A Conversation on Women's Negotiation and Advocacy | Conversations on Conversations

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Conversations on Conversations, where each week we explore a topic to help us have more powerful conversations with ourselves and others. I'm your host, Sarah Noll Wilson, and joining me this week is Miss Kathryn Valentine, where we will be exploring the very important topic of women in negotiation. Here's a little bit more about Kathryn. She is the CEO of Worth More Strategies, where she leverages over a decade of research in gendered business skills to help companies advance female talent. She is a top-rated speaker. Her clients include multinational organizations such as JPMorgan, KPMG, and TIAA. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Forbes. She has been invited to speak on her research at Harvard, Wharton, and Kellogg Please join me in welcoming Kathryn Valentine to the show. Kathryn, thank you for braving the weather and joining us today. Welcome to the show.

So excited to be with you. It is much better than just watching it rain.

So just for people to know, and just, you know, we believe in honesty and full transparency, Kathryn is under one of her first tornado watches. And so we're going to be playing this by ear based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and so they don't get them down there. So this will be a fun chat.

Currently, I think it's like most of our snow days where we get a snow day and then the kids stay home and it just rains.

Yeah, sure. Well, let's hope that that's the case. Okay, Kathryn, before we get into your research, your work, and digging into all of those yummy topics, what else do you want us to know about you?

What an interesting and broad question. So I'm married with 2 kids, 2 boys, and they are just so much fun to be around. And recently, I don't know if you follow Laura Vanderkam, but I've been using a lot of her time management strategies. And she— and had figured out a way to go to dance class again, which I haven't done in like 20 years. And I'm having so much fun.

Good for you.

It's great. It's me and a bunch of like 55-year-old women, and it's just delightful.

I, you know, there is something about— did you used to dance when you were younger?

Yes.

Yeah, there's some— I figured there's something about reconnecting with things that brought you a lot of joy as a kid and being able to be unapologetic about it that I think is so important for like self-care and healing.

And for the past 10 years, I mean, especially with kids and COVID and everything, it's been, how could I possibly find 2 hours?

Yeah.

But it has been so much fun.

Can you give me the shortest bullet point of the lessons you learned from her work that's helped you? Because I'm unfamiliar.

Oh, from Laura's work? I thought you meant Kate Moss. I was like, I mean, I could try.

There are people— oh, I mean, you can show us some moves. We can add it into the bonus content. No, I have no doubt that other people are thinking exactly what I was thinking of. So what's the secret?

Oh, okay. So I read Laura's book last December, Tranquility by Tuesday, She has a bunch, but this is just her most recent one. And one of the things that's in it is this chapter on how to design your ideal schedule, where you actually lay out what you would do every hour for a week. And at first, it does— I mean, it takes about half an hour to figure it out. And I thought to myself, like, why am I doing this? It's never going to work. And frankly, I hit my ideal week pretty much never. But so many things have gotten worked into my life because I wrote down what I was hoping for, and then things end up sort of channeling that way, right? So now I pick my son up from school on Fridays, we do parent walk-up, and it's like, it's the best feeling. And I never could figure out how to get it done before I laid out the ideal schedule. So that one tool has really changed things for me.

Oh, I love that. And, and thanks for sharing that because, you know, sometimes we have to just be really clear about what we want in our life to see it as a possibility. It can be so easy to be like, no, it can't. And let's be honest, and sometimes it can, right? Sometimes there's a privilege we have when we can work in that kind of stuff. But when we do, it's so important. Okay, Kathryn. I know you and I had a pre-conversation, but what I'm curious about is Talk to us about your journey to the work you're doing. What fueled your passion and the research that you're doing to want to not only help women be able to show up differently so they can be more effective, but also so you can help people who don't identify as women, our male allies, to be able to think differently about negotiation?

So, I started my career at McKinsey, which was, I think, a very, you know, a lovely place to start. I was very lucky that way. And fairly ambitious, wanted to do well, and started reading the books for, like, women in leadership. And again, this was not yesterday. This was a while ago.

Sure.

And the books were like, 101 Things You're Doing Wrong by Being a Woman. And it was just very depressing. And so, like, that's the backdrop. And then I was getting my MBA. I was doing my MBA internship. And I decided that I wanted to negotiate to be placed on another team because I'd finished the project in like 4 weeks. And so I canceled all my plans for the weekends, read all the books, underlined them, highlighted them, Googled how do I negotiate, wrote a script, practiced the script. No one's ever accused me of underpreparing, right?

True.

And so I did everything the experts told me to do. Went in and had this conversation at 10:00 AM. By 10:05, I had managed to offend the coordinator completely. Like, I had no idea how this happened. By 10:10, I was being told I wasn't a culture fit, which obviously means I wasn't going to get the job.

Yeah.

And if I wasn't going to get the job, the internship didn't make sense anymore. So per company protocol, I was escorted out of the building by security. And deposited on the sidewalk. And so, I'm standing on the sidewalk with that box, that cardboard box of your things, and I'm trying to figure out what the heck just happened. I was one of the top interns, and then all of a sudden, I didn't have a job in less time than it takes to get a latte. And so, I was in a very fortunate position where I had a year of business school left. So, I went back to Northwestern, and I started to figure out what had happened. And at that point in time, the research on negotiating specifically as a woman was just coming out. And so, I went as deep as possible. And what I learned in that time was, one, negotiation is gendered. What I can say and what my brother can say lands differently.

