Mastering Negotiation Means Facing What You’re Afraid Of [00.00]
Moshe Cohen :
We are really good at teaching people skills and strategies. And then they go to use them and they choke. More often than not. What gets in the way is their emotions. I can’t tell you how many of my students have come to me and said, I negotiate every day for my boss with clients, with vendors, but I can’t negotiate with my boss when it comes to my own career and ask them what’s different.
It’s the same skills. And what’s different is that when it’s them, all of their emotions come in, they feel stressed and they shut down. However, those fears are so powerful that they prevent people from negotiating. They make people rush through their negotiations. They make people back off at the first sign of resistance.
And if you’re aware that’s going on, then you can manage it. One of the things that I ask people when I coach them in their negotiation is, what are you afraid might happen? If you ask for this, what, what’s actually gonna happen? I say, how likely is it that you’re gonna ask your boss for a raise and your boss is gonna say, leave and never come back?
It’s not like, and even if that happened, what are you gonna do? Then you’ll find another job. This isn’t the only place you can work. So once people can start thinking through their fears, they become a lot more manageable. They can get their arms around them.
Negotiation Begins Within: Reframing Self-Doubt and Reclaiming Your Voice [01:16]
Aram Donigian :
If you were negotiating for a person that looks like, sounds like things like you but you’re a negotiator on their behalf rather than your own behalf, how would that change the way in which you approach that? I don’t know if that framing may work too.
Julie Salganik :
I often ask them to step outside of themselves. So I might ask them to say, who’s the person in your life who thinks you are an absolute rockstar? And if they had to go in and be your agent in this conversation, what would they say? Good. Write it down, practice it.
Sometimes just getting the building, the neural pathways, right? Getting those words out of your own mouth and not having the sky fall down is a really powerful experience. So the real opportunity becomes how do we understand someone and meet them where they are? It is absolutely about the preparation and the learning, and the framing and the strategy and all of those things.
If you don’t do the work to look inside yourself too, you may very well be missing an opportunity. Because if we can’t get ourselves aligned with ourselves, it’s going to be really hard to come across. What I observed over the course of my time doing the negotiation work is, there are lots of people who really need the advice and the skills, and sometimes that makes a really big difference for people.
And then they would go out to have the big negotiation and for whatever reason, just revert back to exactly what they had done in the past. So if I’m going into a negotiation and I fear that I’m never going to make headway, it doesn’t really matter what words I’m saying, but if that’s the story that’s raging in the back of my head, I can’t connect that storyline internally.
It’s very little I’m going to be able to say, and very few tools that are going to save me from that negotiation was about aggressiveness. And we had to really find a different frame. And so in our conversations we worked through it and he said, maybe I don’t need to be aggressive. Maybe I can just be assertive in the new environment that he was in, the strong negotiators were very aggressive, and so he was struggling with the, do I meet them where they are, and then risk showing up as that guy, which he was deeply committed not to.
And you can imagine all of the reasons why in our society, yeah, that would carry some consequences, right? And so it was just that little shift to go from aggressiveness to assertiveness that freed him up. And within a couple of weeks, he’d basically closed off everything he needed to close off and launch the part of the business he was looking to launch and brought on the partners he was looking to bring on.
And he was done. He didn’t really need anything. Not even the preparation to be honest. He just needed to shift his perspective, internal work and building those connections inside ourselves and finding the stories that we’ve been telling consciously or unconsciously that are getting in our way.
Smart Salary Negotiation: When to Push, When to Pause, and How to Leverage What Matters Most [03:33]
AD :
It’s a common question about how do I apply these skills to negotiate more effectively for a salary, for a new position, or even for a pay raise, whether you’re with a company or whether you are just trying to get on with the company. In this case, my student had been with the company for not quite a year, but then came up time to discuss a potential raise. And really, again, thinking about the things we’ve talked about so many podcasts before, the student was just sharp about thinking about how to leverage the relationship that he had with the manager and developed over the last year to really dig into what interests there were, take time to consider what jobs were out there if they had to walk away. So the idea of alternatives, you know, really get creative around potential options. And also think about what are fair comparisons, throughout just transparent, open communication both ways, lots of good questioning.
