7 Tricks for negotiating in business situations

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Your gender might matter most when it comes to negotiation — women just aren’t as good at it as men. Part of the reason for this is that women are more hesitant to ask. But to be fair, women who negotiate competitively are judged negatively, whereas men aren’t.

BATNA Thousand

Another factor that has a huge impact on your ability to negotiate is the power of your BATNA — or Best Alternative to a Negotiated Deal. William Ury, author of the negotiation bible “Getting to Yes,” says that the key to effective negotiation is learning how to read the core needs of each side. If you can estimate the BATNA of each party, then you’ll be clear on where you can push during the compromising stages.

I learned about Ury’s methods when my husband and I were in couples therapy. The therapist taught us to stop trying to change each others’ needs and to understand them instead. This is how we got better at accommodating each other in a way that didn’t crush us. And it was a great lesson in negotiating that went way beyond our marriage.

Meeting Expectations

Ury focuses on strategy — he teaches how to understand the big picture from both sides. But you also need to have some tactical plans. I learned mine from one of my former bosses. My strengths are management and coming up with ideas. One of the reasons I took a job with this guy was because I knew he had totally different skills from mine: He was a great dealmaker, especially in business meetings.

This boss gave me so much negotiating advice it could fill 50 columns. Here are seven of the most memorable tactics I learned from him:

1. Don’t attend a meeting without decision-makers.

If you can’t get the meeting organizers to tell you who’ll be making decisions about the items under discussion, tell them you’re sending an admin to the meeting in your place. When they complain, say, “Then why don’t we both send our decision-makers?”

2. Don’t take a meeting unless you know who’s attending.

If the person who scheduled the meeting won’t tell you who’s going to be there, call just before the meeting and say, “I’m calling to see if the meeting’s still on. Please give me a call.”

When my former boss did this and got a call back 10 minutes later saying that the meeting was on, he asked, “Great, who’s coming?”

3. Always have a scapegoat handy for hard questions.

This is a person who takes the first shot at an answer to tough questions.

When my boss and I went into a partnership meeting and they asked how we would handle billing to small businesses, I told them we’d do it by hand. After a half-minute of me going on, my boss came up with a more reasonable answer because I had bought him the time to think.

4. Treat your lawyer like your friend.

Of course, the company’s lawyer was my boss’s friend because he only hired his friends. But lawyers at top-tier firms are generally smart people who shunned a risky career path by going to law school and then straight into a big law firm.

Consequently, they can keep a meeting strategy in their head and help you think of the other company’s point of view. And while some people say lawyers are slow thinkers, I think this is an illusion created by hourly billing.

5. Inundate the other side with information.

When my boss and I met with venture capitalists, they fired off question after question. We began to be able to predict their questions and created bright, visual charts and diagrams to answer them.

This caused the VCs to slow down in order to look at the charts, which allowed us to finally say what we wanted to say.

6. Don’t fidget.

In the first meeting I had with my boss, he noticed that I dropped my pen eight times. A fidgeter doesn’t know she’s fidgeting because she’s too absorbed in the fidgeting.

Someone who’s relaxed and confident doesn’t look rigid, and definitely doesn’t fidget. Even if you can’t master this, at least look around the room to see who has: They’ll be the toughest negotiator.

7. Believe you’re good at negotiating.

If you think you’re bad, you’ll be bad. If you believe you’re smart and you do a lot of preparation, then there’s no reason not to think you’re good.

If you really, really don’t think you’re a good negotiator, go to work for someone like my ex-boss. When you’re surrounded by great dealmakers, some of it starts to rub off on you — that’s how it worked for me.

 

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How to negotiate when you have nothing to leverage

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You probably know by now that while I go by the name Penelope today, it didn’t start out as my real name. It was a pen name. My editor at Time Warner gave it to me, and the first time I saw it was in a contract. It looked like a good place to start negotiating.

But when asked about writing under a different name my editor said, “When you’re Dominick Dunne you can negotiate with Time Warner.”

