Top Tips: How to Gain Confidence in Negotiations - Highlight Reel - Part 2

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. This show is produced by the American Negotiation Institute and with over 5 million downloads and listeners in over 180 countries, listeners just like you have made this the number one negotiation podcast in the world. Hi, my name is Kwame Christian and I am the founder and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Here at A&I we believe that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And we are passionate about providing you with the best content that will help you to make your difficult conversations easier, both at work and at home. Lastly, I want to remind you that we offer consulting and conduct trainings both virtually and in person all around the world. Our focus is in three main areas. First, negotiation and conflict resolution. Second, leadership. And lastly, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Check the link in the description below to learn more about how we could work with you and your team. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview.

It's just so much fun being able to help these people.

That's incredible. That is incredible. And so, listeners, today, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on salary negotiation, but more specifically, confident salary negotiation. And so, before we get into the how to's of this, Kyle, I kind of want you to set the stage here and tell us why it's so important for us to have these difficult conversations around compensation.

So on the surface, salary negotiation seems like it's just a numbers game. How can I get the most salary out of this organization that just offered me a job or will hopefully be offering me a job? And let me try and figure out that numbers game. However, underneath the surface, there's some so many factors that impact how we show up to that conversation. And when I talk to job seekers, the number one factor that comes up probably 95, 98% of the time, is confidence or lack of confidence. People say, oh, I don't have the confidence, Kyle, to ask for 40,000 more dollars than what they already offered me. Oh my gosh, this is meta or Amazon or some hypergrowth startup. I'm scared to go ask for more money. And confidence keeps coming up. So today, hopefully we can talk about a a few ways people can boost their confidence as they go into these salary negotiation conversations.

I love that. This is great. And before we get into that again, I want to kind of explore a little bit behind some of the perspectives that might hold people back. When you think about the mindsets that hold people back and make it tough for them to negotiate effectively, and advocate for themselves. What are some of the patterns that you're seeing?

A lot of people, when they go into salary negotiation, they have these ideas around money. And when it comes to money, they're like, oh, I don't think I'm worth this amount of money. They say, I've always made X dollars and now this is 50% or 100% more than I've made before. And people feel like, oh, that's already good enough. I shouldn't negotiate more. And there's these negative feelings or perceptions people have around money. It can be difficult to move past that. And people connect money to their worth. I'm worth X amount of dollars, but not Y amount of dollars. And there's this stickiness that comes in and we, when I come in, I try and say, let's disconnect that and not say, here's what you're worth. The money is not your worth. It's simply an exchange of energy. You're showing up and delivering a certain amount of energy to the organization. What energy can they provide back in regard to money? And that can be helpful for some people to disconnect from, oh, this is my worth. No, it's not. It's just an energy transition between you and that organization.

That's so cool. That's really interesting because it almost depersonalizes the heavy conversation, right?

Yeah. Because it's not personal. This organization isn't hiring for you. They're hiring for a set of work. And what is the dollar value attached to that worth that work? Not to your worth, but to that work. And what's the dollar amount that they've attributed to that amount of work? And that can be helpful. And there's a range that they've attributed to that work. And today what we're going to talk about is how much is work worth to an organization? What's the budget range for that? And not the budget range for you as a human, but the budget range for that work. And that can be helpful to understand that as you go in and hopefully boost your confidence that you're not negotiating how much am I worth? But how much is this energy or this effort worth to this organization?

Oh, I love that. That's really cool. Well, great. So here's. Let's set the stage for the audience. First, we're going to talk about how to appropriately research and calculate your market value. The next one is use networking effectively to learn about the compensation plan. And then lastly, asking about the range for your role. Because there's an art, there's a strategy to doing that effectively. And if you make a mistake there, it could be pretty significant. So make sure you listen to the end to figure that one out too. Now, Kyle, first, when we talk about the use of research effectively, this is something we talk about all the time on the show. We have negotiation guides and salary negotiation is one of our most popular ones. And my listeners are probably saying, oh, I know what Kwame is going to say. That's right, I'm very predictable. So if you go to americannegotiationinstitute.com guide, you can get access to all of our free guides there. But I want to talk about some of the basic things that people need to keep in mind when it comes to research. But then I also want to go a little bit deeper and talk about some of the main misconceptions and mistakes people make at this stage. Where should we start as it relates to research?

