This document provides an overview of negotiation skills and strategies for women. It discusses how women's negotiation approaches can differ from men's in being more cooperative, focusing on interests rather than positions, and taking a broader perspective. The document also addresses challenges women may face in negotiation, such as stereotype threat and gender bias. It provides tips for women in areas like building trust, identifying interests, and using different bargaining techniques.
1. Negotiation Skills for Women
Victoria Pynchon, J.D., LL.M
She Negotiates Consulting and Training
Shenegotiates.com and blogs.forbes.com/shenegotiates
5. • Build trust – food, touch, similarity
• Ask diagnostic questions
• Identify
needs, desires, constraints, hidden
stakeholders, priorities, preferences,
attitudes toward the future
• Lead with benefit
• Anchor first and high
• Frame deal favorably
• Log roll
• Make hypothetical offers
• Bracket
• Offer contingencies
• Close
6. • Kind
Women are . . .
• Nurturing
• Emotional
• Weak
• Indecisive
• Patient
• Tolerant
• Afraid of conflict
7. Analytic Emotional
Positions Interests
Self-interested Nurturing
Competitive Cooperative/relational
Direct Indirect
Hierarchical Non-hierarchal
High sense of entitlement Low Sense of Entitlement
More inclined to boast Underplays achievements
Dominant Submissive
8. Stereotype threat – anxiety when you believe you might
confirm a negative stereotype about your social group.
10. EXERCISE
• Ask your negotiation partner for something
you want and haven’t been able to get
• Tell her who she is; why she keeps saying
“no” (or why you haven’t asked)
• Start the conversation by offering her
something you know or believe she wants
• You asked that I leave something with your
women that they could use after I was gone.
I’d like to make my book available to them
at a discount instead of may I sell my book
to your women?
11. Male Bargaining
Feel bargaining advantage
Advantages
Feel entitled to more
rewards
Less likely to back down
Use more distributive
tactics
Feel entitled to
information
Seen as stronger speakers
than women
Seek more power
Intimidate
12. Female Bargaining
• take a broad or 'collective' perspective
Advantages
• view elements in a task as interconnected
and interdependent
• see the big picture and come up with a
systematic plan on how to solve it.
• work through steps by sharing experiences
while figuring out what both sides can gain
to achieve an integrated outcome.
• more concerned about how problems are
solved than merely solving the problem
itself
• Instead of concentrating on what they want
or need to get out of the negotiation
women focus on what both sides need and
how both parties can get what they want
13. Within six months of taking top-flight negotiation
courses, less than 40% of the women were using
the skills they learned, compared to 98% of their
male counterparts.
When asked why, they said they believed that
many of the learned negotiation
strategies, tactics and skills were inconsistent
with who they believed they were as
women, and specifically in conflict with their
identity and how they saw themselves.
14. We work
22%
longer and
10% faster
for the
same
reward
21. • Cooperate
with the
group or
betray
• Which has
the
evolutionary
advantage –
likely to pass
genetic
material into
the future
22. • Two suspects
• Insufficient evidence to convict
Prisoners’ Dilemma
• Offer
– 1 confesses & implicates partner –
1 freed; partner gets 10-year
sentence
– Both confess and implicate the
other, each receive 5-year
sentence.
– both remain silent, 6-months in
jail.
• Optimal choice for both cooperate for
six-month jail sentence.
• The optimal choice for individual
suspect is to rat out his partner and
secure his own freedom.
• What is the rational decision?
23. • If both play red card
(uncooperative) each member
of pair earns 2 points.
• If both play black card
(cooperative), each member
of pair earns 3 points.
• If one plays red card &
partner plays black, red card
earns 5 & black earns 0
points.
• The choice is cooperate or
betray. Begin play by holding
your card of choice up to your
chest.
• On 1, 2, 3, play the card of
your choice & record your
score.
25. A process in which we
Interest Based seek to expand the
Negotiation pie of benefits
available to the
parties in an
attempt to satisfy as
many of their
needs, desires, pref
erences and
priorities as possible
(their interests).
35. Exercise
• Trade something of value with your
negotiation partner that is low cost to
you but high value to her
• If you don’t know what she values, ask
her
• 5 minutes each
38. • Start high/low
• Make small/grudging
concessions Competitive
• Demand reciprocity Distributive Bargaining
• Share little information
• Maintain high
aspirations
• Make hypothetical
offers you can later
disown
• Stress BATNA
• Make multiple offers
with same benefit to
you
40. • Are they difficult or simply
uninformed
– Educate them about their true
interests, consequences of their
actions, our BATNA
– Help them understand what is in
their best interest
– Determine whether they’ve
misunderstood or ignored a crucial
piece of information
41. Are they irrational or are
they operating under
hidden constraints
– Institutional
– Precedential
– Promises to others
• Hidden
stakeholders
– Deadlines
42. Are they liars, cheats and
thieves or do they have
hidden interests.
