Nolan Martin :
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us on the NEGOTIATEx podcast. We are continuing our conversation with Joan Moon, a negotiation coach, trainer, and consultant. If you haven’t already checked out part A of the show, be sure to do that first. Let’s jump in the conversation with Joan.
Aram Donigian :
Socialization is another process. It’s a structure. We know that it’s a factor that influences women’s negotiation behavior. You were just talking to that. I’m a parent of six kids, four girls, and I guess I’m just curious because I’m responsible for so much of the socialization that’s occurring. How can educators that spend so much time with our youth through their first 12 years of schooling, contribute to building negotiation skills in women from a young age to counteract maybe some of these early socialization effects?
Breaking Gender Norms: How Early Expectations Shape Our Future [01:31]
Joan Moon :
Yeah, I love that question, Aram, because there’s so much research out there that shows that gendered expectations start at a really, really young age. I saw something on social media recently about going through a store and looking at the boys section and the girls section and the boys, there’s NASA T-shirts, and in the girls section, it’s rainbows and tell me I’m cute. And so the feedback that we give to young children, it starts at such an early age.
So to answer this question, I would say one of the first things that you can do as a father or as an influence in any young person’s life is to notice how you are providing positive feedback. Is it just for gendered behavior? And I think that this can be magnified more in certain cultures. So I’m Korean-American. I was always given positive feedback when I performed really gendered duties.
So when guests came over, I cut the fruit, I served the tea, and then I silently stood in the background. And the silent part was really important. And I noticed as I reflect as an adult, I continued this behavior. So when I perpetuated this behavior onto others unintentionally, so when my brother was getting married, my uncle was coming to visit right after the wedding and he was the great patriarch of our family.
And so after dinner, I got up and I saw that my new sister-in-law wasn’t getting up with me. She’s not Korean, so she didn’t know these sort of unspoken rules
AD :
And you didn’t give her the playbook like, Hey, you’re coming into the family this is.
JM :
Oh, I gave her a major assist. Okay. So I said, Hey, I singled her like, Hey, come with me. And so she comes up to me and I whispered to her, they need to see you doing the dishes. And like clockwork, we started doing the dishes. I like clockwork. My uncle turns to my brother, he nods approvingly, and he says in Korean, she seems like a nice girl.
And the thing is, this is not a culture-specific thing. I do think it’s magnified or perhaps a little more explicit in certain cultures, but what are we giving positive feedback for to girls and women? And so being aware of that and monitoring that I think can make a huge, huge difference. It starts with monitoring, but in order to monitor that, you also have to have an awareness of what is gendered behavior. So that brings me to my second point, learning about gendered issues.
You can’t fix something if you don’t know how to diagnose it. So let’s stop thinking about gender issue as a woman’s problem. Some men don’t realize that they also have a gender and we can educate ourselves on gender issues. I actually listened to a great podcast. It’s about gender from a man’s perspective. It’s called man enough, and it’s incredibly thoughtful and nuanced and wrestles with really tough subjects.
So I really love that podcast. And as a parent, I think one thing, and this is just coming from my own personal experiences, it’s not based on some of the research out there, but teaching girls to trust their inner compass at a really young age because women are exposed to so much gaslighting throughout their lives.
And what can really, really help is that we teach girls from a younger age to trust themselves. It doesn’t mean that we don’t teach them to be reflective or change their mind when they have more updated information on something, but it means when a little girl says something, instead of saying, are you sure? Why are you sure about that? And instead saying, oh, tell me why you think that way. And a response can be really, that small change can make a really big difference in how that girl turns into a woman and how she trusts herself as an adult.
AD :
I know you said that’s simple. I think it’s very profound as a parent. I thank you. That is good homework for me there.
JM :
Thank you. I appreciate that.
NM :
Hesitancy to negotiate is one internal barrier women may face in negotiations. How do you guide women to overcome potentially self-imposed limitations in building the confidence needed to negotiate effectively, both in general sense and even more so in male dominated fields.
