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Management By Agreement

Tips to Keep Your Agreements on Track

by Stewart Levine

November 2005

You can view all forms of managerial activity as a series of negotiations and promises for resolving the ambiguities and conflicts that come up as people perform their agreements. The following tips and techniques will help you keep things on track. The ideas are simple enough but implementing them is not always easy. Changing behavior is always challenging but if you are interested in improving results new behaviors are helpful. The value of agreements is that they align mind and heart and create the power of synergy in relationships. The challenge is that when lawyers endeavor to collaborate they often get stuck in conflict—it’s just the nature of the “software” lawyers have been programmed with in their educational process. I hope these tips are helpful in getting lawyers beyond their learned habits.

Preventing Conflict

Conflict happens! It happens without any bad intention. Conflict and disagreements occur because of different perceptions and observations; different interpretations placed on the meaning of things; different feelings people bring to situations and different desired outcomes. The key to preventing conflict and achieving desired outcomes is to craft an agreement for results that can serve as the roadmap from where you are to where you want to be. This agreement should contain the following items:

  1. What is the detailed vision of what you want to achieve with as much detail as you can think of. What will things look like 3, 6,12 months out?
  2. How will you measure success? What are the agreed objective benchmarks you will use to measure if you achieved the vision?
  3. Make detailed promises of what each of you will do and have consequences for breaking promises.
  4. Share fears and concerns about moving forward together. Get on the table what might get in the way of fully trusting and committing to achieving the results you want.
  5. Use the above dialogue for developing relationship and deepening trust. Once relationship is established you can work through anything. The detailed agreement is not nearly as important as the relationship. As long as you can continue to work together you will achieve results beyond expectation.

Resolving Conflict

Remember all conflict happens at the emotional level. Emotional triggers prevent the resolution. Deal with the emotion and whatever the "fight" was about will resolve itself. To resolve conflict effectively remember:

  1. Most conflict is not the result of any kind of negative attention. Because of differences in people, failure to get clear at the beginning and inexact language conflict happens. Don't be so quick to blame.
  2. Conflict shows up as a stress reaction. Before you can engage in meaningful collaborative dialogue you must manage your stress.
  3. The two keys to resolving conflict effectively are a.) Listening and understanding the other's point of view; and b.) Forgiveness—letting go of how you are holding them and the situation.
  4. Conflict lives inside each of us as a story - it's the way we talk to ourselves about the situation. For both catharsis, and to share details everyone tells their story from beginning to end, without interruption.
  5. The goal is to reach a new agreement for the future. To get you engaged in doing that keep in mind that as long as the conflict exists you are paying a price for bringing the conflict with you.

Negotiating Excellence

Remember, the game is not to win, but to reach an agreement everyone can win with.

  1. The most powerful form of negotiating is to find out what they want and figure out how to give it to them; let them know what you want and to get them figuring out how to give you what you need.
  2. Always leave something on the table. If the deal is too sharp it will come back to haunt you because everyone will not be able to perform.
  3. Think in terms of a long-term collaboration, not a short-term transaction. This will help you to create a relationship which is critical if you want to continue working together.
  4. Get beneath positions to the concerns that are behind them. Find out what they are really concerned about and take care of it.
  5. Games and withholding are ploys that never work. Everything always gets revealed so you might as well let it all out and deal with it.
 

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About the Author

Stewart Levine, Esq., is a consultant, trainer, mediator and facilitator. He is the author of the award winning “Getting to Resolution: Turning Conflict Into Collaboration” and the recently released “Book of Agreement” that has been called “more practical than Getting to Yes.” www.ResolutionWorks.org.