Negotiation Skills for Women | C3E Women in Clean Energy Symposium

good afternoon oh come on are you awake out there or what good afternoon there we go I'm going to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart but I will make a confession that it's not near and dear to my heart because I was good at it it was near and dear to my heart because I was so terrible at it I am the embodiment of what you think about as an academic who studies the thing they are worst at and so I used to be someone who avoided conflict who tried to go along to get along and discovered quite a while ago because I've been at this for a long time that that didn't work out so well that avoiding conflict really does not bode well for my ability to have influence and to have an impact in the world and so what I started studying was negotiation and I have been studying negotiation for a very long time now with the intent of trying to figure out how to be more effective how to help people get more of what they want from their negotiated interactions and there are a couple of things that I've learned along the way I'm going to pass on to you and the first thing I want to talk about is that one of the biggest challenges people face when they think about negotiation is that they view negotiation as a battle and that when we were thinking about engaging in a negotiation we're already putting on the battle armor and that battle has the following characteristics I'm gonna try to get stuff from you you don't want me to have and I'm gonna try to keep you from getting my stuff and as soon as I walk into an interaction with another human being like that with that mindset with that battle armor on then we are preparing because they're gonna do exactly the same thing they're seeing I'm prepared for a fight they're going to get ready for a fight and we have a battle and oftentimes when we confront that kind of interaction it becomes more important for us to win then really what it is over which we are negotiating so we privilege winning beyond what it is we might walk away with but what that battle mentality also is it limits what we negotiate because for so many of us the challenge of negotiating is that because we have to get into a battle there are so many people with whom we don't want to pick a fight I mean it's pretty hard for me to negotiate with my Dean if what I have to do in that process is pick a fight with him why would I want to do that so what I want to suggest is that there is actually a better way and what I first want you to do is I want you to broaden your definition about what is negotiation to move from this relatively narrow definition of negotiation as battle to process where two or more parties decide what each will give and hope to get in their interaction and this next clause is really important and through a process of mutual influence and persuasion there is no command and control in negotiation I cannot force you to say yes all I can do is present proposals to you where you believe it is in your interest to say yes which means I really need to understand you your interest your preferences what makes you willing to walk down that path of agreement with me now this definition is relatively broad it can span negotiations that we typically think about as structurally adversarial to ones but most of you probably don't even think about his negotiations so that structurally adversarial one a couple of months ago in response to my giving in to my addictions I like horses so I bought another one yes and now it was up to five the my I have a trailer that holds five horses so we could all get together and drive places but unfortunately my truck was not big enough to haul the trailer and five horses so I need to get a new truck and those of you who not are not particularly knowledgeable about trucks I went from a 2500 GMC to a 3500 dually okay but I had to negotiate somebody knows right you had to negotiate the price of that dually and it turns out that is a structurally adversarial interaction because the caught the truck dealer wanted to basically sell me this most stripped-down model for the most amount of money and I wanted the most tricked-out model for the least amount of money and we had a m-- ago she ation but this definition also includes the meeting I had this morning with my doctoral students because with the research meeting and while the content of the meeting was about the research project the context of the meeting was which of my scarce resources will I contribute to this ongoing interaction because truthfully I called that meeting and I call those students to that meeting because they have resources both tangible and intangible to which I wished access and they showed up to the meeting because I have resources but they wish access to and so while we talked about the research we're also contemplating what do I contribute and what do I hope to get and all of us are doing that so if you think about negotiation you could really distill it down to a very simple equation negotiation equals influence and if you're gonna make changes in the world you have to be able to influence therefore you have to be able to negotiate now one of the things that happens is as you reframe your perspective from negotiation moving away from that battle mentality to one that I think will actually resonate much more so with you and that is that negotiation rather than being a battle should be collaborative problem solving but before you take you sort of lead yourselves down a path of oh right I've heard about this that's that win-win kumbaya everybody feels good about this kind of interaction that's not what I'm talking about what I'm talking about is a solution you're looking at problem solving solution is one that makes you better off better off than your status quo better off than your alternatives better off than had you not negotiated now you're probably thinking that's a pretty low bar why would I negotiate to be worse off don't think too hard you'll have to think back in your own history and I