Yeah.

Two, most of the advice out there, like the advice I had consumed, is actually created for men. It just doesn't come with that warning. And three, there's a solution.

And let's— and, and let's be really explicit— likely white men.

Yes.

Because when it comes to—

Because that's who was in the world.

Because that's, that's who's in the Positions of power, right? Like, and that's who's in the, you know, like, yeah.

Yes. And so, and then the third thing I learned is there was a solution, there was a research-based solution that's very well known in academic circles, but had not been connected to, you know, professional women who could use it now to be more successful. And so that became my mission. And then what's happened recently is really expanding the aperture to, oh, it's not just negotiation. It turns out many business skills have been created and are discussed through a white male lens. But there have been these— there are these incredible gender researchers who have been doing research for Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Georgetown, who've been doing research for a solid 10, if not 15 or 20 years on this topic. And so what my job is now is to bring their research insights straight to professional women who can use it. And so this is negotiation, which we'll talk about today.

Mm-hmm.

It's also networking. We need to network differently. It's time management. One of the reasons I'm deep on Laura Vanderkam right now. It's career management strategies. It is how do you advance in the workplace? Those are also different.

Yeah.

And so, that's what we're building out right now. And so, to your point, you know, I think the value for women is you've been handed tools that weren't built for you, and then the world gives you— makes you feel bad when they don't work for you. Let's actually give you some tools that are built for you, and you can choose in any situation, you can choose which one fits better, which one feels more authentic, but at least we're going to give you some tools, some more tools. And then for non-women in the workplace, your team performance is hindered if only half the people can say what they need to be successful. Your team performance is hindered if only half the people can network with the folks they need in other departments to get the— right? There are so many ways in which women are being undercut.

Yeah.

And if you, as a non-woman in the workplace, understand those, Your teams are going to be much more successful.

There is so much to unpack here. And I am trying to slow down my brain enough to talk about this. I need to go back and find it. But just yesterday, I was on LinkedIn, and somebody had posted this really powerful video. It was so simple. And it was basically like a student asking, what's the difference between aggression And being assertive? And the teacher's response was gender and race. And that point that you brought up is something that is worth amplifying, that most of how business operates, most of the books that are out there were written through a very specific lens for a specific type of person. And it can be hard and uncomfortable, I know, for folks who, you know, like for our male colleagues to understand like we're not playing by the same rules. You are not going to get the same feedback. You are not going to have the same experiences. You will not have to deal with just some of the bullshit that we have to deal with. Just like, you know, as a white woman, I'm not going to deal with the same stuff that my—

Right.

women of color colleagues are experiencing. And I just want to say this because this is something that I've been wrestling with myself in our own work, is being really transparent about what's the lens that we're looking at this through and how do we bring in different perspectives. Because you made that comment of those books you read, it didn't come with a warning to say this wasn't designed for me. How are you— I kind of want to just start there for a second. How do you approach your work to understand and name the lens in which you're looking through? Just because I think that that's something we don't talk about enough.

So I was raised by a single mom who was in the workforce. And as you can imagine, the dinnertime conversation was all kinds of things. She was also in the workforce in the Deep South as a divorced woman. In the '80s, right?

'80s, yeah.

But one of the things that we found when she retired is that she had been paid about 40% less than her male colleagues for 30 years.

Wow.

Which is, I mean, if you add that up, that's a real big difference in retirement.

Yeah.

And so, I think to your point of like, what's the lens, sometimes I feel like I'm not even as good at that as I want to be because I was raised solely through the female lens.

Yeah, sure.

And so, that's just the default way that I see things. The other kind of thing that popped into my mind when you were talking in terms of lens is I think it also helps to talk about not only how this is helpful for women and for males or non-women, but also how it's helpful for companies.

Yeah.

So, you know, McKinsey did this research showing that true gender equity would add $28 trillion to global GDP, which is— right, it's one of those numbers that you almost can't contextualize.

Yeah.

So, that's the annual revenue of Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google combined, multiplied by 25.

Wow.

And so, companies want a piece of that growth. But I think they also, and many of them are, I've been really amazed at how progressive some of these companies are, but many of them are starting to understand that the only way to grab that growth is if they can enable women to have conversations that we have not been enabled to have that allow us to deliver more value, advance further, stay longer. Like, conversations that we've been locked out of so far.

Yeah.

And so, that's why, I mean, when I went to my husband and I was like, I'm leaving McKinsey, I'm starting a new company, I'm going to teach women how to negotiate, companies are going to pay me. He was like, This seems like a bad idea. And I've been so excited by the companies that are like, no, that's the old way of looking at it. The new way of looking at it is we need you to have a voice or we're not going to be able to be successful.

