Summarize Leadership Chapter 10: Leading through Effective External Relations

This chapter focuses on leading through effective external relations that include developing an external relations strategy, building and maintaining a positive corporate image, working with the news media, and handling crisis communication.
Effective external relations require a sound communication strategy. You can use the communication strategy framework. With the framework in mind, you can take the following steps to create a strategy for external audiences:
1. Clarify your purpose and strategic objectives.
2. Identify your major audiences or stakeholders.
3. Create, refine, and test your major messages.
4. Select, limit, and coach your spokesperson(s).
5. Establish the most effective media or forum.
6. Determine the best timing.
7. Monitor the results.
Building and maintaining a positive corporate image require having an external relations strategy that is vigilant, vigorous, and comprehensive. It involves developing a strategy for managing the press and media, making meaningful and sincere philanthropic contributions, being actively involved in the community, obeying all of the legal and regulatory requirements of investor relations, and ensuring all external communication vehicles carry honest, clear, consistent, and meaningful message to all stakeholders.
To increase chances for favorable treatment, it is important for a company to establish a positive relationship with the media and for every senior manager to know how to work effectively with them. Any leader of an organization should know why the media are important, when to talk to them, and how to manage encounters with them.
Most companies will face a crisis so they should know how to handle with it. Although establishing positive relationships with external audiences prior to a crisis will help in all but the extreme situations, no amount of goodwill can guarantee the positive coverage that is necessary to avoid permanent damage to a company’s reputation. The following guidelines will help companies respond appropriately in most crisis situations.
1. Develop a general crisis communication plan and communicate it.
2. Once the crisis, respond quickly.
3. Make sure you have the right people ready to respond and that they all respond with the same message.
4. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience.
5. Do not overlook the value of the Web.
6. Revisit your crisis communication plan frequently.
7. Build in a way to monitor the coverage.
8. Perform a post crisis evaluation.
All leaders of organizations must realize that their companies’ reputations depend on their internal ethos and the perceptions of their many external stakeholders. They cannot ignore the importance of establishing and maintaining a positive reputation or the necessity of effectively managing external relations to obtain and keep it.

Summarize Leadership Chapter 9: Establishing Leadership Strategic Internal Communication

This chapter focuses on how to establish leadership through strategic internal communication that include recognizing the strategic role of employee communication, assessing internal communication effectiveness, establishing effective internal communication, using missions and vision to strengthen internal communication, and designing and implement effective change communication.
One of the major responsibilities of an organizational leader is communication with employees. Effective internal communication provides organization direction and employee motivation. The leader must realize its importance in accomplishing the company’s strategic objectives and performance goals and integrate it into the company’s overall strategy and business processes. The communication objectives would be
1. To ensure all business units receive the same corporate message that joint decision-making is now a priority.
2. To establish forums (meetings if appropriate) for the joint decision making to occur.
You first responsibility will be communicating your message clearly; your second will be persuading the managers to act it and seeing that they do.
The leader should use the scorecard of current employee communication to uncover how your organization stands in relation to the best practices for internal communication. If you find key managers are uninvolved and unsupportive of communication efforts, you may need to coach and encourage them to accept responsibility and accountability for the success or failure of employee communication.
The effective internal communication consists of the following:
1. Supportive management.
2. Targeted messages.
3. Effective media/forum.
4. Well-positioned staff.
5. Ongoing assessment.
Missions, visions, values, and guiding principles make up one category of major strategic messages that most organizations convey to their employees. Mission is a statement of the reason a company exists that is intended primarily for internal use. Vision statement establishes the company’s aspirations. It describes an inspiring new reality, achievable in a well-understood and reasonable time frame. Leadership communication must include how best to create and deliver these core messages to ensure they are strong and meaningful and not simple feeble slogans good only for adorning coffee cup.
Good internal communication provides the direction needed to reach strategic and financial goals and encourage productively. It enables the smooth operation of the organization when interwoven seamlessly into all other processes of the organization. You will need all of your leadership communication skills to inspire employees to support you in achieving the organization’s strategic and financial goals, and it is through skilled, strategic internal communication that you will accomplish leadership.