suspect you will find without much difficulty a situation where you voluntarily agreed to an outcome that made you worse off nobody had a gun to your head you said sure you privileged agreement over the quality of the deal so it turns out it's actually a relatively high standard I want to be better off that had I not negotiated but because there is no command and control and negotiation I've got to find a solution that not only makes me better off but at least keeps my counterpart whole because otherwise there is no reason for them to walk the path of agreement with me now if you move from a battle mentality to a problem solving orientation what happens is so many more things become negotiable because now you don't have to worry about picking a fight with the person across the table and so what I want you to think about are all the situations on a daily basis that you could try you could basically create an influence attempt because you understand how to be able to propose solutions to the problems that your counterparts face that make you better off and that is sort of this that's the summary statement of what we're trying to find when we negotiate and it turns out that there are lots of situations where with a little creativity you can figure out solutions and frame them if you understand your counterpart and what they care about when I interviewed here at Stanford for my position I talked to a lot of faculty a lot of senior staff and the deans and I listened very carefully to the challenges and the opportunities that they were describing they were here at Stanford and they eventually decided to make me an offer which I appreciate and when we had a conversation about with my Dean about the compensation package I used all that information that I had gained during the interviews to frame my asks in terms of solutions to the problems and challenges that stand face how could i with my skills and ability and the resources that would be entailed in my compensation package help me help Stanford a problem-solving orientation not solving my problem but solving the problem of my counterpart now what that means is that we need to develop fluency we need to think about the broad topic of negotiation and how understanding this problem-solving orientation can open so many more avenues for negotiation for us getting more of what we want and developing fluency means I need to understand that there's more nuances in how to negotiate than simply coming there with a battle mentality now one of the challenges that I face when I talk about negotiations is that so many people have drunk the kool-aid that the goal of a negotiation is to get a deal the goal of a negotiation is not to get a deal the goal of negotiation is not to get to yes regardless of what some other people have said the goal of negotiation is to get a good deal and sometimes the best deal that's available to you is the one you had before you start the negotiation so what you need to understand is what is a good deal and not privileged agreement over the quality of the deal so let me suggest that you need at least three parameters then you need to have clear in your mind before you initiate a negotiation and the first parameter is what are your alternatives if no deal were reached what happens to you if there is an impasse this is a critical piece of information because it turns out that he or she in this case he said I have to do this in this audience I can just say she that's so rare anyway she who has the best alternatives gets more in the negotiation and why is that what do you think this is not a hypothetical what do you think what makes why would if you have really good alternatives will you get more in the negotiation you can walk away exactly and all of you should know this from your current or past history in the dating world right you know when you've got that you know you're in that period of your life where you're really popular and then somebody wants to spend some time with you and you like you have like 20 questions like where are we going what are we gonna do why should I go out with you but if you're in that period of time where it's been like a really dry spell and somebody asks you out you don't have 20 questions you have an answer yes that sounds good to me this is exactly the same way as alternatives work when I have good alternatives I can command more from the interaction because it's easier for me to walk away and if you and I are negotiating and I have a really good set of alternatives and you want to deal you have to pay me to stay in the game now when you think about your alternatives there's an analogy I want you to think about too many of us look at our alternatives and say and that we use it as a judgment about what is an acceptable level of performance so if I can just get above this I'm doing okay I want you to think about your alternatives as a safety net and I think this is a really important analogy I thought for long and hard about this because if you think about them as a standard for performance so anything above that alternative is good what you have just done is severely limited the upside of your negotiation so think about your alternatives as a safety net much like you would think about a safety net if you were a trapeze artist if you're a trapeze artist and you're trying to have a good performance ending up in the safety net is not prep table right that is not a good performance however if you end up in the safety net you're really glad it's there but it's not something that you aspire to it's not something you want you want a better outcome than that and that's how you should think about your alternatives there your safety net to protect you from the impasse but they are not a standard to judge acceptability of an outcome however your alternatives are outside the negotiation so if you and I are negotiating our alternatives are what happens with perhaps the other parties with whom we could negotiate are the other options that I might have if we cannot come to a deal but they affect