, but the odds are that it will occur. As Katzenbach writes, an effective team is “about hard work, conflict, integration, and collective results.” Working on a team is not easy, but the benefits can be very rewarding for the team members, and the results can be much better for the company. Obtaining the best results can depend on the team’s ability to manage conflict. Just as individuals and teams must be able to disagree in meetings, teams need to know how to manage conflict in their overall team activities.
Types of team conflict; internal team conflict will usually be one of four types:
1. Analytical (team’s constructive disagreement over a project issue or problem)
2. Task (goal, work process, deliverables)
3. Interpersonal (personality, diversity, communication styles)
4. Roles (leadership, responsibilities, power struggles)
Approaches to handling team conflict; most teams will use one of the following three approaches to managing conflict:
1. One on one: Individuals involved work it out between themselves.
2. Facilitation: Individuals involved work with a facilitator (mediator).
3. Team: Individuals involved discuss it with the entire team.
More and more companies are using virtual teams to connect their personal in offices around the globe. Although virtual teams are common, many companies do not know to ensure that they function as effectively as a co-located team would. Virtual teams require special effort, and it should not be taken for granted that people who are effective in traditional teams will also work well in a virtual team setting. There are marked differences.
Traditional team:
• Face-to-face
• Communications primarily in person
• Limited by time and distance
Virtual team:
• Geographically dispersed
• Communicating through technology
• Unrestrained by distance and time
This chapter has discussed the best approach to ensuring all team activities run smoothly so that the team achieves its objectives. It has provided team leaders and team facilitators tools to help them build and manage a team. No doubt, leading a team and working on a team present some challenges, but with the right approach, a team can work through the challenges, achieve high performance, and, in the end, “outperform other groups and individuals.”

Summarize Leadership Chapter 7: Leading Productive Management Meeting

This chapter focuses on how to plan and conduct productive meeting by determining when a meeting is the best forum for achieving the required result; establishing objectives, outcomes, and agenda. First, performing essential planning, you need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what you want to accomplish. Your main purpose for meeting might be to inform, but could also intend to persuade or even to instruct in the same meeting. You need determine topics for the agenda that should follow directly from the objectives and end products and should contain the information about timing and objectives. The attendees you invite should be the ones who can contribute to achieving your objectives. You should consider the setting that includes location, equipment, and layout of the room. For on-site meeting, you should establish ground rules that attempt to protect the meeting time as if it were off-site. Setting the time for the meeting can be important. To accomplish your goals, you want people when they are at their best. You should think about people’s schedules and commitments as much as possible. Finally, you will want to anticipate and provide any information the group may need before or during the meeting to accomplish the meeting purpose.
If you have not done so beforehand, announce at the start of the meeting the decision-making approach that you plan to use, clarify leader and attendee roles and responsibilities, and establish meeting ground rules. In addition, the meeting will be more productive if your attendees know and use common problem-solving tools such as brainstorming, Ranking or rating, Sorting by category (logical grouping), Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Opposition analysis, Decision trees, From/to analysis, Force-field analysis, The matrix, and Frameworks.
The primary responsibilities of a meeting leader are to plan the meeting, provide the content, anticipate problems, and ensure process facilitation. Fulfilling the last responsibility may call for the use of a skilled facilitator. A facilitator’s primary responsibility is to ensure process problems do no interfere with the success of the meeting. Facilitators help to keep the meeting focused on the objectives and ensure redirection if it gets off track. Skilled facilitators should be prepared to (1) handle some of the most common meeting problems, (2) manage meeting conflict, and (3) deal with issues arising from cultural differences.

Summarize Essentials of Negotiation chapter : 7 Ethics in Negotiation

This chapter focuses on the primary factors that negotiators consider when they decide whether particular tactics are deceptive and unethical. The negotiation process raises several critical ethical issues. Much of what has been written on negotiating behavior has been strongly normative about ethics and has prescribed “shoulds” and “should nots.” We do not believe that this approach facilitates the understanding of how negotiators actually make decisions about when and where to use specific tactics. We have approached the study of tactic choice from a decision-making framework, examining the ethical overtones of these choices. Negotiators can respond to another party who may be using deceptive tactics: ask probing questions, recognize the tactic.
We proposed that negotiators who choose to use an unethical tactic usually decide to do so to increase their negotiating power. Power is gained by manipulating the perceived base of accurate information in negotiation, getting better information about the other party’s plan, or undermining the other party’s ability to achieve his or her objectives.
Research on negotiators ethics and on various aspects of this model leads us to the following conclusions:
1. While individual negotiators may disagree as to which negotiating tactics are ethical and which are unethical, the research reported here suggests that there is much more convergence than might have been expected.
2. The decision to use a deceptive tactic can probably best be understood through a decision-making model. It is clear that many individual differences and situational variables are also likely to affect that decision.
3. In deciding to use a deceptive tactic, a negotiator is likely to be more heavily influenced by
a) His or her own motivation,
b) Expectations of what the other negotiator will do,
c) The expected future relationship between the negotiator and the other party.
4. Negotiators who have considered the use of deceptive tactics in the past or who are considering their use in the future should ask themselves the following questions:
a) Will they really enhance my power and help me achieve my objective?
b) How will the use of these tactics affect the quality of my relationship with the other party in the future?
c) How will the use of these tactics affect my reputation as a negotiator?
Negotiators frequently overlook the fact that, although unethical or expedient tactics may get them what they want in the short run, these same tactics typically lead to diminished effectiveness in the long run.