Yeah, yeah. And part of that is because we see this a lot. Companies go, we need to diversify. We need more diversity on our team. So we're going to hire more people who are different than what we have. But none of them interrogate and are willing to see, own, and change the ways they silence people who are different than the norm, the ways they exclude people. And, you know, I mean, I just had a situation last week where somebody shared an example of, I'm the only woman on my leadership team, and they go to all these events, like major events. I'm talking World Series, and she's not invited. And they don't see that as a problem. And like, and that's, that's, that's, that's the work, right? Because to your point, so much— I feel like so much for so long of the language to women is you need to be more confident, you need to speak up more, you need to be more assertive, instead of it being like you're playing in a game that wasn't built for you. So let's name that. And hey, people who are in power who aren't women, you need to understand the role you play in silencing those voices.

Yeah.

And then we need to figure out how to play the game differently, right? What— yeah, go ahead.

Agreed. And I think for women, it's because you're playing in an environment that wasn't built for you. You actually need to be able to negotiate more often because the, you know, the frame we're plopping you into doesn't fit you. So you got to negotiate on the A, at the core, but B, in all kinds of different ways. So I would argue that the skill of negotiating is actually that much more powerful because we need to negotiate to try and make this And then for the non-women, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot recently is, and I'd be curious if this is your experience, but I run into so many— and actually, in this one, I ran into so many leaders who happen to be men who genuinely want to do this better.

Mm-hmm.

But in some way, an environment has been created where even asking the questions feels risky and actually legally could be risky. And so, I've been recently trying to think about how do we become resources where, you know, a leader can just call us and ask whatever you want to ask because you need to know the information to achieve what you genuinely want to achieve. I think there— sometimes I talk to people who seem to think that it's all intentional. And that's just not what I've found in my work with leaders.

No. It's not. I mean, we all have unchecked bias. We all operate from deep-rooted systems based off of our culture, our upbringing, media, all of that. And I think that point is interesting of it not feeling safe to ask some of those questions. And I think you're absolutely right, having the place to say, let's talk about the stuff that maybe you're afraid or uncomfortable or not sure that you can ask someone. And part of it too is, Like, and like, let us support you, or, right, somebody like you do the labor, um, instead of asking a woman who's dealing with it, who might not necessarily have the, the answers to it. Um, so there's 2, 2 things I'm curious about. One, I love, absolutely love that point that you made of, then we have to negotiate so much more. And one of the things that I know you share as a really great resource, and we'll, we'll put it in the show notes. Is there's so many different things for us to think about negotiating, right? And so often, we think about only negotiating on salary. And so I would love to dig into expand our— and I also love your— I'm just such a fan of people's language. Let's expand the aperture. What are other ways and areas that we need to be thinking about negotiating that we aren't maybe on a regular basis?

Yeah. So, Sarah, this is one of those questions I can nerd out on for a really long time.

Okay, let's geek out on it.

Let's do it. I'm going to try and be concise. Okay.

Or don't.

Thank you for that permission. We've spent the past decade putting together a list of 75 things we've seen women successfully negotiate, and you can get that on our website. But to your point, let me kind of— I'm going to take it in buckets. One is the financial bucket. Most people think about base pay. What we know from work done by Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize last year, is that if you want to maximize your financial earnings over the course of your career, you would actually negotiate career progression. You would negotiate promotions much more than you would negotiate raises, because the promotion doesn't come with an extra 3%, it comes with an extra 20%, and you're in a new pay band, right?

Yeah.

And so, there's a lot more room there. So, financially, A, think about negotiating that. B, think about negotiating stock options. The gender wage gap is 20%. The gender gap in stock options is 80%.

Oh.

Uh-huh. Men on average get $105,000 in stock options and women get $26,000 in stock options. That's compounded by the fact that 17% fewer women are offered stock options to begin with. So let's think about stock options. Let's think about equity. Gender gap there is 40%. Let's think about 401 benefits. Let's think about performance bonuses. There's all kinds of different buckets we can go into there. The other thing that I encourage people to think about, and when we do our corporate work, it's around opportunities to increase your impact. So how would it be helpful if you had a new tool? Would it be helpful if you did a different training? Would it be helpful if you sit in on those meetings or got those high-profile assignments or were embedded with the client or had more team members? You know, what is it that you need to deliver the impact that you're capable of? And then what is it that you need to reduce your stress? There are— we can talk about how many hours you work, when you work those hours, where you work those hours, who you work those hours with. I mean, there's all kinds of different ways you can negotiate what your job responsibilities are. You can negotiate what your job responsibilities aren't. Yeah.

Right?

There's all kinds of things like that. And so one of the workplace negotiations I did that always comes to my mind on this one is when my I was raised partially by my grandparents. See, thread on having a single mom.

Yeah, sure.

And I was always really close with them. And when my grandfather passed away, my grandmother just stopped. She just stopped eating. She stopped taking medicine. She just stopped. And so they were in Texas and I was in Philadelphia. There's no way my employer would have known this, right? And I got to have a conversation, which was, hey, as you know, I've been doing really good work. This thing happened in my life. I'm really worried about my grandmother and it's impacting my ability to deliver right now. So what I want to propose to you— and this was, you know, 10 years before COVID when no one did this— but what I want to propose to you is I'd like to go to Texas and I'd like to work from there for about a month just because there will be another body in her house with her and it will make her eat. And I was 3 times more productive there than I was sitting in a cubicle in Philly just worrying.