how we negotiate because they affect where I set my reservation price or my bottom line my reservation price is a bright-line standard that I do not violate it is the worst possible deal that I would be willing to accept it is that tipping point between a yes and a no that was pretty easy to say it's really hard to do because we human beings are incredibly smart and what we want if we want a privilege getting a deal yes and our reservation price is such that we can't quite exceed our reservation price we come up with all sorts of excuses why that reservation price was bad and why we didn't do a very good job at setting it and how really we should just say yes anyway because of course the future may be more important than the present and so what I suggest to you is that you really think very hard about what that bottom line is and you do it in advance of your negotiation and then you use a strategy to help you solidify that the strategy that I use I have a person actually my co-author on this book who if I'm really concerned that I'm going to be too committed to getting a yes and not getting a good deal I tell him what my bottom line is and I would be I would rather I mean there are a lot of things I'd rather have then have him realize that I've violated my reservation price so I use him as my disciplining mechanism so it's a very useful strategy but you've got to be careful because people are so quick and for those of you who've been out in the world for a while you know you have done this time and again the best example I have is residential real estate sales anybody ever buy a house and did you before you begin that process think about what you could pay what would be reasonable what would be the top end and then as you begin the process you looked at those houses that fit that criteria and they all suck and then you look to the houses that were a little bit more than you should be doing it was a little bit of maybe a big stretch especially here in Silicon Valley a really big stretch and you decided to go for it right you don't need that coffee or that food you don't need insurance you know you don't need to have a savings account let's just put everything into the house you've all violated your reservation prices it's a very difficult strategy to be committed to have the discipline because we so want a deal now if all you pay attention to are these two parameters you will systematically underperform in your negotiations and you will underperform because of a very powerful psychological process which can be described in three words expectations drive behaviors your alternative is your safety net your reservation price is that point of indifference the worst possible deal that you would say yes to and if that's where your head is that's where you will end up what you must also do it's understanding that psychological process about expectations use that psychological process to leverage up your expectations and this is one of the things that I think so few people do in negotiations even those who might think about what their alternatives are and what their reservation prices are what they may also ignore is how powerful setting an aspiration is an optimistic assessment of what you could achieve in this negotiation notice those words optimistic and assessment you have thought about this negotiation and your counterpart and what what would happen what could you achieve if things went your way in this negotiation because you need to leverage up your expectations about what is possible and let me tell you how powerful that is this is a study that was done by some colleagues of mine I want you to first look at the blue bars in the blue bars we have on the fundus on the left-hand side aspiration on the right-hand side alternative negotiators in this situation were asked to either focus on their aspiration or they were asked to focus on their alternatives as you see and you would expect given what I just said when people focus on their aspirations they do better right you can sort of see that bar is much higher up there and when they focus on that as hard as they do worse but here's the paradox the researchers ask a second question how satisfied were you with the outcome in your negotiation and do you see the weird result folks who got more were less satisfied those who got less were more satisfied this should provide two insights to you one very scary how do most of us decide how well we did in the negotiation we think about how we felt about it let me just suggest to you that's a really bad metric right because we get less but we feel better we get more but we feel worse why how could this be true what do you think how do you explain this guilt hmm I haven't heard that one before and we got another path of hypothesis expectation gap exactly with my alternative I exceed my alternative so I feel pretty good about that I don't meet my aspiration and I don't feel so good about it but on average I get more so at least you should have the discipline to realize that if you have an aspiration and you focus on your aspiration you're probably gonna feel worse about your negotiation right but you're gonna be you're gonna get more of whatever it is you're negotiating over but here's the second piece of insight that this study provides us while I am going to have the discipline to focus on my aspiration I'm going to talk to my counterpart in terms of their alternative because what's going to happen they're gonna public seed their alternative they're gonna feel really good and because I'm negotiating with them they're gonna feel really good about negotiating with me and then which bodes well for future interactions so two pieces of very important data here number one set an aspiration understand that you will be disappointed in your performance that's okay suck it up number two highlight to your counterpart that if we don't get a deal then they will be relying on their alternative let them focus on their alternative and when we do get a deal they'll feel much more satisfied about the outcome