And herein lays the problem with most negotiations. You are in a great position if you have something to leverage, like, another person willing to give you the same type of deal. This is called your BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement). But in most cases, one party has an especially terrible BATNA. In the case of me and Time Warner, if I said no to them, they would have ten million people who would love to write a column for them. If they said no to me, I would not have a column.

Yet most advice about negotiating assumes you have a good BATNA. In an interview I did with William Ury, the author of my favorite negotiation book, Getting to Yes, he said that negotiation is all about knowing your BATNA and knowing the other party’s BATNA and then helping both of you to get what you want.

If you think about negotiating from this vantage point, then you can understand why job hopping is okay in today’s market: the BATNA for young people is stronger than the BATNA for hiring managers. Hiring managers are scrambling to hire young people and the young people are quitting faster than human resources can replace them. Meanwhile, the alternatives for young people are increasing – they can live at their parents’ house, they can start their own company, and they can travel. All great alternatives to getting a job at a company.

That said, sooner or later each of us finds ourselves in a situation where we have a really lousy BATNA. I find myself in this position a lot, as a writer. For example, a very large syndicate asked me to write for them. It would have meant having my column run in 400 newspapers at a time when I had about ten newspapers. I sent the contract to my lawyer, thinking he’d just take a quick look and say yes. But he told me that there was a clause that made me essentially unable to write for anyone else. Ever. We tried negotiating and they wouldn’t budge. Of course they wouldn’t. Millions of people want to write a syndicated column. So I had to say no. It was a very hard decision. In hindsight I am thankful for that lawyer, but for years after that, every time I found myself struggling, I worried that I did the wrong thing with the syndicate.

When Yahoo offered me the chance to write for them, they gave me a difficult contract. I gave it to the lawyer and the lawyer was very frank: It’s not a great contract, but it’s a great opportunity, and you should take it. So we talked about some things I could try asking for that would not be that hard for Yahoo to give on, just to be nice. I gave Yahoo a short list, they picked a few things, and I signed.

So what have I learned from all this? If one person has a great BATNA and the other has a terrible one, it’s not really negotiations; it’s trying to get a little something extra. It’s asking for a favor. If you approach negotiations from this perspective then you are much more likely to get a little bit of what you want.

Figure out where your counterpart might be willing to give a little. Even if your BATNA clearly stinks, most people you negotiate with will be willing to give a little just to create some good will for the working relationship you are establishing.

So you can read all the negotiation advice in the world, but if you have a terrible BATNA, what you really need is advice about how to ask for a favor. And, ironically, the advice for asking for a favor is the same advice for negotiating: Know what is most important and least important to both parties.

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How to negotiate more effectively with anyone

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During my first job interview, my mom drove me to 31-Flavors while we practiced interview questions.

One question we did not practice was “How much money are you expecting?”

When the ice cream store owner asked, I said, “Well, my parents are cutting off my allowance for the summer so I’d like twenty dollars a week.” That seemed like a lot because I wouldn’t need money for school lunches.

Later, my mom pointed out that I gave a number so low that it would have been illegal. In the end, the owner paid me minimum wage for a 40-hour week, and because I had asked for so little at the beginning, by the time I was a doing the job of a manager I was making less than some scoopers.

So I quit, and moved to a pizza parlor where I got extra money for cutting the salami with the machine that cut peoples’ fingers. It wasn’t until later in my career that I realized there are established strategies for salary negotiations, and if you follow them, you will likely get the salary you deserve without risking the loss of a limb.

I got a lot of practice doing that in my twenties – having about ten jobs in ten years. I got a sense of who would negotiate and who wouldn’t. I learned to read people in business. And then I realized that you can use these skills for a lot more than just salary.

One of my bosses gave me the book Getting To Yes. He said the book would help me manage because every management moment actually has implied negotiations.

When I went to couples therapy with my husband, the therapist assigned us reading. (Who knew therapist assigned books?) But guess what it was? Getting to Yes.

It was a great idea. Because then instead of paying a therapist to entertain our insane ideas of changing each other. We learned how to make the other person feel happy about giving us what we want by making sure that they get something, too.

