The Shadow Negotiation

How Women Can Master the Hidden Agendas That Determine Bargaining Success

Deborah Kolb, Judith Williams

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743215121
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

At last, here is a book that shows women how to recognize the Shadow Negotiation -- in which the unspoken attitudes, hidden assumptions, and conflicting agendas that drive the bargaining process play out -- and how to use that knowledge to their advantage.
Each time people bargain over issues -- a promotion, a contract with a new client, a bigger role in decision-making -- a parallel negotiation unfolds beneath the surface of the "formal" discussion. Bargainers constantly maneuver to determine whose interests and needs will hold sway, whose opinions will matter, and how cooperative each person will be in reaching an agreement.
How the issues are resolved hangs on the actions people take in the shadow negotiation, yet it is in this shadow negotiation that women most often run into trouble. The most productive negotiations take place when strong advocates can connect with each other. Good results depend equally on a bargainer's positioning her ideas for a fair hearing and on being open to the other side's point of view. But traditionally women have not fared well on either front. Often, they let negotiable moments slip by and take the first "no" as a final answer, or their efforts to be responsive to the other side's position are interpreted as accommodation. As a result, women can come away from negotiations with fewer dollars, perks, plum assignments, or less say in decision-making than men.
To negotiate effectively, women must pay attention to acts of self-sabotage as well as to the moves others make in the shadow negotiation. By bargaining more strategically, women can establish the terms of their advocacy, their voice, and at the same time encourage the open communication essential to a collaborative discussion in which not only acceptable, but creative, agreements can be worked out.
Written by Deborah M. Kolb and Judith Williams, two authorities in the field, The Shadow Negotiation shows women a whole new way to think about the negotiation process. Kolb and Williams identify the common stumbling blocks that women encounter and present a game plan for turning their particular strengths to their advantage. Based on extensive interviews with hundreds of business-women, The Shadow Negotiation provides women with a clear, insightful guide to the hidden machinations that are at work in every bargaining situation.

PART I

The Power of Advocacy:

Promoting Your Interests

Effectively

1

STAYING OUT OF YOUR
OWN WAY

A reporter once asked Yogi Berra what advice he would give aspiring ballplayers. After puzzling for a minute, the veteran catcher produced one of his signature comebacks: “Ya gotta dress for every game.” Berra, seldom out of the Yankee lineup, was talking about more than just putting on his pads and mask. To play well, you had to be ready, pumped up, and prepared to face what was thrown your way. That’s what the tools of effective advocacy do for you in a negotiation. They don’t just put you in the game. They help insure that you will be ready to hit whatever is tossed your way, be it a sneaky curve or an unexpected fastball.

Part of that readiness is confidence in yourself and your ability to hold your own. Before you can convince the other person of anything, you first have to believe that you are in a good position to push for your demands. It’s tough to get up for a negotiation when you look at your chances of success with a jaundiced eye. Why bother to negotiate at all? Who wants to get into a struggle she is just going to lose? Pushed by a colleague, pressured by a boss, or just limited by circumstances, it often seems easiest to acquiesce quietly or keep quiet altogether. Why risk the unpleasantness? It’s tough to be persuasive when you think your case is shaky. Unconvinced of its merits, you are bound to have a hard time convincing anyone else. Better, you think, to cave before the other side pokes holes in your argument or laughs. Then again, maybe if you come on strong, assume an assurance you don’t really feel, they won’t notice the holes in your case.¹ It’s toughest of all to force yourself to negotiate when you have been burned in the past or feel uncomfortable pressing for something you want.

Before you can negotiate effectively with others, you might have some negotiating to do with yourself. Successful advocacy begins with preparation—both psychological and factual. You must convince yourself that your demands are legitimate and believe that you have both the right and the ability to push for them. You need to see a negotiation as an opportunity that opens up choices, not as an occasion that forces you to take what is offered. Many successful negotiations begin with a resounding “No.” But to get past that no, you must first see the possibility of a yes. Once you step back and take a realistic look at what is possible, you would be surprised how often you can turn around even a seemingly no-win situation.

Sometimes the enemy is us. As women, we often don’t take the simple steps needed to empower ourselves in a negotiation. At times, we get in our own way even before the actual bargaining starts. Underestimating our strengths is as deadly as overestimating those of our bargaining counterpart, but we do it all the time. When we think we are on tenuous ground, we pull back on our demands and narrow our options from the beginning. When outflanked or outgunned, we silence ourselves because we don’t see much point in speaking up anymore. At the other extreme, our dander up, we dig in our heels, substituting rigidity for persuasiveness. And now and then we just walk away. We don’t attempt to even the odds.

