Negotiation Law Blog

First off I just love the name.  

National Girlfriends Networking Day is a nationwide celebration of making connections.  Events take place around the country on June 4th [live streaming] three amazing women; Lesley Jane Seyour the editor of MORE magazine, Taj Williams-Franklin a WNBA coach, player and community activist and Soledad O'Brien Emmy award winning journalist.  [They] will be taking questions through social media from nationwide participants. 

Read on here and sign up today!

The live-streaming events are free!

This is what feminist heaven looks like.

Do we have to be this successful to rearrange the world to fit one woman's life? Or could we simply realize that this is what WorkLife looks like on the day it stops being a man's world.

Scandal's show-runner Sonda Rhimes' executive-Mommy day.

As part of her Shondaland production company, Rhimes oversees some 550 actors, writers, crew members and producers, and her days are optimized to do so. In the morning, she gets her older daughter, Harper, who is 10, off to school and then contends with whatever is most urgent: writing, giving notes on a script and watching casting videos. The televisions in her office and home are connected to a system that allows her to watch real-time editing by her editors. Both of her daughters have rooms across the hall from her office at work. The younger, a perfectly chubby-cheeked 1-year-old named Emerson, comes in every day, clambering onto Rhimes’s lap during meetings.

I'm not blaming the guys when I say that the historic accident of the modern workplace wouldn't have required men to choose between work and family. They would long ago have figured out how to have both.

Oh, wait a minute. They did. It was called "wives."

In today's economy, few men have the luxury of "wives" and even fewer working mothers have the luxury of the services wives and mothers of an earlier era provided - 24-hour child, husband and extended-family care.

According the government statistics, fifty-nine percent of all married mothers work and 67% of all single women (including those widowed and divorced) work.

Let's celebrate Mothers Day by reimagining the future of WorkLife for everyone's benefit, shall we?

Nearly every law student in the country from the oldest grad to the youngest aspirant, learns the meaning of "intent" in civil law from the case of Garratt v. Dailey.

You may not want to hurt Bill, but if you put an apple on his head, raise your shotgun and pull the trigger, the law will say you intended to kill him in the highly likely event that your William Tell act causes Bill's death.

The rule that Garratt applies to a five-year old's decision to pull out the chair out an adult woman is about to sit in is this - if the defendant knows with a substantial certainty that his act will result in harm, he must be presumed to have intended it.

Which takes us directly to law firm women's initatives. As the National Association of Women Lawyers' 2012 survey of BigLaw women's initiatives concluded, the programing offered by BigLaw to retain and promote women does not achieve its goals. Not only that, but these women's initiatives rarely have measurable promotional goals.

As the Survey reports, even though women’s initiatives have been in effect for at least a decade, "what such initiatives actually do, and the impact they have on women in firms, is all too often not clear and at worst, open to criticism bordering on cynicism." More particularly,

fewer than half of all women’s initiatives are evaluated annually by management. Similarly, fewer than half of all women’ initiatives submit written evaluations. Moreover, it is not clear that the reporting and evaluation functions focus on specific goals. Some 40% of firms report no specific criteria at all for their evaluation. Of those who report goal-related evaluation criteria, there is often no connection to concrete advancement criteria. Thus, descriptions of evaluation criteria were often along the lines of “accomplishment of goals and activities identified at the start of each year” or “number of events, quality of events, participation level.”

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We've been talking about women's negotiation deficits for so long that we've completely neglected the men. This post is an attempt to cure that omission. Listen guys! We care about you. And we'd like to help you with your negotiation problem. 

But let's start where we've been for the past ten years ever since Linda Babcock of the Heinz Negotiation Academy for Women published Women Don't Ask. 

In Speaking Out About Women And Power, U.C. Berkeley Psychology Professor Tania Lombrozo describes a study in which women experienced gender blow back when they voiced their opinions “too ardently.” The social scientists conducting that study asked a group of men and women to evaluate a hypothetical CEO who was described as offering opinions as much as possible or as withholding opinions.

Unsurprisingly, female CEOs who offered opinions frequently were judged less competent and less suited to leadership than their sister CEOs who withheld their opinions. Equally unsurprising was the way in which the study judged the men – as more competent and better suited to leadership if they spoke up often and less so if they didn’t.

Too many people have concluded from studies like these that women are stuck between a gender rock and leadership hard place but men are not.

As Lombrozo is quick to note, however, men faced a complementary danger: of being perceived as poor leaders if they didn’t voice their opinions. Members of both sexes were penalized for failing to conform to traditional gender stereotypes.