– Personal (unrelated to
you or deal)
– Relational (related to you
but not to
deal, i.e., “face”)
– Political, social, cultural
43. • Reiterate terms
Close
• Or…recapture the main
points, what’s left to
resolve, and what’s needed
to do so.
• Set day/time to reconvene
• End on hopeful
note/congratulate both for
progress made
Editor's Notes
Today, we’re going to talk about three things:First, we’ll talk about the gender wage, income and leadership gap, exploring some of the reasons it still exists and what we do to contribute to its stubborn persistence in business and the professions.Next, we’ll talk about the ways in which we try to get our bargaining partners to do what they don’t want to do – pay our client a larger sum of money to settle a lawsuit, give us a promotion or access to better human resources, or to get our children, spouses, friends or housemates to put the cap back on the toothpaste and throw their dirty clothes in the hamper.Finally, we’ll talk about our own conflict resolution styles – where we learned them, how they’re working for us now, why they might not be serving our needs and what we can do to change them.Next week, we’ll begin to learn what the most prominent business schools around the country are teaching their students as the most effective and efficient form of negotiation.
Whatever your conflict resolution style, there’s a short menu of contentious tactics available for you to “win” the dispute. Contentious styles are all meant to convince someone of something they DON’T want to do. Some people are so afraid of conflict or so desirous of a peaceful surround that they simply yield to anyone who picks a fight with them. So you go on a golfing trip with your husband instead of visiting Italy as you’ve always wanted to do. Yielding or giving in, of course, creates resentments that can poison relationships so the yielder isn’t doing anyone any favors. Ingratiation is, of course, a tactic that both men and women suspect women use more often that not. Negotiators call ingratiation “trading power for sympathy.” You don’t have a feign a life-threatening disease to get your negotiation partner to do your bidding out of sympathy. There are a million reasons why you NEED rather than WANT the outcome you’ve suggested and the more pathetic you are the more likely you might be to get it. But you sell out your power that way and lose the respect of your bargaining partner. Argument, of course, is what we do when we’re giving good reasons why our proposal is better than another’s. You can judge for yourselves how well that has worked for you. After arguing in Court for a quarter of a century, I’d flip a coin myself. Promises of future action are, of course, quite persuasive, as long as you’re credit worthy and threats of future adverse action a good bet if you’ve got the mafia behind you. And physical force. Well, not many women resort to this. We should, however, all continue to be a little ashamed of the state of affairs that requires us to lock up more people in prison than any other country in the world and finds it acceptable to resolve international disputes at the point of a nuclear bomb.
Let me begin with what most women already know. We hate the word “negotiate.”We LOVE a conversation. And we love agreement. So my business partner and I use a common definition of “negotiation” as THE definition for women.Negotiation is just a conversation leading to agreement.
Is this a problem for us? What are the opposite of these traits?Could they hurt your career path or your negotiation position? When we are impatient, we are acting outside the culture’s expectations for our behavior. There are times that call for the expression of an unkind thought, to be impatient with stonewalling, to be intolerant of intolerance. These stereotypes used against us when we press our own case, seek our own gratification or sing our own praises. They are as harmful to us as the stereotypes that we’re emotional rather than rational, weak instead of strong, uncertain rather than decisive and more likely to fold than to carry on when confronted with conflict.
. I’m sure you can identify which column lists the male stereotypes and which the female.
One of the culprits for women’s hesitancy to negotiate and tendency to accept far less than she deserves is stereotype threat.The term was first used by social psychologist Claude Steele to chronicle his observation that black American students did worse on an exam when it was perceived as diagnosis of intelligence rather than a means to measure knowledge.When the students thought they were being tested for intelligence, they conformed to that stereotype that black students are less intelligent than whites.Shocking, right? Especially since we’re all supposed to be blissfully “post-racial” now.Because women are stereotypically poor negotiators, they are far more likely to negotiate badly when they believe that’s what they’re being asked to do. When they’re asked to simply “ask,” they do every bit as well as men do in performing their “asking” task.In one study, a group of business students (even numbers of men and women) were asked to practice negotiating salaries in a realistic office setting. Before the negotiation, each student was provided with a brief summary of what they could expect from the “boss” (played by an actor) with whom they were negotiating.The researchers found that when the students were told the experiment was a realistic assessment of their negotiating skills, the women negotiated much more poorly than the men. When they were told it was not a realistic assessment, the women and men performed the same.I’m bad at math – arithmetic, really. Anything that has numbers in it. I’ll admit it but only recently have I noticed how much I rely on being a lawyer to deal with stereotype threat. “I’m bad at math; all lawyers are; that’s why we went to law school. If we need a numbers person, we hire an accountant,” I’ll say. I don’t want to further the stereotype that women are bad at math so I cover my bases by attributing it to something else.
Male bargaining advantages: the negotiation leverage belongs to the person perceived to be best situated to walk away from the table – so how important are THESE bargaining advantages?