Hmm.

But I think those are the kinds of things that But we should be able to have those conversations without worrying about backlash.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Impact, increasing your impact. I'm curious if you can speak to one of the things that we know is that often women, the feedback women are given is different than the feedback men are given. One of the things we also know is that a lot of times the tasks that are given to women don't have the same kind of exposure and impact as their male counterparts. And I'm curious, I assume that this is— I just want to be like, I know you know all of this, so let's just talk about this stuff that I know a little bit about and expand on it. But can you just dig into that a bit, that idea of impact? Because not all impact is the same when it comes to career progression. Not all impact is the same when it comes to exposure, when it comes to being able to show your strengths. And so I would love to just— I would just love to hear you tease that out a bit and geek out on it so that we can understand that better. Because boy, you know, it's okay. So, and it was interesting. So something personal happened. My niece Monica, she's 17, 16, 17, and she was voted to be the secretary of an organization within her school. And because she's really organized and da da da, I said, great, and make sure that your voice is still heard. And it was interesting because she was like, oh no, no, no, it will because that's why they wanted me in this position. I'm like, I am telling you that usually the person who's the note-taker are women, and usually they're so focused on capturing everyone else's that they don't have the time or headspace to speak up, and/or they're minimized and dismissed as not being as valuable. So I'm just telling you, this is a common trap, and I want you to be super aware of it. So anyway, the floor is yours.

This is an amazing, like amazingly rich thing to go into. So I have feedback, I have tasks, and I have a trick. On the feedback side, one of my very favorite women who's incredibly, incredibly successful has this saying, which she, you know, doesn't share widely, but the saying is, give me a list or promote me.

Mm-hmm.

And that is the mentality for every feedback session, which I love, which is basically we know that bias is removed the more specific you can get. And it is very possible to drive towards specificity in those feedback conversations as a woman without igniting backlash. So, for example, your manager says, oh, you just don't have executive presence, or whatever the heck it is, right? You say, oh, what an interesting point. What does that look like to you? Oh, so if I demonstrated X, Y, and Z, then I would have strong executive presence. Okay. Well, the second point that you said, I don't actually understand how I would do that. Can you talk to me more about what that looks like? You are going to make them tell you how you can do this. And if, if at any point in time in the meeting, you feel like they're beat, like you don't understand exactly specifically what to go do, then keep asking questions. And then at the end, you write the note, right? That's like, thanks so much for the time. Here's what I heard from you. Here's what I'm going to do. And then every time you do it, you send them another note. Thanks so much for the time. Here's what I did. It meant the team did X, Y, and Z. So grateful. And if it's not authentic, then don't do that. But it is a really good way of, if you're getting feedback that's nebulous, just ask questions until it's not nebulous.

Yeah.

The trick there at a higher level is we know that men are promoted based on potential and women are promoted based on performance. Which means that even in an organization with only 3% bias, it's going to take women twice as long to reach executive levels, right? So, basically, it'll take you 16 years instead of 8.

Wow.

And so, what we need to think about is if we know that's how things work without interruption, like, yes, we should fix the structures, that should happen. In the meantime, I'm really focused on giving women tools so that they can be successful in the structures now so that we can change them.

Yeah.

So if we know that that's what's happening, what do we do? What we do is we have a midpoint review that actually matters. My theory is that midpoint reviews are the most important conversation that women have every year. Because if you only start your negotiation in your annual review, then it's a surprise, right? There's all these things.

Yeah.

Oh, well, you haven't done that yet. You haven't done that yet. You haven't done that yet. But if you have the conversation 6 months earlier, hey, when we have our annual review, I'd like to be asked to be promoted to VP. Can you tell me what I would need to demonstrate? To prove that I'm ready for that? Oh, well, you need to X, Y, and Z. Oh, I need to run a P&L? That's so interesting. I don't actually have a P&L to run. How would I do that? And then your boss is like, oh, that's right. Um, let me figure out how to make that work for you. Or let me, let me give you this part of my P&L. Let me, whatever it is, right? But you're having this conversation in a way so that they're telling you exactly what boxes you need to check. You're checking them. Every time you're emailing them to let them know you checked the box so that by the time you get to your annual review, it is sort of predetermined because you've been having that conversation for 6 months already.

That's so interesting. And also that point of following up and making it visible, making— because it's not— I'm not making my progress visible out of contempt or resentment. It's informing. That is definitely a pattern I've seen in a lot of folks, but I see it more often in women. And, you know, and I'll say this, I'm a Midwest woman. We were raised to not think, you know, don't get too big for your britches. Don't, you know, we confuse humility with low self-esteem. And one of the things is that there's this assumption that if I do good work, it'll be seen and recognized. And that's just bullshit. And like, so you— Well, because it doesn't acknowledge the fact that everyone's incredibly busy.

I miss things all day long.

Right.

And so do our bosses. And so I think for this one, when it's sharing your wins, I don't think of it as a braggy way. I think of it as like a celebrating together because you told me that I need to work on X. I worked on X. And as a result, we just landed a new account. Like, that's great for both of us. I want to share that win.