Coaching Strategies To Boost Confidence And Negotiation Skills [05:59]
JM :
So one thing that I do with all of my coaching clients is I give three different types of data. And the first one is the gender research. Because you hear this, researcher’s like, oh wow. Now so many of my own experiences make a lot of sense. It validates their own experiences and it’s providing a larger context for their own experiences. So the research on women getting worse negotiation outcomes when there’s ambiguity or women being challenged more than men, I bring all of these research to validate and also provide context.
The second piece of data is anecdotal data, whether it’s from other women, whether it’s my own experiences, other clients. And what it does is it counterbalances the feelings of isolation that you can feel when you’re going through a really tough time when you feel like, oh my gosh, did I mess this up? And women are incredibly hard on themselves.
And the third piece of data I offer is I pull that data from what they have told me to demonstrate. You actually have been doing this and you can be good at it too. So I had a recent client, Ellen, she had reached out to me and she was just in a really bad place. She was overworked, burnt out.
She was in consulting and she was trying to get off of this project. Her leadership had given her all these promises, but they weren’t fulfilling these promises. And she, in the end, reached out to a very senior member of the leadership team and leveraged her and her influence to get off of this project that she had desperately been trying to for weeks and months. And so when she came to me, she was like, oh man, my managers kept saying no and this and that.
I was like, but what I see, I see you having successfully actually utilize the negotiation strategies that you’ve learned, right? I teach a negotiation course online and I call all parties, PDMs, power brokers, decision makers and messengers. And I said, you got the power broker involved to influence the decision maker and to finally release you from this project. And she was being so hard on herself that she wasn’t giving herself credit for. You obtained the objective that you set out for set. And so a lot of this is building up. You can do this and you have done this successfully, so let’s just keep going. And that helps women overcome some of the obstacles and shift into a positive growth mindset.
AD :
Those three points you shared around data, the reason that resonates with me, I was reading something recently talking about when you highlight those sorts of things, you are actually inoculating someone. And I’m wondering if the research shows that once you’ve hit those three points of data, again, don’t want to oversimplify, but that in and of itself you’re going to see a transformation and is that true? Do you see that to be true?
Prioritizing Mindset: The Key To Effective Strategy And Successful Negotiations [09:08]
JM :
Absolutely. So when I first started the coaching, I used to jump straight into strategy, right? Here are the stakeholders, here’s your framing strategy, here’s the timing, here’s the sequence. We went straight into strategy and I thought we had a solid plan, but with one of my early clients, everything fell apart the moment she entered that conversation. And it’s because I realized we hadn’t done the mindset work. We hadn’t addressed all of these fears coming up, and we know, and there’s plenty of research that shows how the psychological state can influence negotiation outcomes.
And so what I do in the very beginning is what you’re talking about, this inoculation, right? We address the mindset issues so that they can take these fears over to the side and really focus on the strategy. That’s when we roll up our sleeves and we get to work. But until I see that shift in the mindset and address any hesitations, none of the strategy work will be fruitful until we’ve done that work.
AD :
As a consultant, a trainer, a coach, just looking at your website, mentoring, peer support are some potential strategies for overcoming negotiation reluctance. Can you share an example of what that looks like? Mentorship peer networks and how they’ve positively influenced someone’s either ability to negotiate or the outcome they were able to achieve.
Leveraging Networks: The Crucial Role Of Information And Support In Negotiation Success [10:35]
JM :
So networks are important for both the outcomes of the negotiation, but also the social support that one needs throughout a negotiation. And so I’ve had clients really utilize their networks well to get key pieces of information. So I’ve had clients where they’re part of secret Facebook groups where everyone in the same industry was sharing their salary information so that everyone could have good information as they negotiate their own salaries. I did say make sure that there’s some men’s data in there because if every woman on that database is making 70 cents to a man’s dollar, then that might not be good information.
So networks can be good for calling someone up and asking for information about an organization that they’re applying to. And we saw this, there was one high profile case where Bradley Cooper shared with his co-star, Jennifer Lawrence, what his salary was for a movie that they were co-starring in so that she had good information to negotiate her own salary.
So networks can be incredibly powerful sources of information. We also see that they’re important social support networks for women as they go through high stakes negotiations. If you read a memoir by any accomplished woman, you’ll probably find the section where they talk about the group of women who supported them throughout the toughest decision-making processes in their lives.