Listen. We are all judged according to the culture’s expectation for our behavior. Women are expected to be kind, patient, tolerant, loving, giving and self-effacing. Men are expected to be judgmental, tough, self-seeking and self-promoting. We all suffer social sanctions – from harsh judgments to electoral defeats – when we step outside of society’s expectations.

Those who would caution us to “act our role” or suffer the consequences, however, are missing the bigger picture, as are those who urge us to ape the style of the opposite gender. Let’s take negotiation as our example.

In a recent article at Huffington Post, Joan Williams writes that women don’t negotiate because they’re not idiots, citing yet another study confirming the imposition of social sanctions on women who negotiate outside their gender role. Sara Laschever, co-author, with Linda Babcock, of Women Don’t Ask and Ask for It, immediately dropped by to assert that Williams’ article mischaracterized Babcock’s findings, explaining that the "study used only used one negotiation script, in which both the male and female negotiators asked for higher pay in a fairly aggressive way.

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I've been grappling with women lawyers' origination credit problem for quite some time, writing about here (Origination Credit: Cage Match in Business Suits) and at Forbes (Bullied Out of Origination Credit? Negotiate! and Big Law Women's Initiatives | Subvert the System).

The more I read and talk to AmLaw attorneys about the way in which rainmaking credit is distributed among attorneys, the more I believe the answer for women is to take credit for their share of the work whether their firm does or not.

Before addressing how to do that, let's recall that credit is often awarded in the same way the New York Times recently said political favors continue to be doled out in Chicago - by way of a powerful but informal system of crony politics.

How do law firm partners "earn" origination credit? 

Let me count the ways.

1. They're the first attorney in the firm to land a client the firm has never before served;
2. They're the practice head in a specialty to whom a firm lawyer in another specialty refers the business;
3. They're not the practice head in that specialty, but have a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours relationship with the attorney making the internal referral;
4. They're members of one BigLaw firm's women's initiative which cross-refers within the initiative and negotiates the credit according to its own metrics of fairness;
5. Someone with a really big book of business uses origination credit to buy favors or loyalty or to reward someone for favors and loyalty already extended;
6. They have the reputation for excellence in the specialty which made the client call the firm rainmaker in the first place;
7. They actually do the work so well that the client asks the firm to give the working partner some of the origination credit; 
8. They form a relationship with the client while working on the matter and do the work so well or form such a strong bond with the client that the working partner starts looking for another "home" and brings the client's business with him; or, 
9. They threaten to leave the firm and take clients with them unless they're given credit as an originating partner.

I can't speak for any time period after '05 when I quit practice, but some people with the ability to refer work to attorneys do so in response to "favors" ranging from a great night on the town at the best restaurants to the procurement of hookers (cf. MadMen).

Is this fair? Does it "objectively" reflect an attorney's value to his firm? Sometimes yes and sometimes no but rarely do these spoils of cronyism fall from the great banquet table of BigLaw into the laps of women, particularly women of color.

What To Do?

I'm working on this and these are just my initial thoughts which may change, particularly if challenged here. Or, I may come to hold them more strongly but able to articulate them better if challenged here. So, please. Feel free to comment.

At Your Current Firm

There's not much that can be done inside one's current firm other than to continue to put forward your case for an award of origination credit. You deserve some of the credit if you,

1. attended the meeting/s leading to the generation of business;
2. have a reputation for excellence in the field which was part of the "pitch" leading to the generation of business;
3. prepared the "rainmaker" to "pitch" the client for the business; or,
4. lead the team of lawyers that do a great job for a new client that generates the next piece of business that comes to the firm.

At a New Firm

When you're making a lateral move and are asked how big your "book" was the previous year or two, I'd tell the new firm the dollar value of the work you were responsible for generating rather than the dollar value your firm credited to your account.

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I'd like to take a little bit of your time to talk to you about sponsoring the Annual South Carolina Women Lawyers Conference scheduled for October 21, 2011. 

Why South Carolina? 

Because for the past 19 years the same group of women has been hosting an "I Believe Anita Hill Party." 

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings which legitimized women's complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace. This is a particularly timely year in women's professional history to revisit the Hill-Thomas hearings in light of the DSK, Schwarzgenegger and Weiner scandals. 

Professor Hill will be the keynote speaker at the South Carolina Women Lawyers' Leadership Summit the day after the Anita Hill "party." Professor Hill will kick off the morning of the Summit on October 21 with the keynote speech.

