On September 4 the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine (Chamber) held the third session of the Monthly Professional Development Series organized within the framework of the Women's Executive Leadership Development Initiative (WELDI): "Interest-Based Negotiation: The Path to Cooperation" presented by Ms. Galyna Yeromenko of Ukrainian Mediation Center at kmbs (Kyiv Mohyla Business School).

The goal of the session was to help understand the essence of working with vested interests. During the meeting Ms. Galyna Yeromenko presented the “conflict of interest” concept and ways to resolve it, and explained what types of interest exist, and why it is important to distinguish between them.

Ms. Yeromenko started the session with an interactive exercise asking WELDI participants to take on the role of a business owner struggling with management difficulties and to suggest the best way out of the situation. As a result participants learned that decisions are usually based on power, interest, or procedures and how to differentiate between them.
Power as a basis for decision-making process means the authority to act in a certain way.
Interest can be either personal or concern other people and sides of the negotiation.
Procedure as grounds for decision-making acts mainly in the form of legal or obligatory instructions and documents.

Ms. Yeromenko highlighted that people take on different roles while making decisions: they can act as referees, experts, integrators, coaches or mediators, and explained the differences in behavior for each of these roles.

Ms. Yeromenko emphasized the importance of working with interest in a corporate world and stated that managers working with interests of their employees are much more successful. To prove the statement, she presented a statistical chart from a conference on personnel motivation, showing that when the interests and needs of employees are addressed, they accomplish work beyond the scope of their responsibilities, think about their work tasks during their spare time, remain in the company even if they get an offer from another company for a similar position with a salary which is 10% higher, feel that they are part of the company and are more innovative.

To work with interests effectively it is of great importance to find answers to the following questions:
who is a carrier of an interest
what type of interest it is
what techniques should be used to address this type of interest

Also Ms. Yeromenko stressed that when sitting at the negotiation table, one should understand that a counterpart can represent not only his or her interests, but also the interests of employees of a company, its board members, customers, etc. Working with interests helps to widen the audience of negotiations, add other participants whose needs and interests are involved, understand them and build your negotiation strategy most effectively.

Ms. Yeromenko indicated that effective techniques for working with interests include questioning, summarizing, and reformulation. When working with questions one should always ask: What is important? Why is it important? What does it mean? What is the most important? Summarizing and reformulation help a person to understand what a person really means, make sure there were no misunderstandings in communication and make sure everyone is understood correctly.

The presentation was followed by a short Q&A session. Continuing the evening, all the participants were invited to a Business Networking reception to meet fellow WELDI members and share their thoughts and impressions of the session.

According to the results of the participant survey, about 90% of respondents considered the Interest-Based Negotiation session "good" or "very good". The feedback from WELDI members indicated that the presentation was very useful, provided a lot of life examples and the knowledge acquired will be good for personal usage.