I know. I love that so much. And sometimes, you know, one of the things when I'm working with a leader, Regardless, is how do you make your, your changes in thinking visible? How do you make the moments you're catching yourself more visible? How do you draw that really direct line between exactly like you said, you gave me this feedback, I appreciate it. Here's what I've done. Here's what I've learned about it. Here's what, like, here's how this conversation went differently than it wouldn't have, like, than it would have if I had followed my old ways. The other thing that's interesting I'm curious to get your thoughts. And I want to be— I don't want to be careful about how I say this, but I am. I'm being thoughtful. Because again, it's not, it's not manipulative. But when you can bring it back to, you told me to do this, and so this is what I'm doing, there is an element of reminding that person again, not in a manipulative way. Like, I'm changing because of you. Like a little bit of stroking their ego of like, hey, thank you for that feedback.

Well, it's the IKEA effect, right? When people build something— Say it one more time. Oh, when people participate in something, they believe that it is 7 times more valuable than if they didn't participate in it. So people who like build furniture are like, well, this must be worth $500 versus if they just buy it, it's like $100 or whatever, right?

Wait, okay, wait, give me that stat again because I love it so much and I'm totally going to use it.

The IKEA effect is what it's I forget what it's called, but it's when people participate in something, they see it as more valuable. The random $100, $500 thing I gave you, that's just— those are just illustrative numbers. So that's what you're doing with the person you're working with is we are going somewhere together. Oh, that's how I get on that path? Great. Hey, I want to let you know that advice you gave me, it worked really well. Here's what I'm doing next.

It's what I got. I love that. It's such a gift for me. Because we think about that through the lens of including team members in strategies because people are more likely to commit to something they create. But I've never held it in the perspective from a leadership mentoring coaching perspective.

Well, like performance management of your career. Yeah. I mean, plus also it's just like it's more fun when you do it with other people. The wins get celebrated differently.

Yeah. Okay. Can we, um, you said you had a list. Were there other things that you wanted to, because I feel like I think that is a really juicy bit of insight before I ask you a different question.

Well, so we just hit the random trick. If you want to go deeper in tasks, we can, or we can flip it around.

Can we just— can we do just— let's just talk about it. Let's do an abbreviation of that because it is important, again, for people to understand. I was working with a leader once and we had done a full— we call them gap audits, right? We understand how do they want to show up, we interview people and we're gathering Like, where are the gaps? And one of the things that had come out of his assessment is that both men and women perceived him to be behaving in ways that were sexist.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, it was super fascinating. And props to this guy because he so beautifully caught himself saying, there's no way that could be true, and then changed it to, how might it be? And that was such a fundamental shift. It was one of my favorite clients to work with because he was willing to sit with and wrestle and see like, oh shit, I see where this is showing up. And one of them was related to tasks. He would only ever ask women to take notes. He would only ever ask women to organize events. He would only ever ask women to do stuff that wasn't always critical to the business.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So 2 thoughts on that. One is, and I feel like collectively, this is not a you thing, but collectively, we do not acknowledge often enough that it's hard to be a woman in the workforce. It's hard to be a man in the workforce right now. It's hard to be transgender. It's hard for everyone because it's changing.

Yeah.

And so I do, I love being part of the women's leadership community, but also I always want to be really sensitive around the fact that it's way harder to be a man working than it was 30 years ago.

You bet it is.

Right? And so, to your point of how your client, who happened to be a male, navigated that, that's incredible leadership right there. That's amazing. So, in terms of the task, the research that we have, and this is by Linda Babcock and her team coming out of Carnegie Mellon, is that women are asked to do 200 hours of non-promotable tasks every year. That's a month.

Yeah.

The other thing that they looked at is how this is different for junior women and senior women. And the answer is it's not. It's actually about the same amount, but we're responding differently. Senior women tend to work 250 hours more per year simply to compensate for the 200 hours of non-promotable tasks they're doing, which is a huge driver of burnout in executive levels for women. Junior women Currently tend to actually work as much as their male colleagues, but because, let's call it, 8% of their effort is being directed to non-promotable tasks, they're not advancing as quickly. So, uh, figuring out how to unravel this non-promotable task thing is really important, and it's happening for 2 reasons. One, women are twice as likely to be asked to do a non-promotable task. But we're also twice as likely to say yes. And part of that is because the gendered nature of backlash. And so I highly recommend The No Club, and they give actually a formula for saying no to avoid backlash and all of that stuff. But it is, to your point, the task assignment is something else we're going to have to unravel as sort of the next frontier.

I don't know that I've heard the phrase non-promotable tasks said as explicitly, as simply, and as clearly as you just said that. And it's an interesting— even that is an interesting—

Framing?

Yeah, it's an interesting framing and it's a reflection. And again, not just for men because we know the bias exists for both men and women, right? We all have gendered bias within us depending on how we were raised. But that idea of Even just thinking, are people even clear? Well, I mean, I know the answer, but are they even clear about what is a promotable task versus a non-promotable task? And who are you? I mean, that's an interesting assessment all onto its own or an audit.