I like getting niche with research. I mean, I Love Glassdoor or PayScale or Salary.com or LinkedIn, but these tend to just have high level salaries and you want to get as niche as possible when you're researching salary, when you have an offer or a potential offer. So I primarily work with people in tech, Silicon Valley, it these really niche areas. So my favorite is Team Blind. This is an anonymous community board where you have to be registered with a company, have a company email to participate, but you don't have to have company email just to view people's answers. So it's kind of like a Reddit of sorts of Reddit and Glassdoor kind of had a baby. This would be Team Blind. And I like it because people will say, I just got an offer at Amazon, I'm an L6, here's my exact compensation package, my salary, my bonus, all of that. And I like it because then you can go in there and actually see the exact level, the exact team, the actual data was posted and get really live and relevant information. So I like starting with Team Blind to see real case studies or examples of people who've gotten offers. That's one of my favorites. And then once you've seen a few examples, I like zooming out a little and going to levels. FYI, this is again really helpful for tech and you can go and see companies across various practical benefits of it.

Right? Because the thing that I love about what you did, Denise, is that you not only went through the course, but you were actually intentional about putting the the tools into action. So let's start off with you kind of talking about the course setting that foundation and then giving examples about how you were able to use the skills from the course in real life scenarios.

Yeah. So I would say that right off the hop, that course taught me one awesome thing that you think would be obvious that's not, which was be prepared. And you think, okay, of course I'm going to be prepared. But being prepared means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. And what I learned was the first thing you have to do to be prepared is think about yourself and think about where you're at, what you want, and what it is you want to accomplish. Think about where you're willing to concede, what you're not willing to concede on, and. And, you know, write all of those notes out. So take some time to focus on yourself. And so that was the first thing that I applied because there was a couple of areas in my life that I really needed this program to help me with, in which it really did, and that was the first thing that I put myself through, is I went, okay, what is it that you want? And you think that would be really simple, and it's not, because oftentimes we're chasing a feeling. And sometimes you come right down to the core grassroots of what's the feeling that I'm trying to get out of this? And then what's the end result? Then I learned that I needed to sort of put my feet into the other person's shoes, put myself into the other person's shoes and say, what is it that they want? What is it that they need, and what is it that they're trying to get out? What do I think that they're willing to concede on and what they're not willing to concede on. And take a look at, do they want to be valued? Do they want to be appreciated? Do they want to be respected? Are they coming from ego? Where are they coming from? And once you've gathered that information, that in itself will change, it'll up your game by 50%. So, you know, for people that like me, who really didn't take anything in negotiating whatsoever, and you know, probably I grew up as a pathological people pleaser trying to make everybody else happy. And you don't think about what you want, what you need, you're just trying to make everyone else happy. Well, it's impossible to make somebody else happy. And once you come to terms with that, you can start thinking about yourself. And so where I was able to apply these skills, and there's a lot of other skills in the program that I learned. But just based on that, I was able to use it in both a really interesting medical appointment and in a job position that I wanted. And with the doctor's appointment is I had to go see an oncologist. So I'm a breast cancer survivor. And I was on this medication, Tamoxifen, So I'm sure lots of women take it, have no problems with it, but I hated it. It was death to me, and I did not want to be on it. And the previous doctors were. They scared the crap out of me, to be honest. Well, you can't not take it. You're not protected. You know, your cancer is going to come back and you're going to die. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. And then I just said, well, I don't have a quality of life right now, so I need to figure this out. And so I kind of sat down and had to assess, what do I want out of life and what do I need? And when I walk into that doctor's appointment, I know that doctor is going to say, you know, I have to give you this medication. So how do I do this? And do I actually want to come off the medication? Well, I think I do, but the reality is I just want to love life. I just want fun. I want to feel like a human being again. So then I took a look at the doctor's perspective. And from the doctor's perspective, he needs to make sure he's doing his job the best he can. He needs to make sure that he can sleep at night with the advice he's giving me. He needs to make sure that I'm well educated on the situation. And I took all of that together and kind of wrote it all out. Went to my appointment and had a great conversation with him, and he went over all of my options. We had a really great discussion. In the end, we both decided, yes, you can come off this medication, and this is what I want you to do. We came up with a plan. We worked as a team. And I know that that probably doesn't happen to that doctor very often. He probably comes home frustrated most nights just shaking his head. And he would have had intelligent conversation with the patient. You came up with a great plan. If you have any questions, you call me whenever you want. And that was a win win for both of us. And I still, I've called him up a couple of times since, couple of questions, and he's there to answer them. And I didn't just walk into his office and say, I want to come off this medication. I hate it. You don't know what you're doing. I came in and said, okay, this is how I'm feeling. This is where I want to go. I need to know what my options are. And we opened up that discussion and it was a great discussion. So I was really happy with that. I was happy how it turned out. And to be honest, I was quite surprised because I. I knew I wanted to come off the medication, but I walked out of that office actually feeling empowered because I had a plan. So I'm not scared. I'm not scared that I came off of it. I do have options. I know what I need to do, and I made my choice as to what I wanted to do, and I'm happy with that choice. Whereas if I had walked out not happy with that choice, I'd have been mad at the doctor. Meanwhile, the doctor did nothing wrong. I was quite happy with that. And I'd be really happy to see other people.