That same afternoon, I will be leading a panel discussing the intersection of sexual harassment and implicit gender bias with Gloria Steinem (founder of Ms. Magazine and the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the second wave women's movement); Gloria Feldt, feminist activist and author of No Excuses, Nine Ways Women Can Change the Way We Think About Power; Shelby Knox, "star" of the Sundance documentary "The Education of Shelby Knox," now working for change.org, and, Jamia Wilson, Vice-President of Programs at the Women's Media Center in New York City, which trains and promotes women in media, an organization co-founded by Steinem and Jane Fonda.

This panel of two of the most noted leaders of the Second Wave Women's Movement and two Gen-Y feminist activists will talk about solutions to a problem to which no one yet has an answer.

My small start-up company, She Negotiates Consulting and Training, is working to promote women to positions of leadership through their own efforts within a supportive community of women in business and the professions.

She Negotiates is a Diamond Patron Sponsor of the South Carolina Women Lawyers' Conference and we invite you to sponsor this historic event too.

As a former attorney (and current mediator and AAA arbitrator) I am all too familiar with BigLaw's failure to retain and promote their women. We at She Negotiates believe that only by encouraging women to support other women will we finally close the wage, income and leadership gap that seems so intractable. 

The next firm to become a Diamond Sponsor can introduce the Feldt-Steinem, et al. panel and receive four tickets to the event. Here's the Sponsor Form. Please donate today. No donation is too small!

I have a confession to make. Men who are highly empathic, soft-spoken, and extremely agreeable make me nervous. I was given reason for this self-reflection today on reading the most recent bargaining post at Harvard’s Program on Negotiation blog.

According to the brainiacs who study these things, women who are able to read the emotional state of others and satisfy their behavioral expectations are more effective team leaders and better negotiators than either their empathy-deficient female or empathy-enabled male colleagues.

As the Harvard post notes, studies by B-School professors Francis Flynn and Daniel Ames, have demonstrated that women who were best able to read their work team’s emotions and alter their own behavior to please them, were rated as being more persuasive, better leaders and more efficient conflict resolvers than their stiff-necked peers.

In a second study, Flynn and Ames found that female people-pleasers not only “outperformed women who didn’t see themselves as especially adaptive” to other’s expectations, but also outperformed people-pleasing men.

Continue reading here.

It’s been two years now since Claire Shipman and Katty Kay gave us the key to saving the American economy with their book womenomics. As The Daily Beast wrote at the time,

Companies are finding that women’s management styles are not only different, but good for business. It’s now pretty clear that Mars and Venus have muscled their way into the boardroom, too. When it comes to business styles, women are more open and inclusive than men. We tend to encourage broader participation in meetings and like to foster consensus. We nurture subordinates more effectively and prefer conciliation over confrontation, empathy over ego. We are also more cautious, more risk averse. We take a longer term view of decision making than men.

I don’t want to get all gender wars about this. Listen, whether you spell the name of the creator as Natural Selection or God, the order of things is half women and half men. Who are we to disagree? If women are seeking consensus, perhaps men are asserting power. If women are nurturing subordinates, maybe men are firing people who cannot be encouraged to perform.

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For Supreme Court watchers, here's my article on Duke v. Wal-Mart over at the She Negotiates ForbesWoman blog, Wal-Mart Discrimination Case Grapples with Implicit Biases against Women.

As the New York Times‘ Adam Liptak reported today, the Supreme Court will decide on Tuesday whether 1.5 million women will be permitted to proceed with their gender discrimination class action against Wal-Mart.

The high court is being asked to decide what role it believes social science research should play in determining whether implicit bias is responsible for women’s underpay and under-representation in Wal-Mart’s management ranks. At the center of the Supreme Court case is the testimony of Sociology Professor William T. Bielby, at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Briefs and articles for the serious student of Constitutional Law below.

Ninth Circuit Opinion in Dukes v. Wal-Mart

Opening Brief

Opposition Brief

Reply Brief

Thanks to Rex Stevens for passing these links along to me.

Over at B-School today, you'll find a collection of blog posts that will give you an entire semester's worth of negotiation knowledge, training and (if you practice) experience. Don't miss it. Excerpt below and link here.

Learning to be a great negotiator is a skill that will serve you in a variety of situations. Whether you're buying a car, setting a salary, or in an international business deal, negotiation skills are essential to getting what you want. These blog posts share tips, strategies, and more for becoming a better negotiator.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your settlement engines. Your clients will repay you with more work than you can handle!

Last week at ForbesWoman -- full post here. Excerpt below.

[Last week] I learned that Women Lawyers, Law Students Aren’t Speaking Up in several places including The Lawyerist in its post Women Lawyers: Silence Isn’t Always Golden by Staci Zaretsky.