Well, so I just finished working with a client last month and I had so much fun working with them because what they did is a leadership discussion of, A, what is non-promotable tasks, Yeah. B, given the research, what do we see in our company? And C, what are the systems that we're going to use to equalize that? So now instead of one person always taking notes, they just draw straws at the beginning of every meeting, right? They've come up with some pretty creative little ways, but then they also did a training for all the women on what is a non-promotable task and when it happens, how do we handle it? And A, there's a lot of ways you can say no, which we just alluded to, but B, one of the questions is, Oh, why are you, you know, why am I qualified to do that task? Or why are you choosing me? And I think if you said that without the whole company being trained, it gets a little tricky.

Yeah.

But in this situation where all the leaders had been trained, it just, it's just a nice trigger of like, oh, I was asking you because you did it last time.

Yeah.

Right? And so it just, it's just a nice, again, you have to train the whole culture so that it's non-combative, but it's a nice way to catch yourself. And women, by the way, women do it at the same frequency men do it. It's not just men handing this to women, this is also women handing it to women.

Exactly. And that's an important— that is absolutely an important thing to share. Again, we all have internalized sexism, racism, patriarchy, all of that. I mean, it's within all of us, especially in Western American culture. I want to pull the thread a bit on approaching things in a non-combative way. And I want to share with you an example, an experience I had, and I'm curious to get your perspective on using that as just a leveraging point of here's how people receive women negotiating different, just like in the example that you shared.

Right.

I used to work in HR, and while I wasn't in the decision for compensation, but I was privy to observing how those conversations went. And pretty consistently what I noticed is that if somebody was promoted internally and was a man and the man negotiated his salary, it was usually met with some kind of comment of, we just got to do what we need to do to be able to keep him here because he's such a valuable asset.

Right.

And the story when women would push back was, she just needs to be grateful for what we've given her. And it was such a clear shift. It was such a clear difference in how the negotiation was received. So I would love to hear what are some of those common biases that show up? You know, you use the word combative. How do we approach it in a way that's non-combative? But I want to tease that out a little bit more because that's really important for people to understand that we've been talking about how it's different because of gender, but I want to get even more details around what does that look like typically.

So I'm going to take you back to sort of like 101 level, and feel free to guide me a little bit here. But the 101 level on backlash and negotiation, negotiations is that you're at a higher risk of negotiations and gender non-congruent conversations. So that means that men are at a higher risk when they're negotiating flexibility, and women are at a higher risk when you're negotiating everything else, right? Like when you're negotiating promotion, when you're negotiating more resources, when you're negotiating pay, when you're negotiating all of the traditional career things. And so that's what is happening there is we're taking societal concepts of gender, right? So males, agency, women, other-focused, we're putting it in an environment where most I think people think of it as a combative, winner-take-all situation, and that just ignites those gender concepts. And together, that's what's causing backlash. And the backlash we're seeing is not like the 1950s Mad Men-esque stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say, honestly, even what you were quoting is like a little bit on the heavy side. Like, what we're seeing now is you're no longer invited to that presentation. You're no longer invited to drinks. You're just like very quietly sidelined, quietly enough that Sometimes you think it's in your own mind. It usually isn't, right? So that's—

Yeah, we call it quiet retaliation. Like, it's, it's not always obvious.

It can be real subtle. That's a perfect term for it. That is because of that, which ends up only compounding that women tend to wait to negotiate until their backs are against the wall. And when your back is against the wall, you are inherently You're going to have a harder time negotiating. You're just not going to get the same— negotiation is much better as an offensive move than a defensive move. But because of the risk of backlash, women tend to wait until there's absolutely no other choice. We have solutions to that, which I'm happy to run you through. But that's kind of to your point of what you heard, that's sort of what's going on.

That gender congruence is, again, it makes a ton of sense. I mean, as soon as you said it, I was like, oh yeah, of course. Of course that's the case.

This is the thing about gender negotiations is it's so obvious once you see it, yet every major publication still writes negotiation articles as if we're all the same. Yeah.

And we're not.

We're not.

I want to just hire you for a day and be like, give me all of your wisdom and insight. Because I also, I'm such a data girl too, like a data nerd. So I love, I love the stats just because the research is fun. It just, well, it just brings it to life in a way that isn't like, well, this is my experience. Well, I, you know, I talked to my friend and she said she's never experienced this. Like, I know, okay.

Like, I know. What I get a lot is women who are like, well, I mentioned it to such and such, but they said like the risk of backlash was just in my own mind. Well, and a lot of times, you know, it's not the risk of backlash, it's like the risk of seeming greedy or not a team player or all of these other ways that we say backlash more commonly. They say it's just in my head. And it's like, okay, well, please stop talking to them about negotiation. Because we know from research that women are at a much higher rate risk of backlash than men are.

Well, and that feeds into so many things beyond even negotiating. That feeds into giving feedback. That feeds into The cost, the risk-cost calculation we're doing to speak up when you feel like you have experienced harm, when you have experienced harassment, when you have felt like you were unfairly treated. Because we know, and I don't remember what the stats, but it's substantial that there will be backlash when you are part of the non-dominant group who's speaking up against it. And, you know, I was just talking to this incredible person recently You know, and she, she was struggling and she was like, it's so hard because I'm not the only woman experiencing it in my, um, company. But every woman who comes to me is like, I just want to get this off my chest. Please don't say anything because I know it's just going to make it worse. And, and, and which is so frustrating that that is the reality. But then the other side of it is exactly, exactly what you're talking to. And again, maybe there's a conversation in the future.

