(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

I'm a long-time WIMDI fan; I think I was at the very first one, well, certainly the first careers one you did and I've done them every year since. I don't think I've missed one!

There are some key mindsets that can help you reframe how you're looking at negotiation and I think one of the number one things is the way we react to negotiation because of how we've thought about it. I'm going to share with you my blueprint, and one of the things that I love about having put this blueprint together is you can take it anywhere, for anything, any time; it applies to many types of conversations.

I'm going to share a bunch of my success secrets, especially when it comes to this type of negotiation around talking about money. It makes us all squirm when we're talking about salary or compensation because often when we're in performance reviews and moving into the salary negotiation or the raises, we end up getting into that little squirrelly place.

Anxious About Negotiation? (Important Stats!)

Do you feel this way about negotiation? Does it make you feel a little knotted up, a little anxious?

When it comes to thinking about negotiation, many of us, especially women, get anxious. In fact, 32% of women report feeling anxiety about negotiation. And more than that, women are 2.5x more likely to feel apprehension when it comes to negotiation. Tiffany was talking about the primitive brain, and this is what anxiety does, it triggers that primitive part of our brain; it takes the energy away from our prefrontal cortex –our executive brain—that helps us make decisions. This is why it's so important to understand this when it comes to negotiation, because it makes it more likely that we will take poor advice or make a bad decision when we're stuck in that place of anxiety and we're coming from the back of our brain.

Why is this important? Both Tiffany and Holly were talking about how you want to be able to share data in your performance review and in your negotiation. I'm sharing some data with you tonight because this is the foundation for why it's so effing important for women to move through the veil of anxiety, to move beyond it to the next place so that you can ask for what it is you want. And Holly put out a great framework for helping you identify what it is that you want in a very clear way.

Who's heard of the gender pay gap? Well, we also know within the gender pay gap, there’s also a racialized gender pay gap that makes it harder for women of colour, people of colour in general, and particularly women of colour compared to white women. Women are statistically on average 4x less likely to negotiate, especially when it comes to salary, job performance and promotions. When we do ask for more and I want you to be thinking about this, we tend to ask for 30% less than men do on average; our expectations are lower. Holly said, "Be sure to be looking to ask for what's possible, not what you think you can get." We tend to settle for what we think is reasonable or what we think is barely possible. We talked about some of the implications. What are the implications for not asking? What does that cost?

The lifetime cost of not asking when it comes to salary reviews and promotions, or job negotiations for a new job can cost over $1.5 million over the course of your career, especially when you've been moving up the ladder. You might assume, well, all I need to do is just get up the ladder –the farther I get up the ladder, it's going to get better. Guess what? It only gets worse. The gap widens the further up you go.

Female CEOs in Canada on average are being paid almost $1 million dollars less than male CEOs. $1 million dollars –not over a lifetime, in a year. Now we know from the math, obviously they're making good money and we might consider that to be a great salary. However, the gap is still wider there. And again, as I mentioned earlier, for racialized woman there's a 20% greater pay gap.

Women are also negotiating less and applying at a lower rate than men for those senior positions, because perhaps, we’re thinking, “Well, I don't think I can get that. I don't think that I have enough qualifications.” We tend to minimize what we have and what we're bringing to the table.

This was an interesting stat from last year, that the average performance review raise in 2020 was 3%. And we talked about that question. Holly asked, “How much do you think this case study person could get?” And we said “Maybe 2 or 3%”, based on what she had said. And think about that little tweak, what you can do to up your number from 3% in 2021 to 5%, to 7%, to 10%. What if you could get an extra 5% on your performance review this year? What would that be worth to you? And then compound it again into future years.

Let's up the ante and let's say, go get an MBA. Surely that will help us do better; surely that's going to be the key. And this is an area where many women will go, “We think we don't have enough right now, we're being told all these messages in terms of receiving feedback, but surely I'll do better if I get an MBA.”