WTF??????????

The most competitive and ambitious women in the land are stifling themselves?

Looks like it.

• women law students are less likely than their male classmates to participate in classroom discussions
• women law students are less likely to seek advice from their professors
• women law students are more likely to be motivated by fear (that’s ok, of course, so long as you do what the river guides tell you to do – paddle through your fear!)

Still, we graduate from law school and often do so with high honors or we wouldn’t represent such a large proportion of the new associate ranks in the best firms in the land. All first year associates are frightened. They don’t know a thing, really. Certainly not how to practice law.

It Takes Courage!

It’s a very adult task to speak up for a major American corporation likeFord Motor Company (NYSE:F) in court; to make an objection to the question asked by the deep-voiced man of advanced years sitting across the conference table from you harassing your client in a deposition. It takes courage to tell a jury of twelve strangers that your client was innocent even though five by-standers identified him as the guy who robbed the Circle K (CLKSF:OTCUS).

So we “woman up” when we get that first job and speak up, right?

According to a recent study, apparently not.

We argue only 15% of all cases heard by the Supreme Court. One of those 15% tells Stephanie Rabiner that “women don’t like verbal jousting” and are “horrified” by the controversy it might cause to take a case to the highest court in the land.

Really? Really??

There’s Work to Be Done

O.K. You don’t care that much about money. And you’d really rather have a balanced lifestyle, which you’re hoping will allow you to just go to work, put in your hours, come home and tend to the children who, you hope, you’ll be able to comfortably accommodate into your work-life. You ski. You travel to exotic places. You want to buy a home – an acquisition thatChris Buckley says gives you the right to use the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense - I have a mortgage to pay.

That life you’re imagining rests on the shoulders of the women who broke this path for you. But that’s ok. We didn’t want to create a generation of women who were grateful. We wanted to create a generation of women who would stick up for themselves and for their sisters.

As Gloria Steinem once said, “it’s ok if young women don’t remember whoI am. It’s only important that they remember who they are.”

But listen up ladies, women, sisters, fellow barristers and advocates. There’s work to be done in the world. You have  the education and the training necessary to make a difference at the highest levels of power. And if you choose not to use that power  . . . well . . . at least have the decency to feel just a little bit guilty about it.

Here’s What You Have the Power to Change according to Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky.

• more than 107 million women are missing from the globe today
• more girls have been killed in the last fifty years because of their gender than men were killed in all the wars of the 20th century
• more girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century
• every year another 2 million girls worldwide disappear because of gender discrimination
• of the 600,000 to 800,000 people who are trafficked across international borders every year, 80% are women and girls, who are imprisoned , beaten and raped many times every day of the week to serve the world’s sex trade
• the global sex trade is larger in absolute terms than the entire Atlantic slave trade was in the 18th and 19th centuries

Feel like speaking up in class yet?

How about that bill pending in an American state legislature that wouldmake the murder of a physician providing abortion services to your sisters, your daughters and your mothers justifiable homocide?

You’re a lawyer. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?

No well-behaved woman ever made history. Nor did she end the international slave trade in little girls.

Ready to misbehave yet?

We've had a busy week over at ForbesWoman in articles and blog posts covering:

The Davos World Economic Forum

The paucity of women at the Davos Economic Forum despite how rich the ones who attended are as described in this post by Forbes staff writer Louisa Kroll, The Richest Women at Davos.

Women's Davos Wardrobe Dilemmas covered by Moira Forbes as an unfortunate but still critical factor for the display of power necessary to be a player at the World Economic Forum.

A photo gallery of the executive conferences women CEOs love best.

The Continued Assault on the Glass Ceiling

Aman Singh's post on Why So Many Top Women Don't Make it to Executive Leadership.

Jenna Goudreau's Jobs Outlook:Careers Headed for the Trash Pile

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Whether we’re working on the transformation of women’s lives in the workplace, the home, or on the national stage, an unbelievably powerful network of women is growing, most of it under the radar of today’s power structure. There are numerous ways into this network – through finance, law, leadership, science, entrepreneurism, politics and dozens of others.  And there’s no better place to start than by buying, reading, and applying the lessons of Gloria Feldt’s No Excuses.

For a short review of Feldt's book, click here for post at ForbesWoman.

We kicked off the new year over at ForbesWoman this past Sunday with my short think-post on gay marriage and the razor's edge on which we women negotiate for ourselves - both of which I tied to our fear of losing the benefits and the restraining influences of traditional gender roles.  See Negotiating Sex and Gender here. There's also a bit of instructive back-and-forth in the comments on the question whether the income gap is a systemic problem or simply the result of women being . . . well . . . lazy bitches. Those who know me well can marvel at my admirable restraint.

