Day 26 - Interpersonal Skill
5 May 2020
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sirurp@gmail.com
What is Interpersonal Skill?
Interpersonal Skill is an ability to recognize and understand other people’s moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.
These skills are part of interpersonal skills - negotiation and conflict management, assertiveness skills, refusal skills, influencing/ persuasion skills, networking and motivation skills
My learning for the day
My learning today is about negotiation skills.
Negotiation is a method by which people settle differences.
Negotiation is a to-and-fro communication between two or more parties; to find a common ground. Negotiation is finding out the best possible solution.
What is BATNA
BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.
BATNA is often used in negotiation tactics. BATNA is what you do before going to the negotiating table.
BATNA helps you understand your position against competitors. BATNA helps you define various alternatives so that if one fails, you can propose another alternative.
Negotiation researchers Roger Fisher and William Ury developed BATNA.
It initially started as a project in Harvard Law School in 1978. The students and their professors, as part of the project, began interviewing skilled negotiators in order to understand what made them effective.
A simple question "What advice would you give to both parties in a dispute that would be helpful and lead to better outcomes?" gave them a huge amount of data to design the principles of negotiation in 1981.
BATNA is the fifth of the 5 methods of principled negotiation mentioned in their book “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving”.
– Listing alternatives
– Evaluating options
– Establishing the course you should pursue if the negotiation fails
– Calculating your reservation value – the lowest value deal you are willing to accept
Netscape’s BATNA Blunder
Source - Negotiations.com
This is a story that happened in 1996.
AOL (America OnLine) was looking for a top notch internet browser to market their products. AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the mid-1990s. It was the most recognized brand on the web in the United States.
The top two in competition were Netscape and Microsoft. The Netscape browser was a market leader whereas Microsoft’s Explorer was a fledgling product.
Microsoft, however, had the advantage of being a market leader for their operating system.
Microsoft offered to bundle AOL into their Windows operating system, for free! There was no way Netscape could match the Microsoft offer.
This contract gave Microsoft a significant share of the browser market thanks to AOL’s huge subscriber base.
Author - Jonathan O’Brien
There are many potential BATNAs. It requires a bit of creative thinking to find them. Here’s Jonathan’s list of BATNAs to be used as a buyer -
- Walking away from the entire deal
- Going to an alternative supplier
- Buying a different product or service
- Delaying the negotiation or deal
- Changing the specifications
- Removing a component from the deal
- Changing the person with whom we are negotiating
- Maintaining the status quo and keeping the current arrangements
- Negotiating with another part of the organisation or going above the person with whom you are negotiating
Hope you will remember to do your BATNA before you reach the negotiation table. Grateful to Harvard Law School’s Programme on Negotiation for sharing their treasure of knowledge.
How to improve this life skill?
Set a goal to become a go-to person by mastering the art and science of interpersonal skill.
Follow the LAST model to build your personal brand as a Guru of interpersonal skill.
- Learn - Invest time in learning different frameworks/ models/ techniques of interpersonal skill
- Apply -
- Identify a model suitable to you
- Create a template to document the flow of the process
- Find opportunities to use the selected method/ template
- Maintain record/ process flow of every important activities you did to with respect to interpersonal skill
- Maintain notes of your thoughts/ insights/ failures/ challenges…. to be used for sharing/ training others
- Share - Share the insights captured in step 2 above in a planned manner (social media posts, blogs, videos, study notes…)
- Train - Generate opportunities to train your peers and team members so that, over time, your organization benefits from your efforts
Purpose of this document
I took a 66 day challenge to study Life Skills last year (10 April 2019). To my astonishment, I succeeded in studying for 66 days one skill a day.
My objectives of learning these skills were - To strengthen my mind to face life’s challenges with ease, To use these skills in my worklife for a better performance, To use these skills in my personal life for enriching my relationships, To open new possibilities to surprise myself.
This is my next 66 day challenge (from 10 April 2020) - To share my Life Skills learning with my social media friends.
I pray that my toil helps you in your success journey.
What are Life Skills?
UNICEF defines Life skills as - psychosocial abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life. They are loosely grouped into three broad categories of skills
- cognitive skills for analyzing and using information,
- personal skills for developing personal agency and managing oneself,
- inter-personal skills for communicating and interacting effectively with others.
Which LifeSkills are covered?
The World Health Organisation identified these basic areas of life skills that are relevant across cultures:
- Decision-making
- Problem-solving
- Creative thinking
- Critical thinking
- Communication
- Interpersonal skills
- Self-awareness
- Empathy
- Coping with emotions
- Coping with stress.
Some trivia
‘Life skills’ was never part of the school curriculum. WHO/ UNESCO mandated academia to teach these skills in all schools across the globe in 1993.
Different countries educate their children in these skills with different objectives
- Zimbabwe and Thailand - prevention of HIV/AIDS
- Mexico - prevention of adolescent pregnancy
- United Kingdom - child abuse prevention
- USA - prevention of substance abuse and violence
- South Africa and Colombia - positive socialization of children.
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