Yeah.

of how do we receive this better? Like, I'm thinking of all the times, and I'm a little like— I'm, I'm, I'm— listeners, you can hear that I'm worked up about it because like, I just recently had to deal with, uh, somebody who was a part of a session who had been drinking, not to excuse his behavior, but said something fairly derogatory to me. And when I brought it up to their leadership team, the response was, I'm sure they meant it in a loving way. The response was not, I'm sorry that that happened, that's inappropriate, that's not Right? So anyway, I'm going to let you go.

Okay. So let me— you just gave me 2 examples there. Let's talk about the impact of that on the company. Yes. I love you. So companies understand that in order to achieve growth, they need to leverage all of the talent that's available to them, not just half of it. And the research that I'm deep in on is the gender lens. It's not all the other lenses that are equally valid. It's just not my area Yeah. So companies know that in order to achieve growth, they have to leverage all talent, not just half talent. And frankly, they're getting pretty decent at recruiting in female talent.

Yeah. Yeah.

But now they're in a position where if they cannot support that female talent, they're just— it's almost— they're just wasting all of the resources that they have recruited, trained, and onboarded. And so, when you gave both of those examples, that hurts the company way more than it hurts the talented female.

Yeah.

Because there's a lot of great companies to work at now as a woman. I mean, there are— the clients that I work with, the things that they are doing are absolutely incredible. And so, if you are a talented female, there's a company that would be great for you. It's more, to your point, the companies that are still doing things like that. It's only gonna hurt them.

Yeah, yeah. That's such a— it's such a great reframe because the reality is, it's, you know, it's that whole what becomes near to you becomes dear to you. And sometimes that's like somebody you know, but it's also this is hurting your bottom line.

Like, you want to be— And that's what a business is, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Um, yeah. And I, and I just, I appreciate how you're constantly just using that language of like, You want to be successful, you have to leverage all your talent, not just half of it, not just 75% of it, not just 20% of it. Like, you got to leverage all of it. And that means creating a space for everyone to be able to show up. Oh, man, Kathryn.

Sarah, it looks like I've absolutely exhausted you. Sarah has her head in her hands right now. I do.

For listeners, I— I'm not speechless. It's just part of it is like my brain is going 1,000 miles per hour.

It's like a big bowl of spaghetti. There's so many different things. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's the— yeah, because I use the analogy of like it's a tangled up ball of Christmas lights with yarn and other stuff, and we're just starting to like piece together and pull it, pull it out. What would be one or two critical things that you would want any woman who is listening to this to think about differently or consider saying differently? And I know that that's a big ask because you probably have a thousand. Oh, it's not. I love it.

Here's my number one. If there is one thing to think about, it's how to ask relationally. So the research out of Harvard shows that if you can demonstrate, when you're negotiating, if you can demonstrate that your ask is both legitimate and beneficial, then you are A, more likely to be successful, but B, you can virtually eliminate the risk of backlash. And if we give women tools that allow them to ask for things that increase their impact, decrease their stress, but we've eliminated the risk there, to your point, the cost-benefit analysis becomes different. And now all of a sudden, you can ask for whatever the heck you want because the worst case is you hear no, and that no doesn't carry with being sidelined or escorted out of the building by security, right? And so, here's how a relational ask works.

I was just going to ask you, what does it look like?

So, when I— I don't do client work anymore, like one-on-one coaching, but when I I used to, I would tell clients for the first year like, oh, it needs to be legitimate and beneficial. And the clients are like, what does that even mean? And so we created a formula, it's a trademark formula for how to set the conversation up. And what that is, is 1, past performance, 2, future vision that everyone's excited about, 3, your ask, and then 4, stop talking. We would find that in an attempt to make your negotiation partner feel better, women would start negotiating against themselves.

Yeah.

So what that looks like is, let's say you wanted to negotiate a promotion. As you know, I've been able to increase— I'm going to use sales because it's easy to monetize, but I've been able to increase sales by 10% last year. I think I can do that again this year. In order to do that though, I wanted to talk about being promoted to director level because when I'm meeting clients externally with a manager title, they don't think that I can get done the things I'm promising. promising them. But with a director title, I will signal the credibility that allows me to convert the sale. What do you think? Okay, no manager's going to say no to that.

Yeah.

You just told them you're going to bring them more money. And so, when you exhibit the good work that you've done, make an ask that we're all excited about, right? So, a lot of times it's like whatever your business goal is, but then what you need to do that ask. I worked with a woman, Claire, who, as you know, we've been able to onboard, we just released a new onboarding program, People are being able to be onboarded in 40% less time than they used to. We think we can roll this out to all markets next year, but in order to do that, I need to work the hours I'm most productive. So I want to talk to you about being offline after 6:00 PM every night. What do you think? Right? And they had this conversation. It's a collaborative discussion. Her boss pointed out that they have a big report due on Friday morning. So now she's offline, you know, at 6:00 PM, 4 days a week, not 5.

