Negotiating at Work

Turn Small Wins into Big Gains

Deborah M. Kolb, Jessica L. Porter

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118352410
• eBook ISBN: 9781118416839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Understand the context of negotiations to achieve better results

Negotiation has always been at the heart of solving problems at work. Yet today, when people in organizations are asked to do more with less, be responsive 24/7, and manage in rapidly changing environments, negotiation is more essential than ever. What has been missed in much of the literature of the past 30 years is that negotiations in organizations always take place within a context—of organizational culture, of prior negotiations, of power relationships—that dictates which issues are negotiable and by whom. When we negotiate for new opportunities or increased flexibility, we never do it in a vacuum. We challenge the status quo and we build out the path for others to negotiate those issues after us. In this way, negotiating for ourselves at work can create small wins that can grow into something bigger, for ourselves and our organizations. Seen in this way, negotiation becomes a tool for addressing ineffective practices and outdated assumptions, and for creating change.

Negotiating at Work offers practical advice for managing your own workplace negotiations: how to get opportunities, promotions, flexibility, buy-in, support, and credit for your work. It does so within the context of organizational dynamics, recognizing that to negotiate with someone who has more power adds a level of complexity. The is true when we negotiate with our superiors, and also true for individuals currently under represented in senior leadership roles, whose managers may not recognize certain issues as barriers or obstacles.

Negotiating at Work is rooted in real-life cases of professionals from a wide range of industries and organizations, both national and international.

• Strategies to get the other person to the table and engage in creative problem solving, even when they are reluctant to do so
• Tips on how to recognize opportunities to negotiate, bolster your confidence prior to the negotiation, turn 'asks' into a negotiation, and advance negotiations that get "stuck"
• A rich examination of research on negotiation, conflict management, and gender

By using these strategies, you can negotiate successfully for your job and your career; in a larger field, you can also alter organizational practices and policies that impact others.

PART ONE
PREPARING FOR n-NEGOTIATIONS

1
You Can't Get What You Want If You Don't Know What You Want

Several years ago, I was teaching a negotiation program for women in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The women in the program, scientists from all over the world, worked for large international development organizations, universities, and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), all in the field of agriculture. Our curriculum focused on how the women could better advocate for what they wanted and needed in their careers during negotiations at work. Their issues ranged from securing the resources to attend international conferences to working out disagreements between different groups of scientists over grants, to negotiating for promotions, to securing more resources for a project.

One evening, some of the local women invited me to shop with them for tablecloths at the local market. In this environment, my African escorts were pros at negotiating the price with cloth vendors. They had a keen eye for the value and quality of the embroidered fabrics and knew just what they wanted. They knew which vendor was likely to make the best deal, and they were well informed. Their experiences negotiating in African markets, N-negotiations, made them confident in ways I admired.

Back in our classroom the next day, the situation changed. It was our final session, and the women had to plan an n-negotiation that they would have at work, at home, or in the community about something that mattered to them. While many were highly successful in their fields, they had really not thought about negotiating to get what they wanted in these contexts.

One participant whom I'll call Beatrice colorfully and metaphorically described how her boss continually changed his expectations of her and her work in her institute: “He asks me to get water, and when I bring it in a glass, he says he wants it in a mug. When I bring water in a mug, he says, ‘Why did you get the water in the first place?’ ” Again and again she tried to figure out what he wanted; finally, she decided her situation had become untenable but had no idea what to do about it. She knew she wanted to negotiate, but for what? She knew she was dissatisfied with the situation, but did she want to leave? Did she want to seek a different position in the organization? Her husband suggested a sabbatical, but this was something that had never been done in her NGO.

Fortunately Beatrice had an extensive network of other women scientists, many of whom worked in local universities. She gathered ideas from them on how a sabbatical might be structured. And because she knew her boss very well, she was able to construct a proposal and be prepared to counter his objections in such a way that he was more likely to agree. To her surprise, he ultimately granted her a sabbatical.

Two Steps to Prep for Negotiating

This chapter focuses on the first steps in preparing for a negotiation: figuring out what you want and learning what you need to know in order to advocate for it. It's pretty obvious that you can't get what you want if you don't know what you want. And figuring out what you want can be particularly complicated when negotiating in an organization. It's one thing to be clear about the topic of negotiation if, for example, you want a salary increase. The challenge there is to learn enough to set high but realistic aspirations that can guide your negotiating strategy. Gathering that kind of information is not always easy, but it makes the issues to be negotiated relatively clear. However, things become more complicated when one is trying, as Beatrice is, to figure out what exactly to negotiate about in order to make her situation better. Like the women in the Ethiopian marketplace, Beatrice needs good information about the organizational equivalents of tablecloth prices: what people who negotiate in similar situations get, what it is reasonable to ask for, and more knowledge about the people she is dealing with.