The negotiation process is difficult enough without carrying a self-imposed handicap. Others try to gain the upper hand at our expense. They prod here and poke there in the shadow negotiation, looking for an advantage or searching for a vulnerability to exploit. We don’t have to volunteer either or unwittingly hamper our chances for success. Men are as liable to commit acts of self-sabotage in negotiation as women. Women just tend to trip themselves up in different ways. Let’s look at a sampling of common pitfalls we have winnowed from our interviews. The first step on the way to becoming an effective negotiator is to recognize how you get in your own way.

Opportunities for negotiation go unrecognized. To negotiate, you have to realize that it is possible. Otherwise the moment slips by. Opportunities are missed for lots of reasons. Sometimes, confronted with what seems to be a final decision, it’s easy to forget that no decision is final until it is accepted. Faced with what seems to be an immovable barrier or just plain stubbornness, we are quick to hear that no as the last word. The office manager flatly refuses to discuss health-care benefits. Part-time workers are never included on the company policy. Your new co-worker has an annoying habit of vocally second-guessing your decisions on major accounts. You mention the need for some ground rules, but she cuts you off. When you accept that no as the end of the conversation, you foreclose on the possibility of negotiating through the problem.

Other times, the situation does not seem to lend itself to negotiation. Both these reasons converged for Karen when she was given a new and exciting account at her advertising agency. Karen saw the assignment as a vote of confidence and hesitated to mention the heavy load she was already carrying. She put in longer and longer hours. Challenged by the new account and aware of its visibility in the agency, she kept on top of it, but gradually her other accounts began to slip. Copy was late getting to the designers. She had to reschedule several important meetings with other clients. Over the course of several months, the slippage raised eyebrows. No one in the agency contested her performance on the new account, but it was not the unalloyed success she expected.

Karen missed a negotiating moment. She considered the new assignment a flattering fait accompli. Presented with a terrific opportunity (and one she considered an order from the top), she did not see the possibility of negotiation—let alone its necessity for her overall success. She could have bargained to lighten her current responsibilities or to take an oversight role on certain accounts. She could have requested an assistant and actively sought the managing partner’s guidance on the account. Having secured none of these preconditions, she could not shine on all fronts and her great assignment produced mixed results.

Even within peremptory decisions there is generally room for some give-and-take, but you have to be aware of the possibility and act on it. Before going along with imposed solutions and shutting down your options, try to get behind the rationale. Less onerous answers may be available, but to uncover them you have to get the discussion going. Negotiation is always, or almost always, a possibility.

Being pushy is not my style. Some opportunities to negotiate are not so much missed as dismissed. The practice of negotiation does not square with the sort of person we want to be. It is not so hard to go after support for a project or to defend a team member or a child. But when it comes to asking for something for ourselves, that’s a differrent matter. We might want a raise or a high starting salary or more time to work up a proposal, but it just doesn’t feel right to push too hard. The self-promotion involved, we think, borders on selfishness. Besides, it is a waste of time. We find it more pleasant and efficient to spend that hour getting our jobs done or being with our families and friends than jockeying for an edge. The gamesmanship is off-putting. If what it takes to be an effective negotiator is self-absorption and fluency in boasting, the price is too high.

Distaste leads to avoidance. Better not to play the game, we think, than feel like a fraud. A museum curator in her mid-twenties, for example, carries around an image of herself that makes negotiation painful. “All my life,” she says, “I have been taught to put others ahead of myself. I still have trouble seeing myself as a negotiator. It feels very foreign and uncomfortable to sit down and decide what I want and how to get it. Whenever I do this, I feel as though I am being selfish.”

Naomi Wolf labels the pressures women feel to accommodate others the “Dragons of Niceness.”² These invisible monsters, to her mind, constantly urge women to put the pleasure of others ahead of their own and to take their reality from that pleasure. Negotiation will always feel unnatural so long as being sensitive to others is confused with giving in to their demands. It will always be distasteful when defined as a selfish activity in which people beat each other up for a bigger slice of the pie.

People do make demands in negotiation. That is why we negotiate in the first place. But we have a choice in how we put those demands. When we avoid negotiation because we see it only as an exercise in aggressive self-aggrandizement, we not only prevent ourselves from finding our own voice, we deprive others of the opportunity to hear what we really think. The issue is not whether to negotiate but how to negotiate in a way that feels authentic and still gets us what we want.

Seeing only our weakness. Many women go into negotiations suspecting they will lose. This expectation then drives their thinking. Why should my customer meet my terms, they reason, when so many other vendors are waiting in line? I have spent too many years in a low-paying job in a nonprofit agency. I will never get the salary I want in the private sector. My boss is going to do what he wants anyway. Why should I raise a cautionary voice? He will just accuse me of not being willing to take a risk, even a calculated one. Negativity like this is an almost surefire guarantee that we will start a negotiation psychologically one-down. Even more troubling, it discourages us from negotiating in the first place.