Well, statistically we still see a gap that starts right from the day that MBA is awarded. It’s a tiny gap –3%, but over the years that gap widens, and it's compounded by the fact that women's peak earning years are earlier in life than men's. Women's peak earning years tend to be around the age of 40 and for men around the age of 49. And so we see this drop-off starting to happen and this gap, once it's there, starts to widen. It tends to widen even more because we have accepted less at some point along the line.

If we think about it from human resources' point of view, or your hiring manager's point of view –if you're presented with two candidates for a position and they come sort of roughly in the same area, but one is paid more than the other, which one will your biases say is more competent for the promotion for that higher position? Would it be the one that's paid more or the one that's paid less? Do you see a difference between those two areas? It's an automatic bias that the person who's already earning more must be more competent until you show otherwise.

This is why it's so important to be negotiating and asking for as much as you can, as early as you can, but it's also never too late! We move farther when we are asking for those things that we want. And I want to be clear, this isn't just about salary, but salary and compensation are very key metrics.

We've been talking about data and metrics, right? Compensation is a key metric because of how we perceive it. If you have any issues around looking greedy, see it less as about the money and more about the progression; what it says about your career, where you're going and where you want to go. Holly's already encouraged you to have that 3-year plan. Where do you want to be? That's a key metric. Think about how this can play out for you and use it as fuel to move forward in terms of asking for more.

The Disconnect with Women and Negotiation

So, why do we have these problems around negotiation? Well, there's an interesting disconnect with women and I've heard this ever since I started talking about negotiation many years ago. I'd be talking to senior women leaders in a law firm, extremely good at negotiating for their companies, clients and businesses’ and they'd say "but Carrie, I can't negotiate for myself out of a paper bag." How many of you can relate to this disconnect? Being good at negotiating for others, but not so great for yourself. This is common. Research about whatever kind of negotiators or whatever level negotiators men are, tends to be the same in both negotiating for business and clients, and for themselves. Whereas, for many women there's this disconnect – great at negotiating for others, kind of rocky or not feeling so good about it when negotiating for themselves.

And this may seem like an awkward thing, because women are supposed to be good at relationships; we're supposed to be great at taking turns and things like that. I would put this down to a lot of the inherent biases that we see in our culture that we've taken on and internalized ourselves, as well as some general gender differences. If you know this is true for yourself, then we want to look at ways you can reframe things so that disconnect isn't quite so bold and jarring for you and you can move forward.

"We have to keep changing jobs to get the greatest increase." There is some truth in that for many organizations where you're the “known” quantity. If you are on a lower level, you may feel like you want to leave to come back, and this is true, not necessarily because of gender differences, but because when you're a known quantity inside an organization, there tend to be some of those limiters.

Like somebody said earlier, in answer to one of the questions, “What's the budget?” The greatest limiter of them all from the employer's side is to be thinking about, “What's my limit, what's my budget?” And even asking the question, “What's your budget?” already sets up a limiter, so throw that out. You might want to be asking what range is on the table, but also be prepared to show what range you're capable of and what your value is. Sometimes yes, leaving is a good way to then come back at a higher level, because you've shown some progression and you've shown that somebody else really likes you. It's like dating; when you start dating and you’re seeing other people too, sometimes you become more desirable because you're a hot commodity on the market. It’s the same thing here.

When I started out as a lawyer, I was interviewing for my first job and it didn't occur to me to ask for more. Especially when the recruiter said, "well, here's the offer." It was in the public sector, so it was a known, publicized range. "Here's what we have to offer you." It was the bottom of the range, by the way, and she said the fateful words, "And that's the best we can do." So what did I do? I said yes. Right? I wanted the job, it was an awesome job and I said yes, automatically, not even thinking about it. And then 18 months later, I found out that the male colleague who was hired at the same time as me and two other women was paid $8,000 more.

It was frustrating, because we looked at each other and said, "Well, dang, what the hell happened for us?" And we realized we heard the same thing. "That's the best we can do." But we also found out, that he didn't just say “yes” automatically. He said something along these lines: "Oh, well that's too bad because it won't work for me. What I would need to do this job is X." And he got somewhere between what she offered the first time and what he asked for. And it was a heck of a lot better than what we were offered.