Summarize Essential of Negotiation Chapter 9: Managing Difficult Negotiations: Individual Approaches

This chapter focuses on situations where negotiations become especially difficult, often to the point of stalemate or breakdown. Breakdowns in communication, escalation of anger and mistrust, polarization of positions and refusal to compromise, the issuance of ultimatums, or even the avoidance of conflict—negotiations often hit an impasse. Productive dialogue stops. The parties may continue talking, but the communication is usually characterized by trying to sell or force one’s own position, talking about the other’s unreasonable position and uncooperative behavior, or both. When these breakdowns occur, the parties may simply agree to recess, cool off, and come back tomorrow. The fist step should be some effort at reducing tension, followed by efforts to improve the accuracy of communication and to control the proliferation of issues. Finally, the parties should engage in techniques for establishing commonalities and enhancing the attractiveness of each other’s preferred alternatives.
This chapter explored five major strategies that parties could use to attempt to resolve a dispute on their own:
• Reduce tension by separating themselves from one another through cooling-off periods, talking about emotions and feelings, or attempting to synchronize de-escalation of the conflict.
• Improve the accuracy of communication by role reversal or mirroring the other’s statements.
• Keep the number of issues under control so that issues are managed effectively, new issues are not carelessly added, and large issues are divided into smaller ones.
• Search for common ground through exploring superordinate goals, common enemies, creating common ground rules and effective time management, developing common expectations through a “covenant”, and reframing.
• Enhancing the desirability of the options and alternatives for both parties by providing “yesable” proposal, asking for different decisions, sweetening offers, and using objective criteria to evaluate solutions.
We address methods negotiators can use when dealing with an intentionally difficult party.
Responding to the Other Side’s Hard Distributive Tactics. To summarize briefly, as a pressured party you can respond to these tactics in any of these ways:
1. Ignore them.
2. Call them on it.
3. Respond in kind.
4. Offer to change to more productive methods.
Responding When the Other Side Has More Power. When dealing with a party with more power, negotiators have at least four alternatives. They can
1. Protect themselves.
2. Cultivate their best alternative (BATNA)
3. Formulate a “trip wire alert system.”
4. Correct the power imbalance.
The tools that we discussed are broad in function and in application, and they represent self-help for negotiators in dealing with stalled or problematic exchanges. None of these methods and remedies is a panacea, and each should be chosen and applied with sensitivity to the needs and limitations of the situations and of the negotiators involved. A truly confrontational breakdown, especially one that involves agreements of great impact or importance, sometimes justifies the introduction of individuals or agencies who themselves are not party to the dispute.

Summarize Essential of Negotiation Chapter 8:Global Negotiation

This chapter focused on global negotiation that starts discussion about the American negotiating style, from both non-American and American perspectives. While there is a great deal of consistency in perceptions of the American negotiating style (e.g., Americans are straightforward, impatient), it is important to remember that there is also a lot of variability within cultures (i.e., not every American negotiates in the same way). With this caution in mind, culture or national trait labels can provide us with at least a good starting point for knowing how to negotiate across borders.
We examined the results of the research program by John Graham and his colleagues that compared American negotiators with negotiators from several countries. Graham and his colleagues found that regardless of where negotiators were from, they negotiated the same level of outcomes on a standard negotiation task. The process of negotiation differed across countries, however, suggesting that there is more than one way to attain the same negotiation outcome. In summary, research suggests that negotiators from different cultures (countries) use different negotiation strategies and communication patterns when negotiating intra culturally than when negotiating cross-culturally.
This chapter points some of the factors that make cross-border negotiations different. Phatak and Habib suggest that both the environmental and the immediate context have important effects on global negotiations. We then discussed Salacuse’s description of the environmental factors that influence global negotiations:
1. Political and legal pluralism
2. International economics
3. Foreign governments and bureaucracies
4. Instability
5. Ideology
6. Culture
We added one more environmental factor—external stakeholders—from Phatak and Habib’s five immediate context factors were discussed next:
1. Relative bargaining power
2. Levels of conflict
3. Relationship between negotiators
4. Desired outcomes
5. Immediate stakeholders
Each of these environmental and immediate context factors acts to make cross-border negotiations more difficult, and effective international negotiators need to understand how to manage them.
Next, we turned to a discussion of Hofstede’s work on culture, the factor that has been most frequently used to explain differences in negotiations across borders. Hofstede defined culture as the shared values and beliefs held by a group of people, and is the most comprehensive study of cultural dimensions in international business. He concluded that four dimensions could summarize cultural differences:1. Individualism/collectivism
2. Power distance
3. Masculinity/femininity
4. Uncertainty avoidance
We then examined how cultural differences can influence negotiations.
Foster, adapting work by Weiss and Stripp, suggests that culture can influence global negotiations in several ways, including1. The definition of negotiation
2. The selection of negotiators
3. Protocol
4. Communication
5. Time
6. Risk propensity
7. Groups versus individuals
8. The nature of agreements
This chapter concluded with a discussion of how to manage cultural differences when negotiating across borders. Weiss presents eight different culturally responsive strategies that negotiators can use with a negotiator from a different culture. Some of these strategies may be used individually, whereas others are used jointly with the other negotiator. Weiss indicates that one critical aspect of choosing the correct strategy for a given negotiation is the degree of familiarity (low, moderate, or high) that a negotiator has with the other culture. However, even those with high familiarity with another culture are faced with a daunting task if they want to modify their strategy completely when they deal with the other culture.