Aussie Rules

You negotiate each and every day. It can be anything from “which program should we watch tonight?” to “What’s the best price I can get?”

So if you can improve on those skills, it will help you in everything from salary reviews to getting two staff members to work together better.

Here are nine tips to improve your success:

1. Be a Spice Girl — establish what you really really want. Before you even think of starting your negotiations, nut out:
   • Exactly what you want. Be concise. Write it down. Own it.
   • Your worst case scenario — what you will sacrifice or let go of.
   • Very best case scenario.
2. Consider it a chess game, preparation is key. List all your negotiation points. Have possible rebuttals and alternatives planned out. Start with a few points from your best case scenario that you’re happy to concede. Please don’t forget to be reasonable. Both parties need to feel they’ve been successful.
3. Know thy opponent. Rugby teams help prepare for their matches by watching videos of their opponents in action on the field. So research the party you’ll be meeting with. What perspectives will they will bring to negotiations? What are they like? What are their soft points? Have counterarguments pre-prepared against objections they might raise.
4. Face to face is best. You can’t see a twitch over the phone or anger set in while reading an email. Because non-verbal cues are so communication-rich, they can help you in your negotiations tremendously. Try to do your negotiating in person.
5. Have a huge you/I ratio. Plan each point from their perspective. Try to turn as many of your “I”s into “you”s as you can. For example, replace “I think” with “Do you think?” or “Wouldn’t you agree?” This brings the other side more personally into it.
6. Ask questions. Questions help get communication and understanding flowing. They are also a great strategy if you find yourself stuck in a corner. A well thought out question can both reopen discussion and uncover any doubts or concerns.
7. Use authoritative sources. Dropping in expert research or well known sources to back up your argument will give you credibility and increase your persuasiveness.
8. Silence is golden. We all hate awkward silences. Often silence takes over when both parties have spoken, and a concession is due. Learn to wait out the silences to your advantage.
9. See it. Believe it. Visualise yourself in the negotiation. Have it play out to your advantage. Observe yourself confidently employing the above strategies and coming out successfully.

With the back-to-work blues now a distant memory, it’s time to make way for a new year of success, profitability, and productivity at work. Employers may not however be able to achieve these goals if faced with employees that consistently arrive late, are unproductive, have a disruptive influence over other employees, disregard appropriate workplace policies and procedures or have a generally bad attitude. Employees like this can also significantly impact staff morale.

Managers in Australia who have had their patience tested for too long and decide to dismiss a difficult employee need to be aware that they could potentially face an unfair or unlawful dismissal claim. With Labor soon to remove the “fewer than 100 employees” unfair dismissal exemption, employers need to establish thorough policies and procedures if they are seeking to dismiss an employee.

Some possible strategies that can be put in place to help prevent and manage difficult employee behaviour include:

• ensuring employees are aware of their duties and responsibilities and are appropriately trained and experienced for the job;
• implementing procedures to alleviate the overloading of work;
• ensuring consistency in work standards amongst all employees and avoiding unreasonable work expectations with particular employees;
• having regular meetings to monitor performance in order to minimise the likelihood of employees being unproductive (ie, performance-based reviews)
• checking whether there are any out-of-work circumstances affecting the employees ability to perform and attempting to accommodate them in order to reduce high levels of stress and tension affecting their performance at work;
• assigning each employee a “go-to person” or mentor to discuss issues with and provide feedback;
• being proactive in dealing with an issue of concern immediately rather than allowing it to continue unabated;
• if confronting an employee about particular behaviour, encouraging open communication, acknowledging the employee’s concerns, focusing on the issue at hand and not on their personality, and suggesting ways the issue can be improved;
• documenting counselling and/or warnings provided to employees;
• dealing consistently with employees who exhibit unsatisfactory conduct or behaviour;
• providing an employee with the opportunity to explain their poor performance and/or conduct; and
• seeking appropriate legal advice before deciding to dismiss an employee.

Is your organisation aware of the challenges arising from changing unfair dismissal laws? How are you dealing with them?

In a cruisy little business it can be easy to become complacent. Do a couple of meetings over a latte, bunk off early when the sun’s out.

Alas, to grow our businesses and our minds we need to stretch from time to time.

Here are three good reasons to give yourself a nudge:

1. You’re forced to find new ways of doing things. Once you adopt a stretch strategy, it’s simply not possible to accept mediocrity. Those things you’ve put up with for ages scream at you.
   Challenge: What are you doing in your business that you’ve being doing the same way for far too long?
2. You move to a different level. When you push yourself to stretch, you inevitably meet new people; you experience new things; you open your mind to new ideas.
   Challenge: Accept that you’re in danger of getting passed up … somehow, in some area of your business. What area is that? What might you do about it?
3. You start a ripple. When you stretch, those around you notice the change — your clients, your friends, your network. Some will stretch with you, others will run for cover.
   Challenge: Look around. Who will come with you? Who will hide? Where does your future belong?

Come on, speed it up a bit.

Strategy. Getting the most out of your team. Sussing out the competition. Sure, these are important aspects of the Australian football code known as Aussie Rules, but they’re also key to succeeding in business.

This collection of blogs from some of Australia’s top business experts illustrates the rules of the game and shows how teams can sometimes play a bit differently Down Under.