So I was excited when I had the opportunity to interview the author of Getting toYes, William Ury. He’s director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard, and his new book is The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes. Here are his five best tips for doing well in negotiations.

1. Take a break.
Ury calls this “going to the balcony” in order to get a big picture handle on what’s going on so that you are not getting too worked up over irrelevant details. He says, “When we negotiate when we’re angry we give the best speech we’ll ever regret.”

2. Know your BATNA.
This is negotiator-speak for “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” That is, if you have to walk away, what’s the best you can get? This tells you how much power you have in negotiations. The person who needs the agreement the least has the best BATNA and the most power.

3. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
Ury describes negotiation as an exercise in influence. “You need to change someone’s mind, so you need to know where they are right now.” This means listening more than talking. And the first question to ask is Why. You will hear their needs, but you need to know the underlying cause for the need. For example, if your boss wants you to work a 16-hour day. To negotiate with your boss, you need to understand why – what needs to get done in those hours. Maybe you can get it done a different way.

4. Learn to say no.
“In order to get to the right deal, you need to be able to say no to the wrong deal. Saying no is fundamental to the process of negotiation.”

Tip from the department of great-if-you’re-him: Warren Buffet once said that he doesn’t understand “getting to yes” because he just says no until he sees a perfect yes. Buffet says you only have to give four or five great yes responses in his work in order to be a billionaire.

5. Be clear on your values.
For those of us who might not see a perfect yes, deciding on no is more complicated, and we have to be really clear in our own minds about what we value and what we need. Sometimes a no is surrounded by a deeper yes. For example. You say yes to the values, no to the tactics and yes to going forward. Ury calls this a positive no. But he warns that if you’re in doubt, then the answer if probably no.

What I take away from Ury is that good negotiation is a combination of good self-knowledge and good people skills. And, not surprisingly, this is the combination that gets you a lot of things in life.

There are opportunities in each of our lives to practice negotiations constantly — even, as Web Worker Daily points out, in email. You can do it with a spouse, with a boss, with your neighbor who doesn’t clean the yard. The better you get at the small stuff, the easier the big moments of negotiation will feel.

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Five steps for getting a raise

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More money is good, right? You’re going to be doing your job anyway, so you might as well ask to get paid more for doing it.

But you actually have to do a lot of preparation in order to ask for a raise effectively. The most obvious preparation is to find out what everyone else is getting paid for what you do. A recent New York Times story gives a good overview of online resources for salary comparisons.

Here are five other things you can do to get a salary increase:

1. Understand your boss’s perspective.
This is not a moment of truth, it’s a moment of negotiation. You convince your boss you’re worth more and your boss convinces you he or she is fair, and you reach some sort of compromise that makes everyone happy.

So be reasonable in your approach. You don’t deserve a raise just because you’ve been doing your job well for x number of months. It’s your job to do your job well — that’s why you were hired. You need to show that you’re doing more than you were hired to do, or that you’re doing different work that’s typically paid at a higher rate.
Gather as much information about your boss’s perspective as possible in order to form your strongest negotiating position. Consider this list of 10 things bosses hate most about employees.

2. Expand your job duties.
Get really good at your job immediately so that you can take on more responsibility in another job, in another capacity. Look around for something more to do, and figure out how to do it. Then tell your boss you’re doing more than one job and you want to be paid extra for doing the other job you’ve already been doing.

If you think your boss will balk at the idea of you taking on more responsibility, start looking like your current job is under control. One way to do this is to have a completely clean desk. A clean desk says, “I’m totally on top of my workload. Please give me more.” A cluttered desk says, “Help. I’m drowning.”

(I’m not making this stuff up — researchers actually study offices. Here’s a summary of why you should have a clean desk.)

3. Consistently over-deliver.
Even during a salary freeze there’s always more money for superstars, because losing a superstar costs a company a lot of money. So getting a raise is about conveying to the office that you’re a superstar. This could be in the form of taking on more areas of responsibility, but it could also be in the form of exceeding expectations in a very obvious way.

