Deborah Kolb - The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Master the Hidden Agendas That Determine Bargaining Success

N egotiation is a hot topic today. Win-win, in fact, has become a coded buzzword for good results. Scarcely a month goes by without numerous magazines running features on negotiation, often complete with quick multiple-choice tests we can use to monitor our proficiency. If we feel the need to hone our skills more sharply, we can go on-line and load up a virtual shopping cart. A click of the mouse produces reams of advice on how to negotiate that next raise on our way to opportunity and leadership. Amid all this redundant wealth, do we really need yet another book on negotiationand one for women no less? The simple answer is yes, on both counts.

Every year Working Woman magazine surveys womens salaries in various industries to keep us up-to-date on the wage gap. Currently, women take home seventy-four cents for every dollar that men earn.1 In the twenty-five years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, the disparity has narrowed by only fifteen cents. Progress, clearly, but the rate slowed during the 1990s. Commentators point to various factors to explain the decreasing momentum. They highlight the occupational segregation of the labor force. Women still cluster in low-paying jobs and industries. They account for 90 percent of registered nurses but only 20 percent of physicians. They make up 99 percent of dental hygienists and over 98 percent of secretaries, typists, and kindergarten teachers. They fill three quarters of the clerical positions in U.S. companies but only a little better than 30 percent of the managerial slots.2

This occupational clustering, however, explains only part of the wage gap. The experience of one of our colleagues helps tell us why. She was negotiating with a major university for a prized teaching post. Despite her newly minted Ph.D., her initial meetings with the dean left her unsatisfied. Though the salary the dean eventually quoted was a far cry from her graduate student stipends, neither the amount nor the other perks felt right. So she decided to do a little surveying of her own. She asked all the women hired during the past five years about their meetings with the dean and then informally polled a comparable group of men. What she learned surprised her. Each of the women accepted the deans original offer. Their male colleagues, on the other hand, proceeded to negotiate not only for a higher salary, but also for research support and office space.

This story reflects a pattern familiar to many of us. Grateful for the opportunities we are given, we often just accept the terms that are offered. People expect us to be amenable, and they keep that expectation in mind when they negotiate with us. Furthermore, when a woman negotiates, and not just about salary, she encounters another unspoken assumption: that work is her choice, a luxury rather than something she both needs and wants to do. The person on the other side of the table sometimes takes it for granted that a woman, no matter what her circumstances, will put family and relationships first and not bargain hard. When that happens, she is offered less from the start and generally ends up with less.

These results accumulate over time, widening a gap that is no longer measured in money alone. She might not be considered for an assignment that would stretch her abilities or give her broader visibility. Or she might remain with a departmenthuman resources, accounting, or community relationswhere her chances of moving up in the firm are not so promising. For our colleague, initial negotiations that produce limited resources for research and onerous teaching hours make publishing that important professional book or article all the more difficult down the road. Along the way, she might be asked to shoulder extra administrative duties that somehow never figure so much in tenure decisions as publication does. Hard work, professional expertise, and long hours dont count for everything. We should not be surprised that women hold less than 9 percent of the most senior positions in our major institutions today.3 Women have to negotiate not harder, but smarter.

As we talked to women all over the country about how they experience negotiation, they spoke of specific difficulties and specific situations. But beyond these idiosyncratic circumstances, their collective comments revealed something about the negotiation process itself. And it is this something that is missing in the many books on negotiation we can load into our virtual shopping cart. The advice available concentrates on what to do when you are in the throes of bargaining or getting ready. It helps you approach the issues systematically, rationally, and analytically. What you wont find is any guidance on dealing with the kinds of assumptions our colleague faced or those lurking behind the wage and opportunity gap. To do that you must confront what we call the shadow negotiation.

The shadow negotiation is where hidden agendas and masked assumptions play out. Often it is defined by a whole array of attitudes of which the participants are only dimly aware. These hidden agendas drive the negotiation as much as explicit differences over the issues. Before you can reach a good agreement on the issues, these unvoiced views must be brought to the surface so that misguided impressions and unrealistic expectationsincluding your owncan be revised.

The Shadow Negotiation emerged from our interviews with women precisely because gender is one of the triggers that set unvoiced expectations in motion in a negotiation.4 The women we talked to mastered the intricacies of the shadow negotiation often without realizing its existence. They recognized that if they failed to negotiate for the perks and support demanded by a new assignment, they would find themselves working long and unappreciated hours to complete it. They told us of times when they had problems being given credit for what they had done or sparking enthusiasm for their ideas. But they also reported how they changed peoples minds and got negotiation on serious issues off the ground. They spoke of times when, put at a disadvantage, they turned the situation around. They negotiated maternity leaves against unfavorable odds and job offers even when their rsums did not exactly fit the positions.

More often than not their negotiations involved change. Creating a flexible work schedule or developing a new project or securing a loan for a new business meant that they had to move the negotiations beyond simple yes-or-no propositions. The issues they faced were often difficult and made uncomfortable demands on the other side. Working collaboratively and constructively even when pushed in the opposite direction, they were able to fashion creative agreements. Their stories show us what win-win looks like when people truly collaborate.