High Performing Business – Negotiations – Fairness
Michelle LaBrosse, CCPM, PMP, PMI-ACP
The perception of fairness is a critical success factor in negotiations.
In the book Sway, The Pull of Irrational Forces, the authors discuss how people want to have the decisions of others for which impact them be made fairly. If there is a perception someone was not fair in an interaction, there leaves a stain in the memory of the person and their associated organization.
We see this often in the Cheetah Exam Prep with our students who feel they are treated unfairly from PMI in the pursuit of becoming PMP certified. We will have students with very similar experience backgrounds and similar eligibility applications where they approve one but not the other. This leaves the student not approved extremely disgruntled. Then we have students who do manage to get the eligibility letter from PMI, but for whatever their reasons don’t follow our course processes and end up having to take the test several times before they ultimately pass. These students tell us the test questions on the second and third attempt get easier and they feel that PMI purposely does this to get them to pay more exam fees. PMI may have very good reasons for the way it does business, but when an organization wants to create good will with its customer base, they need to ensure their processes are clearly documented and uniformly followed. Even the perception that a process is not fair when in fact it may be quite fair will hurt an organization (as is the example of the student feeling the organization is making the test easier in subsequent attempts to get more exam fees). While having consistent and fair processes throughout the business is important, it’s even more important to have those processes that directly impact the viability of another’s life be rock solid, transparent, and communicated as such.
It is for this reason at Cheetah Learning in our program to help people become Certified Project Managers, we teach our students how to create a stable negotiations process. Developing trust from having stable ways of interacting with others creates enduring success – which is one of the many values of becoming a Cheetah Certifed Project Manager (CCPM). It’s also why the CCPM is gaining in popularity and growing quickly as the new “must have” PM certification.
“The first thing my boss said when I told him I was interested in getting my PMP certification was that if I was going to do it, he’d heard Cheetah Learning was the best.”