You're leading a team negotiation and you have to manage different personalities. What's your first move?

Very good points! I’ve also found that if I can develop an understanding of the team members’ values and pain points I can use that data to help better craft my negotiation points with a more razor sharp approach. The more you know, the better!

A team with no disagreements is not an effective team. Effective teams include individuals with different skills and perspectives—and thus conflict may arise. A leader's job is to leave room for different approaches and respectful dissent. Lack of dissent may indicate a problem with the team, but more often, it signals a problem with the leader. A mentor of mine once said he chose his team to compensate for his weaknesses. As I pick my M&A teams, I keep this lesson in mind. His point was there are different roles on a team. The leader's first job is to understand the strengths and weakness of the team members, including his or her own, and then leverage the strengths of the team to be as effective as possible.

The most important thing is to know your team. You want to know their skills, weaknesses, and how they operate. Just as, if not more important, you also want to be acutely aware of the team dynamics. Are there cliques or subgroups? Is there friction between some members? Who works best together? Who doesn't get along? All of these things can have a huge impact on the success of a negotiation.

To build trust, you need to become an amazing listener. I have seen countless situations, in which teams lose trust and form natural cliques just because they simply always felt like their managers or team leaders have never listened to them. Even if some team members are difficult and may propose bad ideas, instead of a blunt "no way" or "not possible", you can provide some feedback so that your team doesn't assume you have something against some members personally. It's more of a soft skill really, building trust and rapport. You definitely need advanced emotional intelligence to do it properly!

The article forgets to mention that each team member must prepare before participating in any team strategies. Outside of that, I would be mindful of the followings: - Empower decision-making within the team. This breeds accountability. - Practice trust both ways. If you trust, people will trust you. - Address the elephant in the room. Always, this helps clear the air, and allow the team to be on the same page.