Pushback

How Smart Women Ask--and Stand Up--for What They Want

Selena Rezvani

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118237595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Popular leadership blogger gives the low-down on standing up for yourself

In Pushback, top leadership consultant Selena Rezvani argues that self-advocacy is critical to success. Yet women initiate negotiations four times less often than men, resulting in getting less of what they want—promotion opportunities, plum assignments, and higher pay. This book shines a light on the real rules of holding your own and pushing back for what is rightfully yours. Drawing on interviews with high-level leaders, Rezvani offers readers in the first half of their career the unedited truth about how women have asked their way to the top and triumphed—and how you can too.

• Includes interviews with top business leaders such as Marie Chandoha, CEO of Charles Schwab Investment Management; Cindi Bigelow, President of Bigelow Tea Company; Fizzah Jafri, COO at Morgan Stanley; Rosemary Turner, President at UPS; and Irene Chang Britt, Chief Strategy Officer at Campbell's Soup
• Offers a reliable and methodic approach to negotiating and navigating tough conversations
• Highlights compelling facts and research from the world of psychology and leadership

Insightful and accessible, Pushback is a timely resource for savvy women who want to leverage their skills, promote themselves effectively, and fast track their careers.

Chapter 1

Why Push Back?

Last fall, I stood before hundreds of women, presenting a workshop on negotiation skills. The scene was the Pennsylvania governor's conference for women, an event that brings together 4,500 women from around the world, with the aim of promoting gender balance in leadership and facilitating rousing debates, discussions, and learning. The promise of my session was similar to that of this book: to give attendees techniques to maneuver through tough bargaining conversations—techniques they could use in all areas of their lives.

The women who attend this conference are extremely bright—most hold advanced degrees and are very successful professionally. They are also engaged, vocal, and motivated when it comes to shaping the trajectory of their careers. Kicking off the session, I asked the question, “Who in this room counteroffered when negotiating your current salary?” About 10 percent of the women raised their hands.

This picture was uniquely unsettling but not unique. It's representative of women's behavior when negotiating—and not just about salary. According to the research of Carnegie Mellon's Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, women report “a great deal of apprehension” about negotiation at a rate 2.5 times more than men.¹

How is it possible that in the year 2012—when there are more women than men in the workforce²and women earn more degrees than men³—women are still apprehensive about negotiating? After all, we negotiate every day in countless ways. We bargain with our children and partners, making almost daily trades and concessions of our time. We demand a refund on a broken stroller, negotiate with our bosses to ensure coverage while we're on vacation, or ask the hotel maître d' for a room further away from the elevator. We're in bargaining situations all the time. Yet, time and again, my female colleagues, students, and friends tell me resoundingly, “I hate negotiating and I'm no good at it.”

Women Leaders Get There by Asking

When researching my first book, I spoke with thirty women executives about how they own and use their power at work. I learned that successful women ask for what they want; I even dedicated a full chapter of that book to the art of asking. The women executives I convened figured out through experience that doing good work does not guarantee rewards. They learned that people who are vocal and advocate on their own behalf move up, not those who wait to be noticed. In interviewing them, I also learned that women who achieve leadership status challenge long-standing beliefs. They push back on the “good-girlisms” with which they grew up: “be seen and not heard,” “always be nice,” and “don't be too outspoken.” They don't take “no” as a final, damning answer, nor do they allow rejection to create a deeply personal wound. On the contrary, to survive in a top role, women executives ask for what they want. They're firm. They don't accept what's unacceptable. They speak and maneuver with power.

To understand how women leaders achieve this level of savvy, I sought out even more specific data, turning to a new set of twenty women leaders in the top echelons of their fields. I had the pleasure of sitting down with these women in hour-long mentoring sessions, to hear in their own words about the learning, mistakes, observations, and successes they'd experienced with self-advocacy.

I started each interview by defining the term pushback to be certain we had the same foundation of understanding. The word is often used to mean resistance. I explained that I was using it rather more broadly—and more positively. In the context of those interviews and of this book, pushback represents the group of skills that allow us to take a stand, be firm, or advocate on our own behalf. It also encompasses our adeptness at advancing a cause, making a request, and persuading others of the merits of our view. We can use it to go after what we want, and we can use it to defend what is ours and what we need.

We're called on to push back when

• We're asked to chair an event. We want to say “no” but our reflex is to answer “yes.”
• We're told that there are two paths for advancement at our job: option A and option B. We're interested in the nonexistent option C.
• We're interested in expanding our small business internationally and we'll need to get our business partners, all of whom are satisfied with the status quo, onboard.
• We've had a strong year at work, hitting all of our targets, but we've just been notified we'll be receiving a 2.5 percent raise.
• We're shuttling our kids to their fifth doctor appointment in two months and fuming that we don't share this responsibility with our partner.
• We're being talked down to in a meeting, when in fact we have a master's degree in the subject at hand and ten years' experience in the field.
• We spend $250 on a long-anticipated meal for a special occasion, only to experience an evening of rude waitstaff and cold soup.
• We've just been assigned another administrative project when what we really want is to manage a client account.

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Self-Advocacy Matters Everywhere

A study of 136 women receiving care at an ultrasound clinic examined women's beliefs about their role in medical encounters with their physicians. Women who reported repeating information when they felt their doctors did not hear them, asking their doctors to explain information they did not understand, or reminding their doctors about screening tests were more likely to receive needed diagnostic tests than those who reported using these assertive behaviors less often. Interestingly, women who behaved assertively were more likely to view physicians as advisors in their health care and less likely to view their physicians as experts.⁴

Pushback is not always a formal process, as you can see from the previous examples. Sometimes a simple switch in the way we view our role can be action enough to drive a negotiation or debate in a favorable direction. Seeing the other person in a nondeferential and a more equal, peer-to-peer way can also make all the difference in getting the outcomes we want. What's more, pushback is not always about a grand issue or dealt with on a large scale. Each scenario, large or small, requires similar skills. If you're tackling a negative experience with a maître d' or looking to challenge your boss, you'll need a firm voice, you'll want to be ready for a different range of reactions, and you'll have to be crystal clear about your main message. It's important to know where you won't give an inch and where you're open to considering alternatives and options or hearing their side. Ratchet this up to the top level—to Middle East peace negotiations, let's say—and you'll find that our world's leaders have to summon a similar mind-set. Pushback skills, you see, can be called on by anyone, anywhere, in any debate situation.

