Negotiation as a key competence for managerial success

All soft skills are, and above all, should be, because the success or otherwise of a company is linked to their presence. The crucial skills, in particular, find ample space in contexts where there is trust, open and genuine collaboration, efficiency, creativity and innovation. A research conducted years ago by Google, highlighted how the key precondition of the best performing teams is to operate in contexts of psychological security. The crucial competence of managers in this new context is teaming, i.e. the ability to quickly form effective teams to manage specific projects, ready to collaborate and able to break down the barriers raised by the culture of silence and the predominance of relational fear. All this requires robust negotiation and communication skills.

What are the 'secrets' of a good negotiation?

One must not confuse negotiation with compromise and one must think not of how much the other can lose, but how much everyone can gain. A very illustrative example of the inefficiency of compromise is the story of two sisters and an orange told in the book 'Getting To Yes', by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Two sisters both covet the only orange available and after a brief argument they split it in half, satisfied that neither got more than the other. One sister starts to peel the peel for a candy cake and throws away the pulp, which is of no use to her; the other, at the same time, juices her half to take vitamins on medical advice and, just as casually as her sister threw away the pulp, throws away the leftover peel of her half. They soon realise that they could have had 100 per cent of the orange and not be content with only 50 per cent, which is also not a very acceptable deal in terms of sustainability given the obvious waste of resources. History teaches us that when a resource is scarce, people tend to divide it up inefficiently, missing important opportunities. The mistake of the two sisters? Not having investigated why they aspired for the orange and only focusing on what they wanted. The compromise is therefore short-sighted, plastered in superficial communication and not extended to the why of their demands.

Can a transversal competence be reskilled? And how?

Decoding managerial skills, breaking them down and tracing them back to processes with well-defined outputs, as well as technical skills, is difficult. The challenge is to rank soft skills on a par with hard defined competencies. In an article in the Italian edition of the Harvard Business Review of April 2013, Barbara Imperatori, associate professor of Business Organisation at the Catholic University of Milan, explained how the sociality that characterises our culture has to some extent slowed down more structured processes of codification and development of relational managerial competences and how the complexity of organisational contexts is highlighting the weaknesses of this managerial model. It is therefore clear that scepticism stems from the difficulty of objectifying a concept of effective managerialism and the behaviours that express it. The concreteness of technical capability and the intangibility of managerial capability arise precisely from the measurability of knowledge, processes and results, which is possible in the former and not in the latter. In a nutshell: without a structured approach to the training of managerial skills, there is no way of acquiring them effectively or even reskilling them.

Given the centrality of negotiation, how do you ensure the negotiating effectiveness of a manager?

We all claim to have negotiating skills just by performing certain roles. I don't think I have ever come across a CV where, in the section on interpersonal skills, negotiation skills were not listed. But who says I have it? Who attests it? How do I measure these skills? We try to give the answer after having spent over 20 years observing best performers who, often even unconsciously, repeat certain virtuous behaviours. We have given them names and surnames and traced them within a method available to all that becomes a lens to be worn to read one's own behaviour and correct the less effective ones.

To a leader today, hard and soft skills are demanded: is there a precise rule to balance them perfectly?

It depends on the role and the context. On closer inspection, if a leader's role is to lead an organisation, his or her greatest ability must be to know how to choose and motivate people who, once they have shared objectives, must put down the strategies to achieve them. The risk around the corner of a leader who is too unbalanced on the technical side is micro-management: not delegating, losing sight of the bigger goal and the delicacy involved in leading an organisation. We come from an entrepreneurial and corporate culture that for a long, perhaps too long, has exalted the culture of doing, privileging technical preparation over relational skills, seen as innate or accessory and as such not worthy of attention and development. I will never say that technical competence is not necessary, but today success - especially when technical competence is equal - is dictated by relational skills. A good manager, in essence, must create a healthy balance between both components, soft and hard, otherwise the company risks losing important resources due to heavy, stressful and unmotivating working environments, in which the level of engagement of people and the rate of innovation and growth rapidly decline.