So for example, I was reading Wendy Sherman’s book recently and she talks about the group of high level women in government getting together and ordering Chinese food on a regular basis because that support network was psychologically and emotionally important. And so I always advise whenever you’re going through a high stress, high stakes negotiation, have your people with you, and I even say sometimes, you might want to explicitly ask them, can you be part of my support network for these next two weeks as I go through this process
AD :
And is bouncing ideas, rehearsing, sanity check on the request I’m about to make? I mean, is that the activity that’s occurring?
JM :
All of the above. It could just simply be like, I’m your number one cheerleader. I’m your hype woman. I’m going to remind you how accomplished and how amazing you are. Or it can be, do you want to role some interview questions? Right? It’s whatever is going to be the most helpful for that individual in that moment.
NM :
So what unique elements do your programs incorporate to address the specific needs of women in negotiation?
Making Negotiations Approachable And Inclusive For Women [13:08]
JM :
So the first thing that I do is I try to make it less scary and less masculine. And the reason I do this is because when you ask, what do you envision when you hear the word negotiation, what word association do you have? What words come to mind? And most of the time, 80% of the time, they’re either very masculine or they’re negative associations. So anxiety, intimidation, men in suits sitting around a conference table. And so my professional brand is very approachable. Negotiation is a woman’s thing too. Let’s all do this together. And so I do try to make it less scary and more inviting, and I want women to know that this doesn’t have to be a scary, intimidating thing.
The second thing I do, in the last couple of months, I launched an online course for women. And what the reason it’s an online course for a woman is that for every fundamental that you might teach in your course, I’ve incorporated all of the gender bias information for every concept and all of the strategies that you would learn in the class that you teach Aram at Tuck or the YouTube videos that are out there.
I just make sure that I don’t make any sort of statement on teaching a negotiation strategy without incorporating the gender bias information for each of those elements.
AD :
So I already know the answer to my next question because you talked about being Korean-American, and I’m curious about the intersectionality of biases. How do you navigate that when gender and race are showing up or gender and culture, gender and ethnicity, whatever the other factors are, how does that impact maybe the nuanced approach that you might take with a client or coachee?
Creating Psychological Safety Across Diverse Workshops And Coaching Sessions [14:54]
JM :
So for my workshops, I do what we call code switching, right? The language that I’m going to use and the way that I show up is going to be different based off of a workshop that I’m doing for let’s say a very male dominated organization in the construction industry, the way that they talk about gender bias or racial bias is going to differ a lot compared to if I’m working with a social justice organization where I can talk about something, I can drop words like cis, heteronormativity and they all understand and nod instead of looking at me confused.
So that’s going to be a little bit different in my private coaching, no matter the client, I validate their lived experience because I will tell you that I had too many people say to me in the past, that’s not how it happened, or you’re imagining it, or maybe you’re being a little bit sensitive about this.
So I know from my own personal experience how harmful it can be to hear that, how it leads to you second guessing yourself and not trusting that inner compass that we had talked about. And so I don’t want to perpetuate that with my clients. And what I’ve found is that anyone who has historically been othered a lot, mainly women of color, I find that they really value the psychological safety that I provide for them in that coaching and training because they don’t have a lot of spaces where they feel that level of psychological safety and that they can say what’s really on their mind.
To me, that’s the foundation of any fruitful coaching relationship. It doesn’t matter the particular background. And we can’t group women of color all into one group because the bias that they experience is going to be different based on their demographic information, the way that other people perceive them. The stereotypes are going to be different for every subgroup. So we don’t group them together. But what I will say is that the common thread there is that psychological safety is a very, very high priority for them.
AD :
Thanks.
NM :
How do you think about quantifying the effectiveness of your programs? And is there a particular success story from someone who has gone through your program that you can share?
Tailoring Workshops To Enhance Understanding And Inclusivity [17:12]
JM :
Yeah. You know, I used to quantify success with how much of an increase in compensation I helped my clients get. So one of my early clients, let’s call her Priya, she worked at a tech company, a household name tech company, big tech company. And when she first came to me, she had talked to a couple of people who were already working there and said, maybe I can get $12,000 more in overall compensation compared to their initial offer.