When use the word “winner” you assume only one person can win: it’s a ZERO SUM GAMEPeople waste time figuring out how to divide the pie instead of inventing ways to expand itLose/lose; win/lose or a 50/50 splitHOW CAN BOTH PLAYERS “WIN”?
What are we thinking?
At last, we come to what we’ll be studying in the next three sessions. Mutual benefit, interest-based negotiation which seeks to expand the pie of benefits to the parties in an attempt to satisfy as many of their needs, desires, preferences and priorities as possible. Between now and then, I want you to remember that
When was the last time you had an opportunity to negotiate
We’ve talked about interest-based or mutual benefit negotiation as satisfying all parties’ interests simultaneously. How do we do that? We do that by engaging in a process that creates more value than is apparent on the surface.Think, for instance, of a social network as a potential source of value. That’s all Facebook is. It is a social network in which people disclose their interests not only to their “friends” but also to the owner of the networks’ platform – Facebook.The Facebook IPO put a US$104 billion value on customer data when it make ownership of its stock public this year.Think of yourself as a company that you’re being asked to value because you’re selling shares in yourself. I’ll go through a list of intangible assets most professionals possess using the person I know best: myself.Intellectual property – although I can’t copyright or patent or trademark all of my intellectual property, it is my education + my experience + my skills + my unique perspective developed overtime that = the market value of my time in your hands.My social/business network – In the past six years, I’ve developed an extensive business and professional network both online and “on the ground” – I know people with venture capital, people who hire lawyers, lawyers who hire people who provide legal services to the industry, academics, professionals, and a lot of high potential and high income women who need and want a vast array of products and services.My specific abilities to weigh evidence and make a decision as a private judge that will satisfy the parties to a dispute that everyone has been heard; their arguments taken seriously; their testimony given due weight; and, everyone’s positions given the credit they deserve in reaching a final decision as an arbitratorMy specific abilities to conduct a mediation in a way that maximizes the value for everyone at the table and assuring that no one has paid too much nor gotten too little to constitute rough justice, particularly when compared with the time, risk and money litigation would require them to spend to reach a potentially worse resultMy specific ability to craft a strategic plan and coach women through a negotiationMy ability to present information about negotiation to a large number of people in a way that allows them to improve the quality of their lives.Some of the value I bring to anyone’s table I monetize and some I don’t. But if you don’t know about everything I can do, you cannot create value by unlocking it at the table.
When I mediate, I tell the parties that I won’t let them go until I am convinced that their bottom lines don’t overlap. Still it’s difficult for the parties to narrow the gap themselves because no one wants to give the other the advantage, even when they know that the first reasonably aggressive proffer will give the advantage to the first person to make it because it will influence one’s negotiation partner in its direction throughout the course of the negotiation.When I’m asked to make a mediator’s proposal, I know that the parties have room to move but that they are afraid of going there lest they give away too much about their true goals. I don’t like to put my fingerprints on the parties’ deal because I know that my proposal will be given more weight than it deserves; because I’m operating off of incomplete information; and, that I might be swayed by misinformation. So I suggest that one party make an offer to is a bracket.Let’s say John is at $1.5 million and Zelda is at $100K. Either party can narrow the bargaining range by making a hypothetical offer or suggesting a bracket.The bracket is: if I come down into six figures, will you move to $300K. John has not put a new number on the table. He hasn’t make a concession. But he’s told his bargaining partner that he’s willing to settle for six figures and wants a signal from his bargaining partner that $300K is close enough to where he eventually wants to be that his bottom line could be as little as $500K. This is really the same as a hypothetical offer – If I were willing to give you a 10% year-end bonus if you bill 2200 hours this year, would you be willing to stay in the face of the other guy’s job offer.
One of the major obstacles to closing a deal is the parties’ differing projections about the future value of what a party stands to receive through the resolution — the future value of a business, for instance. Instead of letting the parties argue about the future, consider suggesting that they do what entrepreneurs do every day — bet on it. A contingency agreement enables a party to bet on the future value of a negotiable item, such as the following: * In a dispute over patent rights, the future profits from the sale of the patented product or process. * In a dispute among the parties who are potentially responsible to clean up contaminated soil and groundwater at a former chemical plant, the cost to investigate and remediate the toxic site. * In a dispute over the value of a partnership business, the market for the company’s services in the near and mid-distant future. * In a dispute over personal injuries suffered by an individual exposed to toxic chemicals, whether his condition will worsen or improve over time, the degree to which a worsening condition will affect his ability to work at his present job, and whether the medical treatment he’s now receiving will improve his health. * In a dispute over spousal support, whether a non-working spouse is capable of becoming self-supporting within a given period of time.When faced with disputes over future events, you may suggest that the parties build success or failure into their agreement. Many disputes over the ownership of patent rights, for instance, are resolved with royalty agreements that permit the parties to share in the profits and/or losses over time.When resolving environmental contamination litigation, the parties can and often do agree to share the cost of investigating and cleaning up the pollution at issue to certain agreed-upon standards.