Challenges in Figuring Out What You Want

As Beatrice knew, it is not always easy to figure out what you want or what a reasonable goal might be for a particular negotiation. Some of the challenges are individual and become evident especially when somebody is negotiating for oneself; others derive from the ways that negotiations unfold in the workplace. In their book Ask for It, authors Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever suggest that figuring out what you want can be complicated, especially for a woman.¹ The challenge can come from confused messages that she received as she was growing up, making it difficult for her to distinguish what she wants from what others expect of her. This was certainly true for some of the scientists in the African negotiation program and was likely compounded by cultural issues, particularly the role of family and community that many African women face. The scientists explained that women in these settings must always be cognizant of family obligations when negotiating at work. But when the focus is on changing something about your work—for example, a new title or position or garnering support for a new project or a change in workload—figuring out what you want can present an additional hurdle for both women and men.

Several challenges add to the difficulty.

Challenge 1: Negotiating for Yourself, Not as an Agent

First is the challenge of negotiating not as an agent of your organization but for yourself. When I work with executives, both women and men, I typically begin by asking them about their experiences negotiating with clients and customers. They generally describe what they think makes them successful in what we have called capital N-negotiations.

N-Negotiations Are the Familiar Kind.

These are formal exchanges where both parties recognize that they are in a negotiation over a contract or a deal of some sort with internal and external clients and customers. Participants in these situations credit their acknowledged success to such attributes as an ability to listen well, learn about what the other party wants, gather good information to support what they want, develop flexibility to create options that meet mutual needs, and marshal the support of their organizations to back them up.²

But n-Negotiations Are Different in Kind.

I then shift the conver­sation to what we call lowercase n-negotiations: those exchanges in which we're negotiating mostly for ourselves. I ask what difference it makes to negotiate for oneself as a principal versus negotiating as an agent for an organization—and people never hesitate to describe these differences. When negotiating for themselves, they say, it's difficult to be objective: they feel less secure; the negotiations feel more personal, making it easy to become emotional. There are also power dynamics involved. Will those in authority see it as legitimate for me to negotiate? Will negotiating affect how others see me? This holds especially true when the negotiation is with a boss. How will she respond? Will she see the negotiation as necessary? Will she challenge me for even bringing up this issue? How will the negotiation affect our working relationship going forward?³

Negotiating for resources at budget time is an N-negotiation. There is a formal process and a routine for how and what you ask for. You put together your case, connecting your requests to goals you will commit to achieving. You schedule a meeting, and you and your boss both expect there will be some sort of negotiation over budget, resources, and priorities.

But other situations in which you need to negotiate with your boss differ greatly. For example, imagine you have accepted a new role and made a commitment to implement a new program. Once into the role, you discover that the resources you requested (or were just assigned to you) are not sufficient. Now you have to launch a negotiation that nobody expected to have—and asking for more resources may raise questions about you and your ability to do the job. In the former case, negotiation is expected, and as part of a particular negotiated order, there is likely to be an associated routine, probably of some back-and-forth. But there is no expectation of negotiation in the second situation. In fact, raising it at all may invite resistance, because your ask might put the other person in a difficult situation.

Gender May Heighten These Concerns.

People tend to ask women more frequently than men for favors or help, such as picking up extra responsibilities, taking up certain support roles, helping a colleague, and mentoring other women.⁴ And for a number of reasons, women are more likely than men to say yes to these requests. They might want the person who asks for help to like them,⁵ or they might be more concerned about the welfare of others.⁶ Adding to the pressure to say yes to these types of extra tasks is a gendered expectation that women are helpers, more collaborative than men, and therefore likely to say yes.⁷

And just as there might be a social cost to asking, there can be costs to declining such requests.⁸ William Ury in The Power of a Positive No catalogues some of the reasons people fear saying no: they don't want to jeopardize a relationship, they feel guilty, or they may feel their job is on the line. Women can be particularly conscious of the costs of saying no, since they are more likely to decide whether to perform a favor based on a fear of negative consequences, whereas men are more likely to base their decisions to accept or decline a favor for instrumental reasons, such as the status level of the person making the request.⁹

Gender-Status Beliefs.

It is also just as likely that women may raise issues that others might not re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• More Praise for Negotiating at Work
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: Negotiating in the Shadow of Organizations
• About the Authors
• PART ONE: PREPARING FOR n-NEGOTIATIONS
• PART TWO: PUTTING n-NEGOTIATIONS INTO PRACTICE
• CODA: NOTES ON CHANGE
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement