We love it when our alumni do well when they move on to even greater heights after their time with us. Russell Bishop (2000 – 2006) is one who continues to excel in his career. Building upon his negotiation and relationship management experience with Vantage Partners, his new book, Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work, demonstrates the power of interest based thinking and influence in a variety of workplace settings.
Bishop says: “The current economic challenges shine an even brighter spotlight on the necessity to understand how to influence others when it comes to getting things done. Roadblocks abound and conflict raises its head inside teams, between silos and amongst partners every day. With the pressure to perform mounting every day, finding creative workarounds to the ever increasing number of business challenges may be critical to your success. In almost every case, workarounds that actually work require gaining cooperation, approval or support from others. Trying to bulldoze your way through other people won’t work any better than the highly positional tactics of the hard bargainer.”
The book is rife with practical examples of how to find workable solutions to vexing workplace problems requiring cooperation and collaboration amongst people, teams and organizations. “People do things for their reasons, not your reasons,” is how Bishop frames the core concepts of balancing inquiry with advocacy as you seek to understand the underlying interests of the other parties you will need to influence in order to move forward. At the core of virtually every solution is the requirement to understand how the situation appears to the other individuals, teams or organizations involved in order to find creative, joint gain solutions.
In one particularly powerful alliance example, Bishop shows how two biotech partners mired in a lengthy, contentious legal battle over contract terms, wound up with a creative solution. The workaround to their adversarial positions turned out to be bringing in a Vantage Partner consultant (Bishop) and taking the two management teams through a joint Negotiation Skills course. At the end of the two days off site, the teams managed to resolve all their outstanding issues. How exactly did they get there? Bishop had each team work through a two sided negotiation preparation process, and then had each team present their findings as though they were the OTHER team.
Not surprisingly, each team was completely surprised to learn what the other side thought might be important to them. With joint gain tools and language under their respective belts, each was able to inquire deeply and respectfully into what really mattered to the other. With those interests better understood, the two teams were able to resolve all but one issue, which the two CEO’s put to bed in the following week. Six years of arbitration, litigation, and allowing their major competitor time to steal market share wound up being resolved in two days of real time joint gain application.
In other sections of this powerful and practical book, Bishop shares creative workarounds for decision paralysis, culture clashes, misaligned silos, and meeting mania, and the myth of buy-in. As you read the many real life examples in his book, you will recognize many core principles that Vantage Partners has brought to the world through our best selling books, Getting to Yes and Difficult Conversations. In many ways, Workarounds That Work functions as a practical field book for our groundbreaking thought leadership.
Congratulations, Russell. We applaud your success and the creative application of these joint gain tools. You can learn more about Workarounds That Work by going to www.workaroundsthatwork.com.
Author of Workarounds That Work, Russell Bishop is a recognized expert in personal and organization transformation. He possesses an uncommon ability to inspire clarity and provoke transformational change. Russell also serves as Senior Editor-at-Large for the Huffington Post. www.russellbishop.com