and about negotiating with me so useful piece of advice here so is this enough can we stop here and the answer is no because especially as women we face a challenge and I want to highlight this challenge by a study that was done this was actually published I think in 2012 yep so it's not like a hundred years old it's like you know four years ago and what the study was is that the researcher went to a very large organization and got Supervisors and asked put them into one of two groups there were 140 184 managers they were asked to allocate a fixed pool of resources to their subordinates who were equally performing and equally responsible okay so males and females and so the managers were in one of two conditions and the first they were told when you have a fixed pool of resources we'd like you to allocate raises to your male and female subordinates and those male and female supporters were equally responsible and well performing once you allocate the monies there is nothing left to do people get their raises they move on okay when in that condition the managers gave equal raises to the men and to the women that should not surprise anybody that's how it should be right equally performing equally responsible equal raises in that other condition the managers were told you've got a fixed pool of resources you're going to allocate them to your subordinates however once you give the allocation to your subordinates they can ask you why you did what you did they can attempt to negotiate and the results were quite a bit different when they were in that condition they allocated two and a half times the raises to the men than they did to the women why why did that condition of what what were they afraid of they didn't expect the women to push back but they expected the men to push back but not all men we give them enough money they can we can play Kate them right so they took from Cathy and gave to bill in order to keep bill out of their offices because they knew Cathy wouldn't come anyway this is why you need to negotiate because Cathy was at a disadvantage before she even said a word now why don't you negotiate well there are a lot of reasons but let's talk about the two big reasons first is you don't even see it as an option you're in a situation the possibility of negotiation doesn't even cross your mind and he doesn't cross your mind because you're uncomfortable with negotiation so you really don't want to see situations as negotiable let me give you an example and this is a silly little example how many of you have ever been to a Nordstrom's I know I took what what's he talking about no seriously how many of you been how many bought something how many negotiated the purchase price of the items they bought Wow that doesn't very many people iced anybody seriously why not what stopped you from negotiating at Nordstrom's there's a price as a fixed price on it and that goes on sale so if you want to get less you just wait for the sale right no authority has no authority how do you know that ah well you could have tried sometimes but what most people do is they say I don't think the salesperson has the authority therefore I don't want to embarrass him or her so what I'm gonna do is just not ask have you ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy more and more importantly have you ever been in a situation where you're about to purchase something and the salesperson says to you stop you're paying too much let's negotiate really so if you're the buyer in a Nordstrom's type situation who's gonna have to initiate the negotiation you are the sales clerk it's not gonna say but here's the problem also I let me just suggest there's a couple of other reasons here's one I don't want people to think I'm poor did ever that crossed anybody's mind hmm you know because a lot of people like you know if I if I had negotiate then people will think I can't afford it except we have actually done that study so what do you think the correlation is between socioeconomic status and initiation of negotiation is it positive high-status people are more likely to initiate negotiations are negative low status poor people are likely to initiate negotiations more sure wealthy people are like I could pay for this I don't choose to write so what can you do so if you want to appear wealthy negotiate but others of you are probably concerned that people might think that I am just socially clueless I mean after all if you want to get a lower price wait for the sale but I'm pretty sure in fact I haven't seen an example of this but maybe you have that Nord at Nordstrom certainly if you try to negotiate and you are even if you're unsuccessful they don't take a picture of you and post it over the cash register going she can't come in here again bad behavior right so what happens is we have all of these rules that stop us we don't even consider the possibility and therefore they become true because we don't even consider them to be possible so here's homework for you there's a Nordstrom it's not too far away I want you to go out I want you to find something that's a little expensive something that you want but it's a little expensive and I want you to try to negotiate the price I suspect that not all of you will succeed but I suspect that if he actually did this and we did an assessment you would be surprised at how many people do succeed and so one of the challenges is and I think this is actually really important is if you're going to be a good negotiator you've got to practice and we're better to practice the Nordstrom's because you might get cool stuff in the end right a little motivation all right now motivated misperception we don't even think of as an option there's another big reason why that is there's a situation where I know other people negotiate so it's not that I'm confused here I know other people negotiate but I am so uncomfortable as negotiating because I'm concerned first I don't want to pick a fight but more importantly I don't want them to think that I am greedy or demanding are not nice so as