Once we rivet our attention on weakness, we exaggerate everything that works against us. We blind ourselves to real strengths and cannot recognize, much less use, what we actually have going for us. Barbara’s reentry into the job market is a good example of the damage negative thinking can do.

After taking a decade off to be at home, Barbara was grateful for the job interview. It was just luck that she heard about the opening from a friend. Obviously any one of the other candidates would jump at an offer. Barbara obsessed over the gaping holes in her résumé until they were all she could see. When the offer came, disappointing as it was, she grabbed it. Barbara would have been surprised to learn just how pleased the principals in the firm felt when she accepted. They wanted an older person and put a premium on the connections she had made in her volunteer work. But Barbara’s negative focus prevented her from parlaying those advantages into a higher salary.

With our weaknesses looming so large, we may not draw on strengths that we actually have and that supply the resilience necessary to stay in the negotiation. When intimidated or challenged, we might rigidly defend our claims or take the path of least resistance and retreat. Women are not alone here. Most people harbor doubts about being able to reach their goals. What makes the difference is whether we allow these natural doubts to control our actions. We shortchange ourselves when we focus only on weakness and don’t use the assets we do have.

Bargaining ourselves down. Self-doubt creates another problem. We don’t wait for the other side to whittle us down. We do it ourselves. Before we even start to negotiate—for a new job, a shift in career path, or more open communication with a client or a co-worker—chances are good that we carry on a private debate with ourselves. What do I want? What are my chances of getting it? Am I up to fighting that battle once again? Do I have a choice?

All too often we do more than set goals in these internal dialogues. They are where we make the first concession of the negotiation. Before we open the “official” discussions, we start bargaining ourselves down. We know what we have contributed to the group’s effectiveness and to bottom-line profits. A 10 percent raise seems justified and realistic. But then the second-guessing starts. “My boss will never agree to that,” we argue mentally. “I’m good, but maybe not that good. I’d probably be making more than the rest of the group. I’ll start a bit lower—8 percent sounds more like it.”

This private rationalizing might be faultless. The boss might consider a 10 percent raise totally out of line. But the point is that we don’t even give her a chance to react to our request. Once we make that first concession in our heads, we limit our choices. We decide ahead of time what response we will provoke. We never test whether our anticipated scenario is, in fact, what will happen.

By making that first concession in our heads, we lower our aspirations and lose ground before the negotiation even opens. We ask for less than we want in the hope that we’ll get something and avoid a messy confrontation. These diminished goals become self-fulfilling prophecies as the shadow negotiation plays out.³ Once we settle for an 8 percent raise in our head, that figure usually turns out to be the most we can get, regardless of what we might deserve. When we worry about whether our demands will be hard to swallow, rather than trying to make them more palatable, we handicap ourselves from the start in the shadow negotiation. Self-doubt dominates our thinking. The central issue is not whether you can get something, but how to get what you want.

Making sure everyone is happy. Even when we stand up to that devil whispering in our ear to lower our goals, we can fall prey to another equally insidious voice that gets in our way—the one that insists that we smooth things over. To make everyone happy (or happier), we try to be “nice.” Maybe we don’t want to appear overly aggressive or unsympathetic. Maybe we have trouble with “winning” when victory comes at someone else’s expense or is not masked by a team effort. Whatever the reason, we stumble at the end and give our gains back. That’s what Beth did in a negotiation with another editor.

We were fighting over a new title. The book fit nicely on my list and I argued my case pretty strenuously. The other editor finally threw up his hands and said,“Okay, Beth. It’s yours.” Did I accept that? Oh, no. I tossed the ball back at him. I told him he could keep the book. I could tell just from the look on his face how much the decision meant to him. He’d had a rough couple of months. But I warned him that we needed to set up some guidelines. Otherwise, next time around, I wouldn’t give an inch.

Did they ever set up any guidelines? No. Beth smoothed things over with her fellow editor, but at a cost only to her.

Women, often great readers of nonverbal cues, can retreat at the first sign of displeasure instead of using these messages as a wedge to open a dialogue. Looking to be fair to everyone, we sometimes forget about being fair to ourselves. We also up the ante on what it takes for us to say enough is enough and walk away.

Wanting everyone to be happy, our personal stake in a negotiation can become a moving target. We constantly adjust what we want in response to what the other person wants. At the same time, we fail to reckon the end cost of these concessions. Intent on peacemaking, we don’t think about the pri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction:
• P A R T  O N E
• P A R T  T W O
• P A R T  T H R E E
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index