Would you like to know the secret to being more successful when you try to hire a new staff member; go for a budget increase or move an intractable employee? It’s something that I learned in a coaching workshop on becoming a better speaker. While you most likely won’t have to stand and talk in front of hundreds, being able to tell a good story will make you more successful, persuasive and motivating. There is a skill to telling a good story. Here are five tips:

(1) I/You Ratio
The reality is, people don’t care about you — they are interested in themselves. So turn everything around from you to them–from sales presentations through to stories that start out “my wife/client did this”. Instead draw them in by turning it around: “I’m sure you have a man in your life that did this (like my husband)” or “You would have met a client like Bob.” Remove the focus from you.

(2) Description
Normally you would minimise details so as not to bore. But good stories have real characters and dialogue — people think in pictures. So if you talk about a person, describe them. Give specific detail regarding time and location. For example “It was on a normal windy afternoon that you come to expect, living in Perth”; “She was so short with so many tassels hanging from her shawl you’d think she was a 1950’s lampshade.”

(3) Conversation
Your story will really come to life when you add dialogue. Instead of “he said, she said”, actually rely what was said. You go to superstar status if you can even use different voices or if you were talking before an audience.

(4) Dramatic impact first
Your story doesn’t have to start in the beginning with the natural progression. Why not look for dramatic impact by starting with a bold statement to pull your listener in, and make them want more immediately? You can start with the end or in the middle, then go back and fill in the details. If you were talking about a scary experience, your first words could be “I thought my life was over” (pause for dramatic impact) then go to the beginning and start the story.

(5) Where to find stories
If you’re scratching your head wondering where you can come up with stories, believe it or not they are all around you — in your everyday experiences, your past. They are lessons learned from parents and past employers, stories people/clients have told you and sales experiences.

So when you next need to be more persuasive or more memorable (to beat the pants off your competition) dig deep, grab a story, give it detail and practice telling it.

Following the launch of the National Safety Week in October last year, Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) briefly returned to the forefront of the Workplace Relations agenda. Yet speculation remains as to why the issue was somewhat neglected by both political parties in the wake of the Industrial Relations reforms leading up to the Federal election.

With over 140,000 claims in the FY04-05 (data released by the Australian Safety & Compensation Council) that resulted in a workplace injury with an absence from work of one week or more, the issue of injuries in the workplace should be as important as pay and conditions.

We have previously seen the Coalition Government open the way toward a Federal OHS system through the Comcare regime, and extend its operation to cover self-insured private corporations. The Labor Party, on the other hand, has promised to pursue a harmonisation project with the states to implement a national OHS system in phases.

However, the success of such uniformity will ultimately depend on the level of state and territory cooperation as many of the current state and territory OHS frameworks are inconsistent with the federal laws. Employers and other duty holders are required to comply with different safety obligations depending upon which state they operate in.

For example, three such inconsistencies include:

1. Some jurisdictions contain specific provisions relating to deaths in the workplace and the prosecution of employers, while others do not;
2. There are different risk assessment and hazard identification obligations depending upon the jurisdiction; and
3. Maximum penalties for both corporations and individuals differ in each jurisdiction.

With Labor now in power, a new national OHS body will be established which will be independent, non-adversarial, contain representation from both state and federal governments and will play a key role in policy development and research on OHS issues. Labor has also promised to improve claim and return to work assistance for employers, adopt more common laws and align premium processes and procedures.

Now that we’re moving toward adopting a national industrial relations system, it is essential that a uniform approach also be taken towards workplace safety to ensure a more simplistic system for national employers so that safety is not compromised in the workplace and workplace injuries and illnesses are minimised. It remains to be seen whether Labor’s intentions to create such uniformity will be realised.

It’s scary how regularly I hear someone try to explain the nature of their work only to get themselves all hot and flustered. Maybe it’s happened to you. Thought so.

If we are to successfully develop word-of-mouth opportunities and recruit supporters, it’s crucial we develop the means of being understood. Really understood.

Too often when we meet new people and are asked what we do, we go for one of these responses:

1. The simple response: “I’m a landscape designer.”
2. The baffling response: “I’m an environmental specialist concerned with horticultural planning and its impact on global sustainability.”

Both are fabulous conversation stoppers. If you’re really lucky the first will elicit a response like “Oh, that sounds interesting” — which it clearly doesn’t; the second is more likely to be met with stunned silence or a change of topic towards weather and sport.

To stand a chance of being understood we must use language that is interesting and that invites the continuance of relevant conversation. If we get shifted over to weather and sport too early in the piece, we may well begin a relationship, but we risk being that “nice person who does something with environments”.

Trying to steer a conversation back to where you’d prefer it to be can be very challenging. A nifty little exercise I’ve being doing of late is to ask business owners to rehearse words that can be easily understood by an eight year old. This precludes the use of jargon and demands that language be clear, straightforward and interesting.

The next challenge is to use language that elicits a reaction like “Oh, how do you do that?” as this allows us to introduce our processes and really get into the meaty side of what we do.

Let’s get our landscape designer over here for a second attempt:

RG: “Hello, what do you do?”

LD: “I create beautiful outdoor spaces for people who like to relax at home.”

Get the picture? Of course you do. So go and buy a packet of wine gums and sit yourself down with a friendly child. When you’ve found something that works, post it here and we’ll see what the other kids make of it.