Leadership and Negotiation in cross-cultural contexts

1. 3/6/2017
Peter Wilner, Principal
pmwconsult1@gmail.com
Bridging the Divide: Leadership and Negotiation
Outside Of Your Cultural Context

2. My Role
• I speak Spanish and Portuguese, spend my free time both
here and abroad with Brazilian and Latino communities and
have spent more than 10 years working with those
communities in a variety of capacities. I am a liaison between
cultures from North America and Central/South America and
the Caribbean.
• I am looking to identify organizations who need to address the
issues discussed below but who do not have the specific
resources, experience or expertise for doing so.
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3. Roadmap
• Why Pay Attention To Cultural Diversity?
• Political Diversity in Boston—The 2016 Presidential Election
• A Note About Data
• Business Diversity In Suffolk County
• Principles of Leadership and Negotiation Across Cultures
• Leadership and Negotiation In The Real World
• Approaching The Issue: Revisiting Our Initial Questions
• Conclusion
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4. Why Pay Attention To Cultural Diversity?
All (business) relationships are built on:
• Know
• Like
• Trust
Q: How important is each element
Q: What is the mechanism by which each element is
best built?
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5. Political Diversity in Boston: The 2016
Presidential Election
Clinton/Kaine: 79.71%
Trump/Pence: 13.73%
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10. Business Diversity in Suffolk County (A
Note About Data)
2012 Survey of Business Owners
• 66,834 firms in Suffolk County, 7,347 (11%) are Hispanic-owned
• 5 categories of interest - Cuban; Puerto Rican; Mexican, Mexican
American, Chicano; Hispanic
2011 – 2015 American Community Survey, Places of Birth For The U.S.
Foreign-born Population
• 758,919 residents of Suffolk County, 215,425 foreign born
• 132,579 residents come from Spanish-speaking parts of Central
America, South America, and the Caribbean
– 61.54% of foreign born
– 17.47% of Suffolk County Population
2011-2015 American Community Survey Languages Spoken At Home
• 134,188 of the 716,136 (18.74%) residents surveyed speak Spanish
or Spanish Creole at home
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11. Principles of Leadership Across Cultures
Latin America
• Decision Making - Synchronized Leader: seeks consensus so that all
interested parties will buy in to a particular decision
• Communication Style - Diplomatic Leader: seeks constructive
confrontation, empathy, and to adjust messaging to maintain cordial
conversation
United States
• Decision Making - Opportunistic Leader: Self-initiation, flexibility in
achieving a goal, risk-taking
• Communication Style – Straight-Shooting Leader: avoids excessive
communication, quickly come to point, has less interpersonal sensitivity
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12. Principles of Negotiation Across Cultures
• We tend to act as if our negotiating partner(s)
will embody the stereotypes of the culture(s)
from which he/she/they come
• Ultimately, cultural differences (and the
stereotypes that they can lead to) need to be
subordinated to what people do at the
negotiating table
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13. Leadership and Negotiation In The Real
World
Interviews With North Americans
• Most important business characteristics are persistence, integrity, empathy for
customer, establishing trusting relationship
• Negotiation based on shared interests and building to consensus
• Empowering team members to work independently and be 100% accountable for
work
• Overcoming adversarial relationship, defining obstacles upfront, communicating
with “brutal honesty” crucial to successful business relationship
• Know your product, customer’s needs, culture into which you’re selling,
competition
• Know your selling style and your customer’s buying style (transactional vs.
relational)
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14. Leadership and Negotiation In The Real
World
Interviews With South Americans
• Most important business characteristics are reliability, responsibility,
flexibility, respect for both the client and yourself
• For Brazilians, the most important aspects of a business relationship are
trustworthiness and likeability – will ask personal question in order to find
out if they can trust you
• Business and social relationships are two separate things –one can be
damaged because of the other – important to have trust, set clear terms
for the relationship (prevent being taken advantage of)
• When Brazilians say “yes,” they actually mean “maybe”
• Don’t confuse flexibility and nimbleness with lack of structure
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15. Why Pay Attention To Cultural Diversity?
All (business) relationships are built on:
• Know
• Like
• Trust
• Culture is not monolithic – within each culture, different people have
different styles, priorities, etc.
• How each element is built may also depend much more on an individual’s
personal background and experiences
• Negotiators and Business Leaders need to be able to:
– move fluently between the cultures
– perceive and respect the characteristics that make each negotiator
unique
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16. Conclusion
I am looking forward to
• Hearing your thoughts and feedback
• Particularly:
– The issues that make negotiating with other cultures
challenging
– Leadership styles across cultures
– Potential Solutions
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17. Sources
• Pd43+ Massachusetts Election Statistics
http://electionstats.state.ma.us/
• Boston Planning and Development Agency Electoral Maps
http://www.bostonplans.org/research-maps/maps-and-gis/electoral-maps
• 2012 Survey of Business owners, Table SB1200CSA01
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?ref
resh=t
• 2015 American Community Survey, Tables B16001, B05006
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/
• “What Leadership Looks Like in Different Cultures,” Tomas Chamoro-
Premuzic and Michael Sanger, Harvard Business Review, May 6, 2016
• Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Negotiation: Cross Cultural
Communication Techniques And Negotiation Skills From International
Business and Diplomacy, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School,
available at, www.pon.harvard.edu
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18. 3/6/2017
Peter Wilner, Principal
pmwconsult1@gmail.com
Bridging the Divide: Leadership and Negotiation
Outside Of Your Cultural Context