Summarize Essentials of Negotiation chapter 6 : Finding and Using Negotiation Leverage

This chapter focuses on leverage in negotiation. By leverage, we mean the tools negotiators can use to give themselves and advantage or increase the probability of achieving their objective. Leverage is often used synonymously with power. Most negotiators believe that power is important in negotiation, because it gives one negotiator an advantage over the other party. Negotiators who have this advantage usually want to use it to secure a negotiation usually arises from one of two perception:
1. The negotiator believes he or she currently has less leverage than the other parties, so he or she seek power to offset or counterbalance that advantage.
2. The negotiator believes he or she needs more leverage than the other party to increase the probability of securing a desired outcome.
In general, negotiators who don’t care about their power or who have matched power—equally high or low—will find that their deliberation proceed with greater ease and simplicity toward a mutually satisfying and acceptable outcome. Power is implicated in the use of many negotiation tactics, such as hinting to the other party that you have good alternatives (a strong BATNA) in order to increase your leverage.
In general, people have power when they have “the ability to bring about outcomes they desire” or “the ability to get things done the way them to be done.” Three sources of power: information and expertise control over resources, and the location within an organizational structure (which leads to either formal authority or informal power based on where one is located relative to flows of information or resources).
The concept of leverage in relation to the use of power and influence. It is important to be clear about the distinction between the two. We treat power as the potential to alter the attitudes and behaviors of others that an individual brings to a given situation. Influence, on the other hand, can be though of as power in action—the actual messages and tactics an individual undertakes in order to change the attitudes and/or behaviors of others. A very large number of influence (leverage) tools that one could use in negotiation. These tools were considered in two broad categories: influence that occurs through the central route to persuasion, and influence that occurs through the peripheral route to persuasion.
In the final section of the chapter, we focuses on how to receiver—the target of influence—either can shape and direct what the sender is communicating, or can intellectually resist the persuasive effects of the message. Effective negotiators are skilled not only at crafting persuasive messages, but also at playing the role of skilled “consumers” of the messages that others direct their way.

Summarize Negotiation Chapter 5: Perception, Cognition, and Communication

This chapter focuses on the role of perception and communication in negotiation. We examined how negotiators make sense of negotiation and the role that communication processes play in negotiation processes and outcome. First, we begin with a brief overview of the perceptual process; how psychological perception is related to the process of negotiation, with particular attention to forms of perceptual distortion that can cause problems of understanding and meaning making for negotiators. We discussed how framing influences perceptions in negotiation, and how reframing and issue development both change negotiator perceptions during negotiation. Following these sections on perception and cognition, we turn to the process by which negotiators communicate their own interests, positions, and goals – and in turn make sense of those of the other party and of the negotiation as a whole. We will consider what is communicated in a negotiation, and how people communicate in negotiation. Final, we discussions of how to improve communication in negotiation, the effect of moods and emotions on communication, and special communication considerations at the close of negotiation.

Summarize Leadership Chapter 6 : Developing Emotional Intelligence & Cultural Literacy to Strengthen Leadership Communication

This chapter focuses on developing emotional intelligence and cultural literacy to strengthen leadership communication. Leaders need strong interpersonal skills and an understanding of and appreciation for culture diversity. Without these skills, leaders cannot communicate with and manage others effectively. Interpersonal skills have gained recent recognition among business leaders under the name of “Emotional Intelligence”. First, you should know Emotional Intelligence (EI)’s meaning. EI is the capacity to understand your own emotions and those of other people. Emotional intelligence and cultural literacy are necessary skills that allow you to interact with and lead others effectively, and the key to interacting with others and managing relationship successfully is communications: “The basic of any relationship is communication”. Self-awareness is the first step toward emotional intelligence. We can use MBTI develop concepts of personality. The MBTI consists of four dichotomies - Introvert (I) vs. Extravert (E), Sensing (S) vs. iNtuitive (N), Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F), and Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P) - in 16 combinations. If we know the others’ type, we can effectively lead and motivate them to the way we want. There are many types of nonverbal communication which are important for anyone wanting to improve his or her communication skills. We also need to be a good listener. Thereafter, mentoring other and providing feedback are the last step to develop the Emotional Intelligence. This chapter focused on the Cultural Literacy as well. If we understand and appreciate cultural diversity, we will know how best to communicate with all of the different audiences. First, we should know the importance of cultural literacy and then define the culture. We use the framework to understand differences. There are many factors to understand such as context (what is going around us), information flow (how message flow between people and levels in organization), time (polychornic time and monochromic), language (central influence on culture and one of the most highly charged symbols of a culture or a nation), and power (the differences of power perception).