On Monday, The Daily Asker, Roxana Popescu, penned the most popular She Negotiates post of the week - Six Things Every Woman Should Ask for in 2011. Roxana is a black-belt "asker," taking the opportunity to negotiate literally everything. She'll be adding six more categories of "asks" over at our ForbesWoman blog today so keep an eye peeled for it.

And though Roxana doesn't know it yet, we're planning on having her lead day-long bargaining expeditions in 2011 for those who don't notice the dozens of opportunities that present themselves to us every day for a little haggling. Stay tuned for that announcement over at our home She Negotiates site. For more information on Roxana's "asking" quest, see Day One:  Can I Ask for Something Every Day for a Year.

On Tuesday, She Negotiates rested so that Wednesday could bring you Forget Resolutions: Disrupt and Execute in 2011, by She Negotiates co-founder Lisa Gates. I'd just been telling a book publicist how I'd been dying the death of a thousand book promotion cuts. A couple of hundred here, a thousand there, went out to consultants in 2010 who simply threw me back on my own promotional resources with a little advice about working different or harder. That's what I hired you for! If you're suffering from a similar consultant-overload dis-ease, go no further than consulting with Lisa Gates where the focus is implement and execute. She changed my life. Let her change yours for the better in 2011.

Yesterday, our Gen-Y blogger Katie Phillips, recently graduated from the Tisch School of Arts at NYU, wrote in despair and celebration of entering the unknown in Negotiating Uncertainty: Gen-Y Women are Busy Being Born. Our boomer readers will see themselves in the same circumstances thirty or forty years ago, but this post is not for us. It's Gen-Y to Gen-Y and one of the finest pieces of writing you're likely to see anywhere on ForbesWoman. Really. Check it out.

With part 2 of Roxana's six tips for 2011 today, we'll close the week in asking, haggling, bargaining, negotiating, trading, and bartering for the first week of the new year. Please let us know which topics would be most useful to you for us to cover as we make 2011 not just the Year of Recovery, but the Year of Abundance! 

From Z is for Zen Master in A is for Asshole, the Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution.

Dr. Kenneth Cloke tells us that every conflict “occurs at the intersection, or crossroads, between problems we need to solve in order to grow and skills we do not yet possess. With each level of growth and development, we experience fresh conflicts and transcend old ones that we not only successfully resolve, but develop the skills to move beyond.”

Let’s take marriage, or long-term relationships of any kind. Whenever I complain about a conflict with my husband, my friend the Buddhist reminds me that my husband is my Zen master. Her reminder focuses my attention back on myself and what I have to learn from the dispute I’m having with my husband. The two of us are like the couple in Anne Tyler’s novel, The Accidental Tourist. We sometimes feel like rivals competing for the “better housekeeper” award. Should I win the prize for insight and understanding even though I am haphazard and mercurial in my habits? Or should the blue ribbon be awarded to my husband who is methodical and steady? When we first met, he loved my spontaneity and I his dependable nature. Now his steadiness irritates me and my disorganization angers him.

This intractable meta dispute – the dispute on which all others are based – evaporates when I realize it has something to teach me about my own character and presents a challenge against which that character could possibly develop. What if we solved the immediate problem? “If only you’d put your car keys in the same place every time,” my husband says for the umpteenth time, “you wouldn’t have to spend twenty minutes searching for them.” I could choose to shift the argument to my home court (“you are too controlling”) or take the lesson that a little advance planning might ease rather than burden my busy day.

Here’s the transformative part. When I change in a fundamental way, the people in my life inevitably change in relation to my change. Once my husband and I resolve the order-versus-chaos problem, he will have to find someone else to play the "I'm more orderly than you" game or give it up altogether. If his desire is truly to help me lead a more efficient and productive life rather than “trying to control me,” the two of us can move on to greater, more interesting challenges than this one on which we have been stuck for years. The same is true for relations between workers, members of extended families, red states and blue, and America against the rest of the world.

If we were finally able to resolve our differences over, say, the separation of church and state, we could free up our energy to address other pressing problems, like poverty and intolerance, the environment and health care, and full employment for anyone with the desire to work as a contributing member of the society. Conflict among human societies has caused incalculable loss and suffering. It is also the way in which people have finally stood up for human rights, self-governance, peaceful dispute resolution, independence, and tolerance of differences.   If we encounter conflict with courage and self-reflection, it can and will lead us, and those who surround us, to greater freedom and authenticity, to greater self-reliance, acceptance, accountability, forgiveness and, at long last, a far more peaceful world.