the following thought our series of thoughts ever crossed your mind let's say you just got a job offer a promotion and you say to yourself I know other people negotiate here but I'm concerned about being perceived as greedy demanding or not nice and so here's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna take that job I'm gonna take that promotion and I'm gonna do really good work and they will see my good work and then they will reward me you ever thought about that anybody ever go through that mind game right there how'd it work for you yeah not so good my Dean I think actually likes the fact that I'm on faculty here at the GSB Stanford there are times I even do things that make him proud that I'm on the faculty but I can tell you even at those times when I do that what he's thinking wow I'm really glad she's on the faculty here at the GSB I'm pretty sure the next clause and his thought is not are we paying her enough no he's an economist so he assumes if I'm here I must be paid enough because otherwise I'd be elsewhere right so it's not happening it is the case that the standard for what is greedy demanding and not nice behavior for women is more extreme than the but is the standard for what is greedy behavior for men so there is a little bit of truth to this but it turns out that it's not just negotiating per se it's negotiating the wrong way so let's talk about this because one of the things that I think is important for us to understand first how important actually negotiating can be for us and they way I want to do this is I want to first refer to work that Linda Babcock did Linda Babcock was a associate dean at Carnegie Mellon University she's also the co-author of the book women don't ask some of you may have heard of that book if not you probably should with a lot of wine it's very sad and depressing but anyway she what she did was when she was in the dean's office at the in the MBA program at Carnegie Mellon she did an exit survey of the MBA students which is we all do that Stanford does it Harvard does it MIT does it everybody does it and she found out that the starting salaries of the male MBAs who were graduating from Carnegie that year were on average 7.6 percent higher than the graduating females starting salaries were and you can kind of look at this and go oh yeah well you kind of expect that we can think about comparable worth you can think about institutionalized sexism all sorts of things but actually Linda asked a second question she said when you got your offer did you attempt to negotiate the terms of your employment contract and she found a huge disparity only 7% of the women while 57% of the men attempted to negotiate the terms of their employment contract she wasn't done yet she asked another question if you attempted to negotiate what happened and what she found was no difference in success by gender those who initiated negotiations on average earned about 7% increases in their compensation so at this point my my female MBA students sometimes push back and they say to me professor Neal they're very polite professor Neal let's say I'm making em any offered $100,000 if seven thousand dollars really worth the reputational risk and I am so disappointed in that question when it comes and maybe not for the reason you think but let's see if you do any better let's do a little thought experiment here so suppose at age 32 equally qualified applicants Chris and Frazier get job offers from the same company for $100,000 a year okay now Chris negotiates and gets a salary increase of seven point six % so Chris starts out at 176 Frasier says yes to the hundred thousand dollars okay now we're going to make two heroic assumptions number one Chris and Frasier stay at the company for the next 35 years so we can see what happens and number two the company treats them identically that is every year Chris and Frasier get the same five percent raise fast-forward 35 years Chris says I'm done I'm retiring at 65 how much longer do you think that Frasier will have to work in order to be as wealthy as Chris when Chris retires nine years how many years longer does Frasier have to work five ten oh no not yet it's eight years so I look at my MBA students and say okay $7,000 is not worth it to you what about eight years of your life how's that is that worth it kind of changes the discussion because this is the correct and by the way this is a very conservative estimate because it could only get worse watch this Chris and Frasier they start off pretty close to each other right over the ensuing 35 years this difference becomes Wow becomes over a hundred thousand dollars a year difference how does Chris and Frazier's salary difference how is that explained by the company does anybody say oh you remember 35 years ago Chris negotiated but Frasier didn't is that what they think what do they think Chris is more valuable to the company we're not going to give Chris that stinking 5% raise we're going to give over the 35 years we give me Chris five and a half now you wouldn't even notice that okay five and a half percent well now one percent with a half a percent difference how much longer now yeah you wouldn't even notice that for half percent but okay one more what about if we made Chris a 6% raise and Frasier gets 5% over those ensuing years now how many more years does Frasier have to work 47 years Frasier cannot live long enough so the cost of not successfully negotiating your starting salary anywhere between I don't know eight and forty seven years of additional work is it worth it hmm maybe but if you don't and you've done the calculations correctly if you decide it's still too painful to negotiate then I hope you like your job because you're gonna be working there for a lot longer for a lot less all right expectations drive behavior one of the challenges is historically that women have had lower expectations so you can couple lower expectations with this differential metric for what is a greedy aggressive behavior and you see why women don't negotiate but let me just