In my interviews for this book, I asked women questions about preparing for negotiations—navigating and communicating one's way through them. I asked how they physically carried themselves in a tough conversation. I asked about the nuts and bolts of pushback how-to and about the inside dish—the stuff no one tells you about in the corporate world but that you need to know in order to thrive in it. I learned about how to gain self-worth, how to engage in office politics positively, and how engaging allies can drive the outcome of a pushback situation. I also queried the women about how they manage relationships after a tough conversation or when they're called on to hold repeated negotiations with the same person.

What caught my attention most in analyzing my data was the answer to a numerical question. I asked these women leaders, “Assuming a woman's career success equals 100 percent, what percentage is accounted for by her effectiveness in negotiating and pushing back?” Of the twenty responses I heard, the answer was compelling. The executives I met with felt, on average, that a full 60 percent of a woman's career success hinges on her pushback skills. One interviewee said, “Pushback and being firm is a large part of your career. You have to operate like you're a shareholder and like you own the company.” Although technical skills, academic or business pedigree, and people skills are necessities for those who want to lead, command of your own voice and ability to advocate, according to successful women executives, ranks higher. You can assess for yourself how important pushback is in your particular industry and work environment, but the longer you spend in the corporate world, the more you'll find that 60 percent figure to be rather convincing.

After interviewing more than fifty women executives in writing my columns and books, instead of seeing negotiating and other pushback skills as one part of women owning their power at work, I've come to see it as the most important tool at women's disposal. What's more, it's a tool that the top women leaders I interviewed developed through practice. By committing to the art of asserting themselves and taking risks, these successful women became skilled at learning to negotiate, advocate, stand firm, and push back. And so can you. This book will show you how.

Women's Distaste for Negotiating

How is it that so many women survive professionally without asking for what they want? Negotiation, after all, can make the difference between getting by and flourishing. In their research, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever made an interesting discovery: women often experience negotiating passively—something that is being done to them—whereas men see themselves as an active participant in a strategic pursuit. As part of their research, they asked women and men to pick metaphors that they associate with the practice of negotiating. Women most often selected “going to the dentist,” and men more often chose “a ballgame” or “a wrestling match.”⁵ This finding demonstrates, in a painfully clear way, that women not only think of negotiating as a passive experience, but also as uncomfortable as getting a cavity fixed.

Women hesitate to negotiate and push back for many reasons. Chief among them, I would argue, is a relentless—and often subconscious—belief that relationship should trump outcome or agenda. For example, let's say that Janelle, a twenty-eight-year-old junior account manager, is passed over to lead an important new project at work. She is inclined to protest or try to change her boss's mind but doubts quickly start to creep in. How might pushing back change the existing relationship between her and her boss? “What if I'm laughed at, belittled, challenged, or disregarded?” she wonders. The damage, it seems to Janelle, could be irreparable, and is thus not worth the risk.

A second common reason why women shy away from self-advocacy is a paralyzing need for perfect conditions. We are often plagued by misgivings that emanate from the seductively simple questions, “What if I'm wrong?” or “What if I'm not ready?” Both men and women face uncertainty and doubts, to be sure, but men tend to handle this predicament differently than women do. Research shows that in self-assessments, men tend to overestimate their abilities and women commonly underestimate theirs. Take for example a study conducted internally by Hewlett-Packard. The IT giant noticed that women incumbents were applying for internal job openings much less frequently than their male counterparts. Leaders commissioned a study to learn more, and what they found was revealing. Although men noted that they would respond to a job posting if they met 60 percent of the requirements, women would only apply for open jobs if they thought they met 100 percent of the criteria listed. Similarly, banking company Lloyds TSB found that although female employees were 8 percent more likely than men to meet or exceed performance expectations, they tended not to apply for promotions.⁶ Often we women feel we have to achieve perfection, that we need all of the answers—along with guaranteed outcomes—in order to take a risk (even though risk involves taking action without total certainty).

Raising our hands then, either as participants or as resisters, can feel like an impossibly loaded affair. If we must seamlessly maintain our relationships while getting every fact and figure exactly right—if we are insistent on “victory or bust”—no wonder we don't want to ask for what we want!

The Cost of Not Asking for What We Want

Pushing past our discomfort with advocacy, risk, and negotiating, however, is critical for our success. Negotiations are among the most materially significant dealings we have in our personal lives, and they are particularly important at work. What other conversations create value, drive growth, or increase monetary profit at the same rate? When we hesitate to ask for what we want, it substantially hurts our earning potential, our access to plum work assignments, and our opportunities for promotions. From a broader perspective, not asking for what we want limits our input in decisions that affect us, making our voice a barely audible whisper. Not asking encourages us to accept what is, to consent to that with which we disagree, and to leave a world of opportunity unclaimed.

Take Fatima, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant, who had to decide whether or not s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Pushback
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Why Push Back?
• Chapter 2: Find Your Pushback Style
• Chapter 3: Prepare Psychologically
• Chapter 4: Do Your Homework
• Chapter 5: Maneuvering Through the Conversation
• Chapter 6: Follow Up
• Chapter 7: Push Back to Own Your Career
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index