And then finally thinking about commitment, submitting to come back after some time to, after having discussed it and at the end the student was able to negotiate a two and a half times, not percentage, but two and a half times a greater raise than what had originally been proposed.
So no you don’t always negotiate. If you came to me today, Nolan, with a proposal or an offer that satisfied my interest in whole because I really wanted to work for you, I really wanted this job. What you were offering me was incredibly fair. Why would I negotiate that further and risk damage to the relationship?
Risk a possible no, and that didn’t need to be that way or even risk if you were to agree to something greater. Risk putting you at some greater risk. So I don’t think you always negotiate, and I think that when you do there’s a few things we can get into in terms of advice and principles that are pretty applicable.
Nolan Martin :
So everyone’s interests need to be aligned and so I think that a smart Negotiate X listener going into the salary negotiation just needs to understand, where can I gain some ground and where should I just not push.
Negotiating Isn’t the Problem—The System Is: Why Fixing Workplace Bias Requires More Than Confidence [05:37]
Sara Laschever :
Sure. Well, the first big difference is men just do it more. One study Linda did show that men negotiate for themselves at work, so for things that will help them get ahead professionally.
Four times as frequently as women do. So that means if every quarter, every three months or so, you as a woman gets up your nerve and goes in and asks for something that will help you get ahead. The typical man is doing that 16 times a year. He may not be getting everything he’s asking for, but simply because he is asking for so many more big and little things, he is gonna move ahead of you faster if you’re a woman.
The other thing is that men aim higher when they do negotiate. They feel more entitled to get rewarded for what they’re doing. And one study showed that they ask for 30% more than women do. Women are apparently more likely to have their self-esteem fluctuate a little more in response to negative feedback, criticism, whatever, unfavorable evaluations, that kind of thing.
Men tend to be a little bit more stable. And so women often don’t negotiate ’cause they’re afraid of getting turned down. They’re afraid of no. And that can be a really self-defeating approach. This isn’t really a women’s problem, this is a social problem, it’s an organizational problem, and it cannot be fixed just by women raising their hands a little bit more often.
I can help one woman at a time, improve her situation, and get ahead. But we’re not gonna get wholesale change until organizations take the lead. So number one, detailed specific evaluation systems that are transparent and applied equally to everybody. So try to get subjective judgments out of the decision making about who gets promoted, who gets offered particular opportunities.
There are studies that show that even people who do not think, men and women who don’t think they have any problems, any biases about women in the workplace when presented with identical work products, but one has a male name and the other has a female name, they will evaluate the one with the female name as inferior to that by somebody you know with a male name.
When men and women apply for jobs, men’s CVs are taken more seriously, rated more highly than women’s. When people recommend women for other positions within the organization, they use more muted, modified descriptors in supporting them, recommending them. They use more superlatives when they talk about men.
So, the evaluation system’s really important to try to get those subjective biases, which are often unconscious. It’s not that people are trying to discriminate against women. We all are the products of the noise of the culture that we have grown up in. So there’s that. Then there is also, I know you said you wanna direct this to some degree at middle managers.
A lot of women seem to get stuck at that middle management level. So even if the top boss is saying, we want women to get ahead, we want more opportunities for women. Somehow the guys in the middle don’t get that message or haven’t been mentored or trained to be more open to that.
So the mentoring, the training’s important. The other thing that works really well is to attach managers’ evaluations, their performance evaluations to how well the women they supervise, move ahead, how well they’re doing. And certain organizations have done this where they not only say your performance evaluations are gonna be tied to how the women or minorities who supervise get ahead, but we are gonna publish it quarterly.
So all your competitors in this organization, all you know, the people at your level or the people who are, potentially maybe going to give you some opportunities, throw some good stuff your way, they’re gonna know you’re not doing as well, and people are really competitive. So if you know just that the guy in the next office down or around at the other wing is doing this better than you are, you’re gonna get busy. A lot of people get really busy trying to make the change.
NM :
And we will see you in the next episode.