Check out Extreme Negotiations at Harvard Business Review this month (kicker:  What U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have learned about the art of managing high-risk, high-stakes situations).

I have to tell you that I believe every one of our She Negotiates graduates understands and knows how to use the bullet point takeaways from Extreme Negotiations below.  Let me also say it's not enough to read about these techniques ~ you must practice practice practice practice.

Get the Big Picture

• avoid assuming you have all the facts
• avoid assuming the other side is biased but you're not
• avoid assuming the other side's motivations and intentions are obvious and nefarious
• instead, be curious ("help me understand"); humble ("what do I do wrong?") and open-minded ("is there another way to explain this?")

Uncover and Collaborate

• avoid making open-ended offers ("what do you want")
• avoid making unilateral offers ("I'd be willing to . . . "
• avoid simply agreeing to or refusing the other side's demands
• instead ask "why is that important to you?"
• proposed solutions for critique ("here's a possibility - what might be wrong with it?")

Elicit Genuine Buy-in

• avoid threats ("you'd better agree, or else . . . "
• avoid arbitrariness ("I want it because I want it."
• avoid close-mindedness ("under no circumstances will I agree to - or even consider - that proposal"
• instead appeal to fairness ("what should we do?")
• appeal to logic and legitimacy ("I think this makes sense because . . . ")
• consider constituent perspectives ("how can each of us explain this agreement to colleagues?"

Build Trust

• avoid trying to "buy" a good relationship
• avoid offering concessions to repair actual or perceived breaches of trust
• instead explore how a breakdown in trust may have occurred and how to remedy it
• make concessions only if they are a legitimate way to compensate for losses owing to your nonperformance or broken commitments
• treat counterparts with respect, and act in ways that will command theirs.

Focus on process

• avoid acting without gauging how your actions will be perceived and what the response will be
• ignoring the consequences of a given action for future as well as current negotiations
• instead talk about the process ("we seem to be at an impasse; perhaps we should send some more time exploring our respective objectives and constraints."_
• slow down the pace:  ("I'm not ready to agree, but I'd prefer not to walk away either.  I think this warrants further exploration.")
• issue warnings without making threats:  ("unless you're willing to work with me toward a mutually acceptable outcome, I can't afford to spend more time negotiating")

I'll be blogging on each one of these steps in the negotiation process for the next two weeks so stay tuned.

Cross posted at She Negotiates and the ABCs of Conflict Resolution.

"Victoria Pynchon's negotiation skills crush cultural bias, gender barriers and even fears about the tumultuous economy. She taught me to conquer my fears with courage and navigate contentious negotiation, while demanding my market value.  Her one-on-one supportive coaching techniques trump transformation. Working with her has triggered a personal evolutionary spiral into a new way of doing business with confidence, the fruits of which have knocked down walls in every part of my life. I felt supported through the entire process and experienced immediate results."

Judy Martin, Business Journalist & Founder WorkLifeNation.com

"Lisa Gates reached into the very core of my being in order to bring me back into the reality of my dreams. Her talk is real and her methods concise. I no longer doubt what I'm doing...instead I speak, write, and live, knowing exactly why I do what I do and I realize that the goals I have set for myself are entirely up to me and attainable." 

Cicily R. Janus, Writing Away Retreats

Can we afford not to learn and teach these skills?  Cross-posted at She Negotiates.

How do we "sell" the nation on the idea that women's work is as valuable as men's? Despite the fact that 90 years have passed since women were given the vote and 40 since an entire generation of women raised their voices against unequal treatment under the law, we continue to make a third of what our men do.

What's up with that? and why the Coke ad?

What's up with that is this: we're not negotiating our true market value because we believe it is worth one-third less than men believe their true market value to be. That's what the research shows. Instead of getting angry, let's finally "get even" by learning our true market value; gathering the tools to ask for it; and, then just go get it.

That's what Lisa Gates and I are up to over at She Negotiates ~ our four-week online coached negotiation class for women. First, we give you the tools to re-calibrate your market value. Then we teach you how to get it. It's a simple as that.

Why the Coke ad?

Coca-Cola, one of the most successful products ever to grace our planet, wasn't always a world-wide beauty pageant winner. It once had to sell itself. It's SODA POP for goodness sakes. But it didn't sell itself as soda pop. It sold itself as the staff of life ~ bread. It wasn't a luxury ~ something our then-post-depression post-war parents were not keen on buying. It was a necessity.

