How to manage your negotiating team.

You are leading a negotiating team for your company. When you sit down with the other party, someone on your side of the table blurts out: "Just tell us--what do we need to do to get more of your business?" And in that moment, you know you've lost the upper hand. Gaffes like this are more common than most businesspeople would care to admit, management professors Brett, Friedman, and Behfar have found in their research. Even though team members are all technically on the same side, they often have different priorities and imagine different ideal outcomes: Business development just wants to close the deal. Finance is most concerned about costs. Legal is focused on patents and intellectual property. The authors recommend taking four steps, either singly or in tandem, to align those goals: Map out each person's priorities, work out conflicts directly with departments, employ a mediator if that doesn't work, and use data to resolve differences. Once you are all on the same page, you can take steps to make sure everyone is coordinated during the negotiations themselves. Try simulating the negotiation beforehand, assigning roles to team members that take advantage of their strengths, and establishing the signals you will use to communicate with one another during the session. The payoff from working as a cohesive group is clear. With access to greater expertise and the ability to assign members to specialized roles, teams can implement more-complex strategies than a sole negotiator could ever pull off.

The critical role of conflict resolution in teams: a close look at the links between conflict type, conflict management strategies, and team outcomes.

This article explores the linkages between strategies for managing different types of conflict and group performance and satisfaction. Results from a qualitative study of 57 autonomous teams suggest that groups that improve or maintain top performance over time share 3 conflict resolution tendencies: (a) focusing on the content of interpersonal interactions rather than delivery style, (b) explicitly discussing reasons behind any decisions reached in accepting and distributing work assignments, and (c) assigning work to members who have the relevant task expertise rather than assigning by other common means such as volunteering, default, or convenience. The authors' results also suggest that teams that are successful over time are likely to be both proactive in anticipating the need for conflict resolution and pluralistic in developing conflict resolution strategies that apply to all group members.

Managing multicultural teams.

Multicultural teams offer a number of advantages to international firms, including deep knowledge of different product markets, culturally sensitive customer service, and 24-hour work rotations. But those advantages may be outweighed by problems stemming from cultural differences, which can seriously impair the effectiveness of a team or even bring itto a stalemate. How can managers best cope with culture-based challenges? The authors conducted in-depth interviews with managers and members of multicultural teams from all over the world. Drawing on their extensive research on dispute resolution and teamwork and those interviews, they identify four problem categories that can create barriers to a team's success: direct versus indirect communication, trouble with accents and fluency, differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority, and conflicting norms for decision making. If a manager--or a team member--can pinpoint the root cause of the problem, he or she is likelier to select an appropriate strategy for solving it. The most successful teams and managers, the authors found, dealt with multicultural challenges in one of four ways: adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape or makeup of the team), managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team member when other options have failed). Which strategy is best depends on the particular circumstances--and each has potential complications. In general, though, managers who intervene early and set norms; teams and managers who try to engage everyone on the team; and teams that can see challenges as stemming from culture, not personality, succeed in solving culture-based problems with good humor and creativity. They are the likeliest to harvest the benefits inherent in multicultural teams.