Exceeding expectations is something that must be announced. If you finish your project, that’s what people will understand. If you finish your project with incredible results, you need to remind everyone what the expectations were and what you delivered. If you don’t toot your horn, no one else will. A hallmark of a superstar is they know how to toot their horn with out being annoying.

Superstars aren’t overnight sensations — they work at it. So start performing like a superstar six months before you want to ask for a raise.

4. Get a mentor.
Employees who have mentors are twice as likely to be promoted as those who don’t, according to Ellen Fagenson Eland, a professor at George Mason University. A mentor can help you position yourself, time and again, to receive a raise.

An effective mentor helps you see your path in a way that maximizes your talents and stays consistent with your goals for life. This isn’t small task, and almost all successful people say they have more than one mentor. But start with one, because that will significantly increase the likelihood that you’ll get the raise you’re going to ask for.

Unfortunately, for some people finding a mentor is almost as difficult as asking for a raise. So here are seven ways to find and keep a mentor.

5. Think in non-financial terms.
If more money isn’t happening for you, try asking for something else. Telecommuting, a job for your spouse, extra vacation time, training, even relocation to a company branch in a city with a lower cost of living — these are all things that are worth a lot of money to you, but look a lot less expensive than a salary increase in a company’s budget. So non-financial rewards are a good place to compromise in salary negotiations.

Also, you can turn these benefits to cash next time you change jobs. When you negotiate salary at your next company and they ask you how much you made in your last job, add up all the benefits and include them in the number you give. Some people’s benefits total up to 30 percent of their salary.

If the shy ones among you are thinking this isn’t a fair negotiating tactic, get that thought out of your head. Even CareerHub, a group blog of career coaches, recommends that you include benefits in the total calculation of your salary next time you negotiate.

If none of these steps work, try not to be so obsessed with getting a raise. Think about it — most raises amount to about 4 percent of your salary. That’s nothing. Even if you earn six figures, 4 percent isn’t going to be life-altering.

There are so many more things you can ask for that will actually improve your life, like training in a skill area you’re interested in, or the ability to telecommute a few days a week.

Try focusing on the things that really matter to you instead of the dollar amount attached to your title. You may find that your salary will increase as a natural offshoot of the passion you develop for your work.

 

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Office politics is not optional: Five tips for doing it better

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John Annabel, of Northampton, walked into the office one day to find himself working side by side with a new employee whose only qualification seemed to be that she was having an affair with Annabel's department head. Annabel says people didn't particularly care that she was in the office doing no work until she started taking credit for everyone else's work, most frequently Annabel's.

“I wanted to strangle my boss,” Annabel says. “I wanted to bring that dirtbag girlfriend down before she took credit for one more thing.” But Annabel's supervisor told him to stay calm and to say nothing damaging. He pointed out that the manager would never fire the woman, and the two of them would deny all of Annabel's accusations; complaining would only make Annabel look bad.

So everyone in the department laid low — said nothing about the woman who did nothing except among themselves. When the company went through a reorganization, and the department head changed, the new head said, “Does anyone know what this woman does?” And everyone said, “No,” and she was laid off.

In fact, though, office politics might be the most important skill to master as you climb up the corporate ladder. Julie Jansen, author of I Don't Know What I Want, but I Know It's Not This, says that in corporate life, one has no choice but to be savvy about politics. “Politics is everywhere. It is about the way things are done. It is the personality of the company.” So you have to figure out how to fit in. She tells people, “Be an actor, play the game, follow culture and this is jus as big a part of your job as anything else.”

In the end, Annabel left his job in an effort to escape the political climate of his last job, which left him cold. And he hopes to never have to deal with office politics again.

Larry Stybel, president of Stybel Peabody Lincolnshire, says that is it a common reaction to refuse to participate in office politics, but he advises those people “to just get over it.” Politics is not something you can escape. “Politics is really setting objectives and developing a coalition of people that will help achieve that objective.” Stybel explains that office politics does not have to be a bad thing. After all, politics is primarily about diplomacy and coalition building.