tell you that it really is all about expectations researchers did a study where they actually had two different groups in the first group both males and females were asked to negotiate and they were told the following behaviors I have a cow have a label negative male stereotype they were told the following information negotiator who display the following behaviors tend to perform worse they have a high regard for their personal interests they depend on assertive behaviors they rely on rational analysis and they have limited displays of motion those people do worse they never said negative male stereotype they just gave that description in the other group both males and females they gave a different description they said negotiators who display the following behaviors tend to perform worse they are passive or reactive in expressing their interest they depend on their own listening skills they rely on intuition and they're willing to share those emotion those people do worse then each group was asked please tell us your aspiration what is an optimistic assessment of what you could achieve in this interaction and here's what we found if you look at the dark red versus the orange the dark red or the females the orange is the males when they got the negative male information the females had higher aspirations in their male counterparts when they got the negative female information the males had higher aspirations than their female counterparts but this is aspirations nobody's negotiated what happens when they negotiated and what you see here is expectations drive behavior when I believe that people like me do badly I perform worse in the negotiation when I got the negative female information the women underperform their male counterparts but when the information was the negative male stereotypes the males underperform their female counterparts expectations drive behaviors why is it that women don't ask I can tell you one big reason why women don't ask because women get punished get backlash when they negotiate for raises single issue raises I want to get more money right from male evaluators in ways that the male's evaluators do not penalize male negotiators but there's a little good news here if your evaluator your supervisor is a woman she penalizes both so at least the playing fields level right it's like yeah whatever so what caused this penalty was perceptions of being demanding and not nice so now what is a woman to do well you need to ask differently you need to pair your ask with a communal concern for your counterpart let me restate this you need to use a problem-solving perspective you need to find a way that you're what you want to achieve in this negotiation solves your counterparts problems that's what you're looking for and that works especially good for women because think about this if your concern is being perceived as greedy demanding or nice how hard is it for someone to think that you are greedy are demanding are not nice when you are helping them solve their problems does it take a little more effort yes it does it's worth the effort you need to when you prepare for your negotiation think hard about the challenges your counterpart faces and how your solutions can be answered to his or her problems and this to me seems so obvious but sometimes the obvious is the most poignant if you don't ask for what you want how will anybody know what it is you want if you just hope that they will read your mind you're gonna be disappointed human beings are notoriously bad mind reader's so you need to ask for what it is you want and what I suspect and you will when you start asking for what you want you will be surprised at how often people will accommodate your request one of the things that might have a colleague by the name of Frank Flynn who does research on gifts and reciprocity and what he finds is we weigh underestimate how willing people are to accommodate our requests and so the first thing you need to do is you need to ask but here is the bright here's the bright ray of Sun here because some of this is pretty depressing if I am male and I negotiate for myself systematically empirically I do better than my female counterpart negotiating for herself but if I am negotiating for another that is a representational negotiation women outperform men in representational negotiations between 14 and 22 percent this is why I'm telling you it's all about expectations you see there's no penalty there's no social penalty if I'm negotiating for others there's only a penalty if I'm being greedy or demanding or not nice but there's no penalty I can go she ate like a lion for my counterparts for my team and I do so let me just tell you one solution what what one behavioral implication of this hire women lawyers seriously they're less likely to negotiate for themselves they're more likely to do a better job for you why would you not hire women lawyers okay I just don't understand this so closing thoughts you need to ask yourself this data een this is a very powerful piece of data and result so you need to ask yourself for whom were you negotiating maybe you're negotiating for your team maybe you're negotiating for your organization maybe you're negotiating for a better environment a sustainable world maybe you're negotiating for all those women who come after you who people expect will not negotiate and so they take from them and give to the guys maybe that's who you negotiate for there lots of opportunities for you to negotiate for the greater good and so the question is for whom do you negotiate I use this all the time when I negotiate it turns out that I have five horses three dogs thirteen chickens and a husband I'm the only one working in that group okay I am responsible for all of those mouths so that's who I negotiate for and if what you are concerned about is being perceived as nice is being perceived as likeable let me just I'm going to give you a little bit of bad news here the further you move up in organizations the further you move up in the hierarchy of your organizations