May 20th, 2016, iLab Workshop VI was held in School of Management in Fudan University.
During the two-hour workshop, Lan Luan, the Shanghai project leader of BCG shared her experiences and views towards clients’ expectation and offered several tips of internal management.
After the intriguing opening, Ms. Lan began her topic with the questions of how to manage clients’ expectation in negotiation and how to implement the conflict management skills. “Negotiation skills influence the clients’ expectation in many ways.” She said.
In her thought-provoking speech, all of the students were required to involve in the open-ended discussion about the expectation management. Each problem raised from previous job experience would be taken into solution brainstorming.
After her comments on the brainstorming was a role-playing, which pushed the atmosphere to the climax.
The scenarios were set between consultants and clients acted by both students and Ms. Lan. During the performance, the problems in negotiations indicated the diversity due to different ways of communication.
The results show that many factors lead to a successful expectation management, yet the negotiation concepts are common. These concepts lie in client demand evaluation, analysis of client behavior, evolution of service and control of information asymmetry.
The workshop contributes to students’ critical thinking when negotiating with clients, and these intangible insights would be a beacon for those students engaged in the workshop for their future development.
Written by 2015 IMBA CHEN Qing
May 20, 2016