Stybel recommends taking the same approach Annabel did in his last job: Find a mentor in the office, someone who is great at office politics, get some direct advice from them about tough spots, but also study them from afar to figure out what they do right.

Jansen adds, “There is a tremendous amount of resistance to office politics.” Many people complain that this sort of behavior goes against who they are at their core. Jansen points out that done right, politics is not inherently immoral. It merely involves, “speaking to the right people, going to the right parties and communicating the way everyone else at the company communicates.”

While Jansen advises that you should not compromise your core values to be political, if you find that you can't ever engage in office politics without violating your core values, then you don't belong in corporate America.

Jansen suggests five steps you can take to be more politically astute immediately:

1. Don't try to change or resist company culture including dress, communication styles and office hours. Being different does not work.

2. Practice self-awareness. This is a life-long task and every day you can become a little bit more aware of how people perceive you. Just doing your job is not enough. You need to do it in a way that makes a positive impression on everyone else.

3. Manage your stress levels so you can avoid emotional displays of inconsistent behavior and inconsistent messages. Most emotional outbursts come from unmanaged stress.

4. Be approachable all the time — in your cube, in the hallway, even in the bathroom.

5. Network before you need to network. Being good at politics means that you are good at relationship building, and you can count on a wide range of people when you need them.

But some people will never feel comfortable playing the political game. For those people, Stybel recommends a job where one can say, “Leave me alone” and still excel at the work: Sales would be a definite no, but a career in, say, programming might work. But take a look at yourself. If you don't have the skills for a leave-me-alone job, you need the skills to make office politics work for you. Otherwise you'll get stuck.

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Upbeat news about flextime requests

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The best thing you can do if you want a flexible schedule is ask for it. Younger workers are finding more and more success when they ask, which should give everyone encouragement to request flextime if they want it.

Laurie Young is a founder of Flexible Resources, a company that specializes in finding flextime jobs for people, and she spends her days convincing employers to create innovative positions. You will probably have to do some convincing as well.

It makes sense: You’d never ask for a raise without presenting competitive salary analysis, and you should do the same when asking for flextime. Fortunately, there is a lot of research to present because many companies offer flextime, and it actually helps those companies because flextime is a cheap and effective tool to boost employee morale.

But keep in mind that flexible schedules aren’t available to people who get the job done. Flextime is generally only offered to overperformers. So be one.

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How to get a raise

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You do not deserve a raise just because you have been doing your job well for x amount of months. It is your job to do your job well. That’s why you were hired.

Also, do not complain about your salary not being at market rate six months after you take your job. Because if you are underpaid it’s your own fault for accepting the job six months ago. Do the salary research before you take the job.

Here is a situation where you do deserve a raise: You are doing more work now than when your salary was set. Caution: This does not mean that you are doing more work within the job description you were hired for. Because then you are just doing what you were hired to do. You need to show you are doing more than you were hired to do.

So if you want a raise in six months, get really good at your job immediately so that you can take on more responsibility in another job, in another capacity. Look around for something more to do, and figure out how to do it. Then tell your boss you are doing more than one job and you want to be paid extra for doing the other job you have already been doing. That’s how to ask for a raise.

What if things are moving too slowly for you? David Christiansen at Information Technology Dark Side gives sound advice for those who are both feisty and mobile — put pressure on your boss relentlessly, and if that fails, job hop.

But hold on. Surely there are more important things you can get from your boss than a little bit more money or a better title. Your career will go further faster if you negotiate for things that really matter.

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When it comes to office politics, consider the sibling factor

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Time magazine’s cover story is How Your Siblings Make You Who You Are. There are a few good tidbits about how your sibling experience affects how you are at work.

Adult life is made up of relationships – at work, in marriage, among friends — and we learn the skills for these relationships through siblings because we spend so much time with siblings during our most formative years, according to Susan McHale, psychologist at Penn State University.

One example is if there is a favorite child (which researchers see in the majority of families) all the kids will use it to their advantage. As in, “Why don’t you ask Mom if we can go to the mall because she never says no to you.” And we end up using the same tactics at work: “You go tell the vice president that we missed our sales goals. He has a soft spot for you.”

