Negotiations are for everybody! A breakfast conversation.
World tour week! The biggest Salesforce event outside of the US. It’s a mad week, it’s a fabulous week full of running around, soaking up knowledge and meeting old and new friends. I am getting up at 6am, getting ready to vote for the European election and make my way to the ExCeL centre in East London. The day starts with the Salesforce Women’s Network Breakfast. We gather, we get some refreshments and shake hands. Then the stage opens for Natalie Reynolds, CEO of advantageSPRING talking about negotiations.
Negotiation has a very bad reputation. Women are told to be more like men when negotiating and men are told to be more aggressive. Natalie tells us that it doesn’t have to be like that. She speaks about negotiating as problem-solving in five stages: Discover, Establish, Ask, Lead, Seal
“Negotiation is the most important skill in business and in life to get what you want, need and deserve… And we do it all the time.” Natalie Reynolds, Women’s Network Breakfast
It is still early and I guess not all of us had enough coffee yet to make us fully functional (that totally includes myself!). Natalie engages the audience asking us to arm wrestle with the person sitting next to us. She says we’ll only do it for about 15 seconds and then stop. Our goal is to get as many points as possible. I didn’t even hear that last part… I looked at the women sitting next to me, a friend of mine for many years. We smile and position our arms before we even hear what the goal of the exercise is. We laugh at each other, arms shaking. The end result came close to one of those boring football matches that end 0:0 with no tactics and only passing from one side to the other.
Natalie has to shout a little to make people stop after such a short period of arm wrestling. After all, this just woke our spirits and we feel we can win this. How many points we’ve made, she asks addressing no one specifically. It seemed that no one made particularly many and we get asked why we didn’t just go from left to right? Even if it’s only 15 seconds, we easily could have made 10 points each that way. We could have communicated better, listen better at the start. We could have won this game. But we fell back into what we knew and didn’t try a new way. So should we try out a new way to negotiate?
Deborah Frances-White speaks in her book, the Guilty Feminist about the Power of Yes. And I guess we can learn a lot from this in regards to it always has been done this way. “Yes is dangerous. No keeps you safe. […] No is easy.” (p. 122)
So rather than listening to what we are supposed to do, focus and change our usual behaviour, we start arm wrestling, not gaining any points for either of us. It’s hard to change our ingrained behaviour. It’s hard to start a new way of negotiating. The result would have been better though. It is hard because secretly we all like competition, Natalie continues. We may not say that and some of us most certainly don’t agree. But “We wake up in the morning to win, not to lose.” And that I agree with. I didn’t wake up the morning of my interview thinking let’s go there and show your worse performance ever. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure I will get it. But I didn’t go there to give up. I woke up to win and I didn’t have to wrestle my hiring manager to the ground in order to achieve that.
“When life shuts a door… Open it again. It’s a door. That’s how they work.” Natalie Reynolds, Women’s Network Breakfast
We negotiate and sometimes things don’t work out as expected. That’s life. It simply can suck badly and be unfair. But things move on and we can negotiate again. With a different person, in a different setting. We don’t have to keep negotiating the way we do it now if for whatever reason we don’t like it. And if we are happy with it, then that’s fine too. Negotiations are quite personal, asking for example for a salary increase can come easy to some and is really hard for others.
It’s 9.15 am and I sneaking out of the room. I hear Natalie saying: “And to be clear … Negotiation is any situation in which you are seeking a YES. Influence, Persuasion, Managing expectations, seeking arrangements, the important conversation!” I am shooting off to give a talk myself but more on that another time.
Originally published at https://worldofassortment.blogspot.com on June 2, 2019.