He just busted through the assumption that you couldn't do anything with, "That's the best we can do," otherwise known as “no”, or some other variation of no. So, what happened is we ended up negotiating back our fee. We ended up closing the gap because we went into our boss's office together and we said, "This is what happened. And we think this is something that you're going to want to remedy," and to his credit he did. We were able to renegotiate that. The point here is that for the 3 of us, we were that statistic of 4x less likely to ask. And it wasn't until years later that I realized, oh, this wasn't just us, there is research that shows that this is what's going on.

Now the killer piece here is that at that job, I was actually acting as a mediator; I was helping parties to negotiate. And when I put 2 and 2 together and realized what I was doing, I thought, “Okay, I’ve got to figure this negotiation thing out.” This is what has led me in great part to where I am today. I am absolutely passionate about women getting these tools and being able to use them.

We didn't ask, and then we did. And that was the key to us getting that compensation. I'm telling you this because even though I was there, I am where I am today because I did all these things in between.

I have a book that's just come out, "Conversation Secrets," because that's at the heart of everything, being able to have good communication and conversations. And I've been able to work with fantastic clients, like my client, we'll call her Kim here. She went from senior manager to a global director, a local senior manager to a global director. She doubled her salary, over $100,000 in increases within the same company.

Since we're talking about promotions, I wanted to share some of the amazing results that can happen with somebody who came to me because she hadn't negotiated her entire life. When Kim came to me and we started working together, she said, "I'm in this situation. I really want to go for something here." We worked over 3 months, while she was fielding offers from 2 or 3 different companies as well as internally. And this is what she was able to end up with as a result of all the preparation and clarity work that we did, we were able to clarify what it was she wanted, what that looked like and what that mattered to her.

What is Negotiation?

These are a lot of ways in which we could talk about negotiation. People talk about it like this tug-of-war. Bargaining. How does it make you feel when you interpret negotiation that way? How many of you want to jump in and say, "Yes, I can't wait to do it!"

I want to share with you the way I like to look at negotiation. Think about it like a picture frame; the frame we choose to look at negotiation through, colours everything. The kind of frame that you use, colours how you look at it, the meaning that you make from it and then how your body reacts and whether it causes you anxiety.

We can get into this place where we think it is going to be a fight, “I'm going to have to knock them out or I'm going to have to win,” or something like that, but there's also another way of thinking about it. When I talk about negotiation, I talk about the definition as a conversation. We can think about it as just a conversation, maybe it's a difficult one, but it is after all a conversation, but it might be something that you're having a conversation about internally as well.

It's about navigating a relationship. Particularly in the context that we're talking about tonight, because if you are in a performance review cycle, you're looking for a promotion; you are already in a relationship with this company, this organization, with your boss, and with the team.

If you're going for a new job, it is about navigating that new relationship; a relationship that hopefully is going to be a long and fruitful and mutually rewarding. It's a different frame than thinking about going into a difficult conversation, or a fight with an enemy. When we want or need someone else's cooperation that is also a time when we're looking to influence others.

We would like their cooperation or we're hoping to change their mind and help them see things in a different way. And then sometimes more classically, we can think about it as an exchange of value. When I'm talking about exchange of value, value isn't only about the money, it's about identifying the value that you're bringing to the table and the value that you're looking for in return. Whether money is part of that or not isn’t certain. Often it is, but it's not the only thing of value that is being exchanged.

Now, when we get kind of squirrely thinking about our value or our worth, I like going back to Oprah. I really like what Oprah says here, "When you undervalue what you do,” (when you accept less than you should, or you settle for something), "the world undervalues who you are."

It's this adage that no one will take you seriously until you do. It starts with what you're allowing in your own heart and sense of yourself. And if you were an entrepreneur, like some of us are, if you discounted your fees or cut your rates and accept less than what you know you're worth, it ultimately cheapens who you are. And you can find yourself spread too thin because you're sharing yourself around for less than you should be getting in return.

This can ultimately lead to feelings of resentment and that could be that you resent them for undervaluing you, or underpaying you, but even worse, you can start to resent yourself for copping out and not standing up for the most important person, which is you.