Negotiation styles between siblings affect skills beyond the home. If kids have good conflict-resolution skills among themselves, then they will have more success in school. Regardless of race, income and family structure, it’s the style of play that will make the difference in future success.

Favorite statistic from the article: “Kids in the 2-4 age group have more than one clash every ten minutes,” which I read as my older son hit my younger son with Buzz Lightyear.

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The time is right to ask for perks

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The deluge of press about the difficulty of attracting and keeping Generation Y employees is amazing.

Here’s an example of a press release pandering to the media infatuation with the topic. Even the sheep are suffering : “Fewer and fewer people are choosing the sheep and beef industry as a career. There are huge job choices across a wide range of industries and for young people, the world is their oyster.”

Now is a great time to start asking for a wider range of benefits from your employer. Companies are beginning to understand that if they don’t start caving to Generation Y demands then there won’t be quality job applicants.

Ask for flexible schedules and jobs that foster personal growth because that will make the most impact on your life. Pat Katepoo gives good advice on how to ask.

Not that Generation X didn’t want this stuff in a job ten years ago. But Generation X did not have the demographic power to demand it. Generation Y does, and employers are shaking in their boots. Finally.

Getting a promotion is so last century

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Can we all just stop talking about promotions like they matter? A promotion has meaning when someone is moving up the corporate ladder at such a slow pace that every small step is grounds for celebration.

But there are no more ladders because no one stays long enough at a company to get up the whole ladder. And even if someone did try to climb, they’d probably be laid-off outsourced or off-shored before they got to the top.

So what is the point of a promotion? Titles do not matter because they are accoutrements of hierarchy in a nonhierarchical workforce. And no one cares about getting MORE responsibly that implicitly comes with a promotion, they want the RIGHT kind of responsibility — which means interesting work and a chance to expand one’s skills set.

So all that’s left to justify continuing to talk about promotions is getting a raise, which is hardly a notable event. Here is a headline from Salary.com: “Raise Outlook Better than Employees Expected”. The article goes on to say that the average raise was something just above three percent. Let’s say four percent. This means if you were making $100,000 a year, you’ll get $4,000 a year more. SO WHAT? After cost of living and tax adjustments you are looking at a little over a thousand dollars. That will not change your life in any significant way, that’s for sure.

When someone tries to give you a promotion or insult you with a $1000 a year raise, tell them you want someone that really matters. Here are some suggestions:

1. Growth opportunities

Learning new skills is worth a lot more to you than some ridiculous 4% raise. Ask to get on a team that will teach you how to do something you think is important. Ask to work with the clients who are doing the most innovative projects. Request a training budget and send yourself to a bunch of seminars. The best way to learn is to role-play, which everyone hates to do, so go to a seminar where someone is forces you to do it.

2. Mentor opportunities

Ask to be matched with a mentor in the company. This is not a revolutionary request. Human resource executives have been studying this process for more than a decade and they know how to pick someone good for you. They just need to spend a little time doing it.

3. Flex-time opportunities

If you are so great at your job that you have earned a promotion, suggest that you keep your current job but do it from home or do it four days a week. After all, you’ve already shown you perform well. Heck, ask to work from Tahiti; you should be able to do the job however you want as long as you maintain that stellar level of performance.

4. Entrepreneurial opportunities

Just say no. To the promotion, that is. Now that you have a sense of how much time and energy your current job requires, now that you’ve mastered the scope, you can try something on the side. The safest way to experiment with running your own business is to do it while you still have a regular paycheck. Who cares if it doesn’t include that 4% raise? Think of that paycheck as a research grant for your ideas for a side business.

Instead of letting last century’s carrots dictate your workplace rewards, think about what is right for you, right now. What do you really need? You don’t need a promotion. It’s something else. Think about what would really make a difference in your life and then make it happen. While the rest of your organization is focusing on titles and money you can slip under the radar and get something truly meaningful.

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