I think for a lot of us, we would describe ourselves as fierce advocates for our clients, for our internal stakeholders and customers, for our VIPs, maybe even for those folks who we supervise and manage, right? We want to be fierce advocates for those folks. And so often one of the messages I share with people is, you're already doing this. You know, you're already doing this. My question to you is, what if you took that same ferocious self advocacy, you know, that same art of negotiation you're bringing to delighting clients to those areas that benefit you, like your title, your performance rating, the juicy assignment that just came in, and who's going to lead it, you know, your pay, right? All these conversations. What if you brought that same great advocacy to those areas that benefit you? And what's exciting is when you start to think in a different way, to bring that same fierce self advocacy, you can do it even more often negotiation and even more strategically, right? You can really do it more strategically and think through, how can I be empathic to the other person's situation right now? How can I think about what's top of mind for them? How can I make this a win for both of us?

That's great. And now let's talk about the psychology of that for a little bit. I'm a psychology nerd. I can't. I can't help myself. Because I think when you think about it logically, okay, if I advocate for myself, if I ask for what I want, if I am able to make these requests, it makes it More likely for me to get it. I think everybody will get that and they can see that they can advocate for other people, but there's a mental block that prevents them from advocating for themselves. How would you describe that mental block and what would you suggest people can do to start to overcome that?

Yeah, I think there are plenty of mental blocks. And one of the pieces of advice I share with people is don't tell yourself no before they do.

Right.

At least half of your success in negotiating well is that conversation you have between you and you, you know, and when we try to negotiate, even if we're not successful, we're teaching other people something about our value and that is meaningful alone. So don't be so quick to discount the worthiness of your proposal or your raise request or the partnership you're proposing or whatever it is. One important piece of that, though, is from a gender difference. When we look at some gender differences, women are a little less likely to negotiate when conditions are ambiguous. When, let's say nothing at all is mentioned about salary in a job interview or a job description. Women are less likely to negotiate as compared to maybe when the job description says salary is negotiable, there's almost an invitation there to negotiate. And so I think that's important to recognize as a manager, regardless of your gender, that some people may put their names forward, may advocate for themselves differently. And you can encourage a self advocacy culture in your organization by saying, hey, this stretch assignment and the hours required are negotiable. We are open to different proposals or ideas or configurations of how this could work. So that's a small thing cultures can do to make it so that, you know, it's not just the loudest duck, right, that gets the top pay or the exciting assignment. They're really inviting everyone to shape that opportunity, that role for themselves.

This is great. And yeah, I think one of the biggest barriers that people have when they are having these difficult conversations is the fact that they have low negotiation awareness. This is something I mentioned in almost all of my trainings because we like to define negotiation really broadly. Anytime you're in a conversation and somebody wants something, you are in a negotiation. And like you said, in these ambiguous situations, they are negotiations, but people are not identifying them as negotiations. And so if we're thinking about a practical tool to help people understand what is negotiable, what would you suggest for people to help to increase their negotiation awareness on the job? Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you, and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.