So how do we sell ourselves as necessary to the economy and as valuable as bread and butter? Come on over to She Negotiates and we'll teach you how.

Our next course begins on September 13 and you can take it in your jammies! A warning: this is no ordinary e-class. It's a lot of hard work.

If you're ready to upset the apple cart and apply a little elbow grease to the gears and levers of a society that still fails to recognize our value, come on by!

Our best for yet another new beginning,

Vickie Pynchon and Lisa Gates
She Negotiates Consulting and Training

From today's "She Negotiates" lesson.

If negotiation is a conversation with agreement as its goal, we should not be wasting our time arguing with one another about whose point of view is the best. We should be talking to one another about how we can both achieve as many of the goals we both want to achieve as a result of our conversation.

You do not have to change anyone's mind to give them what they want to get. And you don't have to grudgingly accept half a loaf (a portion of the pie) if, unbeknownst to one another, you possess five items of value your bargaining partner wants or needs, and your bargaining partner possesses a dozen items of value you want or need. In a really effective negotiation, you may find that together you and your bargaining partner can whip up a dozen pies and end up with more than either of you had imagined.

Wouldn't you like to be learning how to do this instead of working on that sanctions motion for your adversary's bad faith refusal to answer interrogatories?

The next game-changing She Negotiates month-long coached course begins on September 16.  Stop trying to change people's minds and start changing the world!

And gentlemen, tell your women friends.  Husbands and significant others benefit from this course as well!  My own happily came back from the gym the other day saying "I did what you taught me; I got two extra months of gym membership free."

My friend's Women's Bar Association is looking for a speaker. 

They wanted that other woman who speaks on the topic of women negotiating.  You know the one . . . what's her name.  Yes, that's her.  The annual meeting committee gave her a ring and she quoted them $10,000 for an hour keynote.  To be fair, an hour keynote takes all day.  First, you've got to travel, then stay over night, then, if you're really serious about being of service to women lawyers, you get up early and listen to the morning speaker, talk to your table mates, find out what their challenges are, and, then alter, ever so slightly, your noon keynote to deliver exactly what this particular unique group of women need to hear.  You stay after, of course, to answer questions and sell copies of your book, which is, after all, your time, the time you'd be spending anyway spreading the good news that women can negotiate away the glass ceiling and the pay gap and their kids' private school tuitions.  Because that's just how you roll.  So it's never just an hour.

Still.

$10,000. 

"Did you negotiate with her?" I asked.

"The search committee didn't even try," said my friend.  "They figured her price was retail."

I don't mind being second choice.  That other woman, well, shoot, she pretty much started the whole women-negotiating-revolution.  I get it.  So I gave my quote and added, "but I'm not a suit on a hanger at Bloomies.  You don't have to buy me retail.  Remember some of what I taught you about money and value."

"Uhhhhh, make an aggressive first offer?"

"Well, yes.  But that's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about the money is meaningless lesson.  You remember.  You can't eat or drink it.  It won't actually do the surgery nor build an addition to your house.  Remember how it just evaporated overnight right before George Bush left office?  Remember how your house was worth $500,000 on Monday and two fifty on Tuesday?

'Money has a value only because we give it value.  It's only worth what we say it's worth.

"Uhhhh . . . . "

"O.K.  I know.  I talk too much and too vaguely."

Here's the deal.  My price is X + expenses.  That's negotiable.  I don't tell you it's negotiable because as soon as I do you'll start negotiating!  And since it was me who taught you to negotiate, I'm not wild about bargaining with you.  The desire to teach is way to strong in me.

"I'm negotiable.  So is that other woman, the one whose book title is Ask for It!  And money isn't the only measure of value.  It would also be of value to me for your women's bar association to sell my book.  Of course I'll bring it with me to autograph and the like.  But you could also include it on your invitations.  If someone in your Bar Association blogs, they could give it a review.  If you haven't already pledged that you wouldn't give away anyone's email address, you could give me your mailing list so I can stay in touch with your members.  Each of your members also has her own network.  We could brainstorm about ways that you could give me the benefit of my pre-speech networking acumen to get more women to your convention.  It's hard to sell seats these days.  How many people are you expecting?  What if we double that?  Could you pay me my full fee then?

"None of us is a suit on a rack.  And what we can do for one another is so much greater than opening our wallets and shelling out a few dollars that money sometimes seems just laughable.  So let me say this again.  I know you've heard it before but I want to highlight it here again.

"I am a store of value and you are too.  My network, my social capital is a store of the store of value of each member in it.  And in that, you and I are both rich.

