Negotiation is the process wherein individuals tend to find out an alternative that takes care of interest of all the parties involved so that none of the parties is at loss. Negotiation is more or less part of our daily lives. In the corporate world, it’s important to have negotiation so as to avoid conflicts and it helps in improving relations with our peers or subordinates. Also, a person’s personality plays a vital role in a negotiation process as it helps both the parties to be on an equal ground. Thus, coming to an acceptable conclusion.
We all know why personal protection equipment is important because it protects workers from injury. However, in reality- employers still struggle to get the workers to wear the safety equipment (glasses).
From the tutorial workshop, what I learnt is different tactical approaches to influence an individual’s decision.
I played the character of Mr. Dale- who has been Manager of the organization for a long period of time. He has been given quite a serious responsibility of ensuring his employees wear safety equipment- safety glasses while working in the organization.
There were two new people in my team who I had to convince to wear their respective safety glasses whilst working.
Mr. Pat Taylor
He has been with the organization for over 20 years, which is quite a while for an individual. I would tackle the situation with emotional appeal. He is an informal leader of the group of more experienced employees and has been around in the company for 20 years. Because he is a senior resource and has grandchildren I decided to approach him emotional appeal.
The emotional appeal that he may lose his eyes or suffer some serious injuries in the eye will prevent him from seeing his grandchildren never was quite a nightmare for him and that simply using the eye protection on the job could prevent eye injury.
The emotional appeal was a clear advantage to me and hence convincing him to wear safety glasses was like a piece of cake for me.
Mr. Chris Jonson
He’s been in the company for a few years and has a bad attitude and doesn’t get along with his peers and bosses. He’s been recently been transferred to my department.
I decided to approach him with logical appeal and make him understand the repercussions of not wearing glasses at work. This approach clicked with him and thus, he decided to wear the glasses henceforth.
What I learned from this activity:
We encounter different people in our life (corporate world). What I learnt here is that when you are dealing with different personalities you need to adapt different approaches like I did for Mr Taylor and Mr. Johnson. I adapted to their personalities to get my point access to them. We need to change our communication approach with each individual.
If I would have interchanged the tactics with my team members I probably would not have been successful in my task. So based on my employees personalities I chose the approaches.
Also, before approaching my employees I had it in my mind clearly as to how will I approach these guys. Because I wanted to avoid any sort of confusion in terms of what/why questions at the time of my conversation- this played quite vital role in boosting my confidence.
Another important point I learnt is that choice is a big factor in decision making for an individual. For eg: in this case Mr. Taylor had a choice of not seeing or seeing his grandchildren, he chose the latter as he knew that being the appropriate and best decision for him. This choice in return solved my problem of making him wear the safety glasses.
Also, as the saying goes ‘you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper’.
I learnt is that you have to think creatively; you cannot always solve a problem by the usual means. We ought to be more creative in approaching the situation and come up with something better and get away from the same thought of train.
At the same time, In order to not come across as a predictable person by undertaking the same tactics. In the future if given a chance to do the role-play again for the same people I would take a different approach. Eg: for Mr. Dale I would use the legitimized appeal (with organizational rewards such as higher pension, etc.) since he has been around in the company for a very long period of time and with Chris Johnson, who possesses rude manners and behavior, I would use impression management (to show my worth in the company and also being his boss) and pressure technique with him (threatening him to fire or suspend from work if he doesn’t abide by the organizational rules)