And after working with me, I helped her get over $60,000 in compensation that was much higher. And I used to talk about these numbers a lot because I was framing success and what I thought other people wanted to hear, and I thought it was a clear marker of success or quantifiable outcomes are easier to compare. But just because you can’t quantify something doesn’t mean that it’s not important, right?
And as I reflect and I think about the work and what I consider a success, what drives me in this work is when I see a transformation and a woman starts to identify as an everyday negotiator, a shift in the mindset because that is going to impact every nook and cranny of her life. So when I get a text from a client from four years ago, she was so hesitant to negotiate, so scared, and now she’s texting me about how she used the skills to negotiate her rent, her wedding details with her mother-in-law, or walking away from a toxic job like the agency that a woman feels after knowing how to negotiate that is what drives me in this work. That’s what I’m passionate about. And so that to me is what true success looks like.
NM :
Thank you.
AD :
Man, I just want to stand up and cheer with an answer like that. I just think it’s so authentic. And I agree this transformative aspect, the fact that it impacts every nook and cranny of life. And I loved, and I’ve had students who’ve come back and said, taking the course and working in this material allowed them to talk about your BATNA, to walk away from somewhere where they shouldn’t have been. And even that is, you can’t quantify that like you were doing with the numbers, but what a huge improvement in the satisfaction and value in that individual’s life,
JM :
Right. And the happiness. How do we quantify a happiness level, right?
AD :
Well, Joan, this has been a great conversation. Nolan and I love visiting with someone who shares passion in this work. I’m going to wrap up with kind of a two-part question. Maybe just leave our listeners with a challenge and maybe an inspiration. Here are my questions. What final piece of advice or encouragement would you give to young women who are just at that beginning point of their professional careers? Question one.
Question two would be, and as you look at your own future, how do you envision your own role in supporting these women going forward?
Empowering Young Women To Invest In Meaningful Relationships [20:16]
JM :
Thank you. Thank you for those questions. So the first one, what final piece of advice I’d give to young women is find your swat, find your hype crew, find your support network. And oftentimes in society, we get these sort of unconscious signals that we need to pour into our romantic relationships, but not quite as often. We get as much reminders to pour into our friendships and these other relationships that we have.
And so I really encourage young women to nourish and invest in those relationships because they are going to be your support network through so many different phases of their lives. Should I mention that we’re recording this on Valentine’s Day?
AD :
I do. I like that answer too, both from experience and as a father. Alright, so let’s get to the second part of it. How do you envision your own role in supporting these women? Where are you seeing yourself in the next 2, 5, 10 years?
A Multifaceted Approach To Tackling Inequities In Society [21:16]
JM :
Well, I will answer with stating what my underlying interest is and not my position. So my underlying interest is to attack inequities from all angles. And that might mean training individual women. It might be helping organizations de-bias their structures and create more inclusive processes. I would love to also go back to working with the most marginalized populations in our society. And so I will keep it open at that. And if anyone wants to contact me about brainstorming and how we can meet those underlying interests, I would very much be open to that.
NM :
Where’s the best place for us to send them?
JM :
I am at Moon Negotiation on Instagram and TikTok. I will be launching my own podcast soon. It’s going to be a Collin show, so you can keep an eye out on social for that.
AD :
Fantastic.
JM :
I have a website called moonnegotiation.com, or if it’s easier, you can find me on LinkedIn and I’ll be releasing the express version of my online course very soon. So keep an eye out. We have a lot of irons in the fire.
NM :
That’s awesome.
AD :
It sounds like you do, and I’m not sure I’ve heard a bigger BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal than attacking inequities from all angles, but haven’t spent the last hour with you. I can tell you are the person for the job. So we will continue to be part of your support network, and we know you’ll be part of ours and really grateful for this time and the insights you’ve shared. Thanks, Joan.
JM :
I really appreciate you having me.
NM :
So that is it for us on today’s podcast. If you haven’t already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the NEGOTIATEx podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.