what you will find is the less people will like you because when you are a leader you change things you change things for the better from your perspective and when you change things you upset the status quo and it makes people uncomfortable so if you really need to be liked I have a solution I've been married to my husband same guy not just married but married to the same guy for 30 it'll be 36 years in November okay and I can be gone I could be on I can be on road trips I can be gone for weeks or a day I can be gone this afternoon like I am and I come home and he goes how was your day and I go find my three dogs I can be gone for 15 minutes a week right an afternoon and I come back and they're like ah thank you we thought you were going forever and our lives were dull and gray and we just sat down and laid down and just we're sad because you weren't here and when you came back you made our day we are so glad you were here my husband of 36 years has never said those words to me so if you want to think about being strategic in how you asked and willing to understand that being an effective leader requires negotiation but being an effective leader means you may not be the most liked person in the world get a dog or better yet get a rescue thank you I've got a couple of suggestions here there's some books there's the Linda Babcock and Sarah lash of your book ask for it robert cialdini's book on influence you have my book any more of what you want and I've given you also my website for getting more of what you want calm which there's lots of video clips blogs there's even a French language thing for those of you who want to practice your French all sorts of stuff on negotiation so check it out there and I think we have about 3 minutes and 36 seconds for questions so anybody have a question they want to ask because that's where we are now okay your speak up or somebody is running multiple people are running to you with microphones I was hoping you could give us a example of how we could pair our ask with something that helps our boss the sales clerk at Nordstrom's whoever we're negotiating well I'm not so I don't wanna spend a lot of time with the sales cook at Nordstrom's because one benefits for them is they get a sale that turns out to be a real positive for them right but part of what I do when I negotiate is I think about what my counterpart is concerned about and for example what the Dean was concerned about when I was interviewing here and because that's what that was I don't take a lot of jobs so I have only a few examples of this but what the concern was is that they had some problems teaching negotiation and they had some problems with their doctoral student placement here at the GSB and so what I said to him here the resources I need for my doctoral students to be a successful which of course will make the doctoral student program more successful here at Stanford which will improve all of our reputations and here in the resources I need in order to be able to teach negotiation by the way I needed have a reasonable salary because Silicon Valley is very expensive that all got put in there one of things I want to highlight is that you most folks will want to negotiate it one issue at a time and if I had more time what I would have said to you is negotiate in a package level because one issue at a time begs a fight and you want to be able to put things in a package they you can craft to be able to find a solution that reflects the unique contributions of both you and your counterpart other questions there that's the law over here just I love the runners this is great I'm an ambassador at one point I was a senior VP of a company listen New York Stock Exchange they paid for me to go to this class negotiation and influence strategies Graduate School of Business at Stanford and we 125 million dollars this three year negotiation so thank you it was a great class ticket yay come on clap anymore there's one move there Racing raise your hand again so they so the microphone person so can I ask a question first cuz I have to make sure where are you I'm here okay so that was amazing um my question is I think a lot of times we need to negotiate with the same person over and over again so that's a repetitive game yes um I wonder do you have any specific suggestions if least we need to frequently negotiate with the same person like in my case I'm a grad students so I'm actually negotiating with my advisor on a daily basis now maybe in the future I'm going to negotiate with my employer on a regular basis - do you have any specific strategy based like repetitive game absolutely let me just tell you problem-solving orientation you know when I when I go to my Dean to ask him for stuff or to negotiate with him you can imagine that me personally I have a really high hurdle because I write books on negotiation I teach negotiation you know I'd give talks on negotiation and so whenever I open my mouth the first hypothesis is if she negotiating with us and then they put on the battle armor right so what I do is I focus on let's try to find a solution to this problem because in whether that's I'm working with my doctoral students on that or I'm working with my Dean so depending on where the higher it's like I'm still using the same strategy if you move beyond the negotiation as battle to negotiation its problem-solving so much changes and especially when you have a future because the last thing as I said that I want to do is pick a fight with my Dean and so what I have to be able do his problem-solve and it's worked well and empirically it works well but also anecdotally it works well thank you very much

Channel: Stanford ENERGY

Views: 5,124

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: women in business, negotiation skills for women, Margaret Neale, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford, Stanford Energy, Entrepreneurship, Business Models, Energy, Negotiation, C3E, Clean Energy Symposium

Id: OtvUh-tPbEY

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2016