Fine.

Way better than she was working till 10:00 PM before, right?

Yeah.

And so that would be like the one thing I would hand as a tool to listeners, to women listeners, is think about laying out your ask that way.

Yeah, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. Um, I feel like that's a really lovely place for us to wind down our conversation because I have no doubt that you are just this wealth of insight.

And, and for people who are listening, I'm just gonna record this and I'm gonna play it I say it for my children every time. I'm like, no, I'm a wealth of insight.

Hey, you know, our mutual friend Allison Forgale, we call each other wingwomen. So if you ever need a wingwoman to be like, you're amazing. And, and it's so valuable. I'm so grateful that you are on the show. I'm so glad that the weather worked out that we were able to have this conversation. And since it's the first time you've been on the show, I ask everyone this question. And I would love to hear your You know, this whole show is about just exploring conversations with ourselves and other people. What was a conversation for you, personal, professional, whether it was with yourself or with someone else, that was transformative for you?

I had the privilege about 15 years ago of getting to work with an executive coach who— she was a PhD in, I don't know, something smart. But one of the things that blew my mind is when I got to talking to her, she She did not take client work in July or December. And I was like, that's so interesting. Tell me about that. And she was like, well, I found 2 things. One, in July, my clients were all on vacation or their teams were on vacation or they were thinking about vacation. So the conversations weren't as helpful to them. And the same thing in December, right? They were in the middle of the holidays. The conversations weren't as helpful. It felt a little bit more like a to-do for them than me delivering value the way that I'm so capable of doing. And also, I realized that the bulk of my children's memories were being made in those 2 months. And she was like, so I just changed the expectation. You know, the expectation is you meet with the coach once a month, every month for 12 months or whatever. She was like, so I just changed. And it was just one of those moments for me where before that I had assumed this is the way we do things, right?

Mm-hmm.

This is the way they've always been done. This is the way we do them. And it was the first time I talked to someone that was like, But why? And how else can we do them that makes more sense? Because a lot of the world has changed since the Model T. And that was such a huge changing point for me. She's incredible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Kathryn, I have no doubt that there are people who are listening to this who want to connect with you, who want to learn more about your work. So what is the best way for people to learn about you and get the opportunity to work with Oh, Sarah, thank you so much for mentioning that.

Um, I would say, first of all, if you want the resource on the 75 things you can negotiate, go to our website. It's worthmorestrategies.com. You can download it there. Secondly, if you're part of a women's group, um, and you ever need a speaker, please let me know. Like, the only way I get these resources to people right now is predominantly through speaking. Um, and then, you know, I'm kind of casually on LinkedIn if you want to connect there.

Yeah, I love it. I, I already want to talk to you about some clients that I want to collaborate with you on. I would love to hear more.

But Sarah, also, like, thank you for the opportunity to just have this conversation with you.

Yeah. No, I mean, thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you for the depth of expertise you bring to it, your willingness to constantly evolve with it. I think that's something I always admire in people who don't get caught in, well, I know this, so this is the one way I do it. But it's like, well, here's what we know now. Here's how it's evolved and here's how it's changing. It's just you're such a gift and I'm so grateful that we were invited and I just can't wait to continue to learn from you and follow your journey and support you and do whatever needs to happen so we can get your work into as many people's hands as possible. So consider me big, big team, Team Kathryn, for sure.

Thank you. And also, I will be playing that in my EarPods before I go on stage next time. It's so helpful. Thank you so much. I feel wonderful.

Good. Thank you for being on the show, my dear. Our guest this week has been Kathryn Valentine, and as you can pick up, I was I was just absorbing everything that she had to offer in that conversation. And one of the things that I'm really chewing on was that model that she shared at the end of past performance, future wishes, what do you need, and the ask, and then just keep quiet. I love having a good structure and framework for how to have conversations that can feel tricky, and that is just a massive, massive gift. And we want to hear from you as always. Send us a message at podcast@sarahnullwilson.com. And let us know what came up for you, what resonated for you, what were you chewing on as a result of this conversation. And for those of you who've been listening for a while, or if you're first-time listeners and you want to support the show, please be sure if you haven't already to rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast platform. This helps us to increase our exposure so we can continue to bring on amazing guests like Kathryn Valentine. And another way you can support the show is by becoming a patron. You can go to patreon.com/conversationsonconversations where your financial support supports the entire team that makes this show possible. Not only do you get early episodes that are ad-free, but you also get access to some pretty cool swag. So speaking of the team, let's give them some love. To our producer Nick Wilson, our sound editor Drew Noel, our transcriptionist Becky Reinert, our marketing consultant Jessica Burge, and the rest of the Snow Co. crew, thank you all so much. And just one big final thank you to Kathryn Valentine for bringing her insights, her wisdom, and pushing us all to think about how we can show up more powerfully for ourselves and others.

Thank you.

And that, my friends, wraps up this week's episode of Conversations on Conversations. Thank you all so much for listening, for showing up for us and for yourself. And remember, when we can change the conversations we have with ourselves and others, I do believe we can change the world. So till next week, please be sure to rest, rehydrate, and we will see you again soon.