Your Whole Brain Negotiation Team

Michal Zieba


	Download PDF
	Print This Page

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” - Confucius

Have you ever asked yourself: “Is this what I want to do with my life…is this my dream job?” Ever get irritated with those who talk about their jobs with excited tones and animated expressions? Or are you one of these blessed individuals who just loves your chosen career path? Either way, we would like to explore with you how these lucky few have got it right, and how you too can have some of the magic of choosing and enjoying the career that’s right for you. Being a negotiation company means that we will of course be applying these discoveries to uncover exactly how you, your team and yes – your organisation – can become far more effective in your negotiations.

Is success purely a product of working harder? Am I getting the most from my team or employees? Are these questions you’ve already asked yourself? Before we start "knocking" ourselves or our colleagues, we would do better to begin by asking a far more telling question: “Am I doing what I’m best at?”

As we all know our brains hide many mysteries. The brain is the fount of our preferences – and our preferences cause us to develop and act differently from each other. These preferences dominate our behaviour, our effectiveness and efficiency at work and influence literally every area of our activity. In the late 1970s, Ned Herrmann created a model. In this model, he divided the brain into four quadrants:

Ned Herrmann Model

You’re probably already familiar with the differences between your left and right brain hemispheres. By making a further useful set of distinctions, a tool created by N. Herrmann - Herrmann’s Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) - is revolutionising today’s business world. Herrmann discovered that each of the brain quadrants is responsible for separate and distinct activities. Understanding how your preferences shape the decisions you make can lead to profound enhancements in your personal and professional lives. Organisations can deploy talent far more effectively through gaining a deeper insight into which environements and challenges will cause teams to thrive – rather than fight.

One person can be a shining star in one job, whilst hopelessly poor at another. Using the HBDI profile we are able to identify not only our brain’s strengths and weaknesses , but also those of our teams’, our departments’ and even our organisation as a whole! In this way HBDI is emerging as the key to becoming a more competitive and productive organisation. Our primary interest lies in the application of this knowledge to the negotiation context. So let’s turn our attention to addressing exactly how you can leverage your negotiation success for professional and business benefit, starting today.

If your negotiations usually involve the participation of more than 2 people, then you will need to take into account not only the needs of each party but also their preferences. You may be representing your boss, your department and other departments, stakeholders not present (suppliers, shareholders, communities) or the entire company (not forgetting yourself!). If this is true for you, then this is usually also true for the other party. HBDI may be an extremely useful instrument to help you form your team, and plann how to best meet their needs.

Talking for a moment about one dimension of the Herrmann model - some of us focus mainly on substantive outcomes of negotiation (profit), others tend to value business relationships more. Of course the ideal is to take care of relationship and substantive goals equally. The challenge many organisations face is of forming a team of homogenous negotiators who are predominantly focussed on one or the other. As an example – our clients in the engineering, chemical and petrochemical sectors recruit predominantly engineers. Engineers generally possess a predisposition to favouring the objective facts and have been known to place comparatively less attention and energy on developing relationships (apologies if you are an engineer, our strengths are largely borne out of our preferences). Another undesirable by-product is that of stale “group-think”, with creativity suffering. Far healthier would be to inject a healthy amount of relationship and creativity into the team, thus balancing it and taking care of blindspots that would otherwise be suffered in negotiation preparations.

The Whole Brain Organisation

Different occupations require unique mental requirements. The best solution for the company and the employee is to have the closest alignment that can be achieved between the employee and their work. Productivity problems are usually caused by a mismatch between people’s mental preferences and the mental requirements of the work they do. A proper matching improves employees’ chances to be “smart”, productive and satisfied. The Whole Brain Method offers an improved approach to marketing, sales, advertising, managing and many other areas of business. What is more, it can also assist you in communicating in ways that will result in your listener being more receptive to your messages, which leads to less resistance and more persuasion, which in turn all translates into more deals being closed on your terms.

Whole Brain Creativity

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world . ”

- Albert Einstein

The brain is the source of creativity. Creative thought is the result of specialised mental thought processes. Effective synergy among all the quadrants contributes strongly to the creative process. Optimal creativity can be achieved by creating a team in which all members represent differently dominat thinking preferences. Let’s have a look at the Mental Activities and Thinking Modes:

Quadrants:

A	B	C	D
Problem Identification	Planning	Interpersonal	Ideating
Analysing	Implementing	Sensing People	Designing
Problem Solving	Organising	Expressing	Strategizing
Diagnosing	Timing	Feeling	Integrating
Logic	Establishing Processes	Social	Innovating

Instead of creating a team where all participants will be able to fully fathom only few dimensions of a comlicated or complex issue, effective use of the HBDI cedes us with the possibility of injecting creativity into every area of business. Instead of killing creativity, we have an opportunity to stimulate, support and reward it.

Whole Brain Personal Development

Our creative potential can be developed or lost by assigning us to an interesting, stimulating job or to a boring, non-creative one. Some companies ignore the creative capabilities of their employees and pay a fortune looking for solutions and advice within consulting organisations. HBDI can prove instrumental as a compass to point you in the direction of your preferred professional career path. Knowing what to focus on while training your people enables your organisation to create champions with minimum investment.

Cast your mind over to the often landmine riddled field of recruiting talent. We all know how much it costs to train and prepare individuals for their role. If this money is invested wisely, the return can be multiples more the original investment. With one of our services being training , we would be saying this, wouldn’t we? So if you are in any doubt, ask us to back this claim up with solid client testimonials as to just how much value recruiting the right negotiators can have on your company’s bottom line.

It is a sad reality that all too often people and companies change only when given a big enough reason to – when they’re forced by external circumstance. Sometimes it is difficult to find this reason in our everyday business. Perhaps you are making a great profit, your negotiations always go smoothly, your teams work harmoniously in preparations and with the client, and clients / suppliers invite you back over and over again enthusiastically praising your breakthrough ideas. If this ideal negotiation world is yours, please contact us, as we would love to investigate whether you are unwittingly already employing the Herrmann Model for added business value. If not, and you can envisage better negotiations, then we would be happy to talk through (without obligation) what specific benefits the HBDI can offer you and your organisation.

I am interested to learn more about:

You are permitted to re-publish this article provided the below resource information is included at the end of the article and you provide a link back to this site.

The Negotiation Academy (TNA) – http://www.negotiationeurope.com - is a specialist business negotiation management consultancy headquartered in London. Committed to delivering both best and leading practice business negotiation solutions, TNA collaborates with clients to instil a world class negotiation capability. With deep industry experience in several market sectors, global resources and a proven track record, TNA is uniquely positioned to assist clients to avoid the losses associated with sub optimal negotiations. TNA has a core competency in sales negotiation training , purchasing negotiation training and executive negotiation training (mergers & acquisitions negotiation training, asset management negotiation training, corporate finance negotiation training etc.)