"Got it?"

My friend, my student, is smiling, even though I can't see that over the telephone.

"I got it."

"Now what was that offer again?"

 The next game changing She Negotiates workshop is still open for a few last-minute members.  We start on Monday.  Don't be a suit on a rack.  Join us!

(cross posted at She Negotiates)

Pictured:  Chere Estrin, Chairperson, Board of Directors, The OLP;  Editor-in-Chief, SUE for Women Litigators; Editor-in-Chief, KNOW the Magazine for Paralegals; CEO, Estrin Education, Inc.

I've written about happy and unhappy lawyers before - here and here but I've rarely framed the issue as succinctly or as well as Chere Estrin at the Organization of Legal Professionals.  In the sidebar to her article The Secrets to a Stress Free Career, Estrin says work does not give you stress. Feeling bad about work gives you stress. 

What does Estrin know? 

Quite a lot. 

"I used to be the most stressed-put person I knew," says Estrin.

I averaged 90 hour weeks in the legal field as an executive in a $5 billion corporation, traveled three weeks out of four, answered to some big shots who thought they owned the planet, and managed hundreds of people.  It wasn’t much different when I was a paralegal manager.  There were critical deadlines to meet, difficult attorneys to juggle, anxious clients to handle and something called a “minimum billable hours” requirement, now referred to as “suggested” hours in a more politically correct and less actionable environment.  I recently looked at a picture of myself during that era.  I was holding my new-born niece, Cristina, a joy to behold and I looked like I just escaped from a train wreck and stopped by to say howdy.

Sound familiar?  After debunking some stress myths (you should go right over there now to read them) Estrin suggests the following:  

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In  Workplace Negotiating Secrets From Bethenny's Shrink over at Forbes.com, Xavier Amador, the therapist on Bethany Getting Married? gives his "secrets" for "winning" workplace arguments.  What Amador suggests (below and at the link) is really just collaborative interest-based negotiation, but his catchy acronym - LEAP - is a good one to remember for all negotiations, whether you're brokering peace in the Middle East or getting your guy to put the toilet seat down.  If you read the article, and I highly recommend doing so,  you'll see that no one is "winning" any "argument."  Rather, people are finding ways to accomodate all of their needs simultaneously.

The numbers below represent an unscientific poll of women in business concerning their skills, attitudes and fears about negotiation.  The women were asked to rate their agreement with the statements on a 1-10 scale with 1 being the least agreement and 10 being the greatest agreement.  The numbers represent the average answer.

Here is an Excel spreadsheet of the data collected in this assessment.

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Yesterday at the She Negotiates blog, I posted two quotes by a woman executive (President and CEO) who is blazingly successful in one of the most male-dominated industries in the world - construction of sports arenas.

Here they are again:

After she’d been in business for 15 years, a colleague told [Alvarado] she had two problems.

[Y]ou have a Hispanic company name, so you may be stereotyped [and] when you walk into a conference room to negotiate, you look like a woman.

When her son was five and asked if he wanted to grow up and be a “contractor like your mother and build sports facilities and schools,” he said “with disdain,

“No, that’s women’s work.”

Ba ba bump! (rim shot). Or as the old feminists used to say, "click."

My partner in negotiation-for-women crime is life-balance coach, Lisa Gates. 

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More important than her religious background (Jewish) her Ivy League Credentials (Harvard) her progressive, liberal or conservative Democrat political leanings, is the prospect that Kagan's addition to the Supreme Court will result in the magic number of three women on the United States Supreme Court. 

Why is three the magic number?

Recent studies have shown that it takes three women corporate board members to avoid the deliterious effects of group think on corporate decision making - my own supposition on the question "why three" being that one or two women easily risk falling into male group-think.  This isn't male bashing, by the way. I assume three men on an otherwise all woman's board would have a similar performance enhancing effect.  

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Can't ask for a raise during an economic downturn?  If the recession doesn't stop insurance executives from increasing their own pay and benefits by more than 50% (to $13.1 million) why should it stop you?

Just in case you were manning the Antarctic Ice Station at the time of the revelations prompting this post, here's the L.A. Times Executive Summary.

WellPoint Inc. revealed Friday that it boosted . . . chief executive [Angela Braly's] compensation 51% last year, even as the health insurance giant prepared massive rate increases in California that embroiled it in a national controversy over skyrocketing health insurance costs.

The proposed rate increases of up to 39% in individual policies turned the insurer into a flash point in the healthcare overhaul battle, breathing new life into President Obama's effort at a crucial time in the debate.

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