Negotiating your next job?

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When we ask professionals to describe a career negotiation, the first thing many people think of is bargaining with a hiring manager over an offer package. That scenario may spring to mind because compensation negotiations can be especially stressful and awkward and therefore become seared into our memories. Although reaching an agreement on pay and benefits is important, failure to think more broadly about your career could mean losing valuable opportunities for advancement. For instance, women are increasingly urged to negotiate for higher pay as a way to close the gender wage gap.

However, studies have shown that women’s «80 cents on the dollar» is explained more by differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories than by differential pay for doing the exact same job. Our research and our work coaching executives suggest that negotiating your role is likely to benefit your career more than negotiating your pay and benefits does. And at times of work-life conflict, negotiating your workload and the conditions that affect it may be critical to remaining gainfully employed and moving forward professionally. As with other dealmaking, career negotiations should not be solely about getting as much as you can.

The best negotiators generate mutually beneficial solutions through joint problem-solving and creative trade-offs, along with compromise.

We advise professionals to think strategically about not just what they might negotiate but how. In the age of Covid-19, the time is ripe to improve your career negotiation skills. Drawing from a research project in which we collected thousands of stories from recent professional-school graduates, mid-level managers, and senior executives from seven global regions about how they advanced at pivotal points in their careers, we propose four steps for preparing for your career negotiations.

Start with Your Career Goals

As you enter a period of change in your career, you should think about your short- and long-term aims and then map backward from those objectives to define the next steps you want to take. Don’t forget to include quality-of-life considerations as well as professional ones. Focused on the terms of the offers, Anya started her negotiation preparation wondering if she should walk away from the tech company unless it matched the salary offered by the consulting firm. Making compensation the deciding factor can be a mistake.

Next, we might have asked, "To improve the tech offer, what might you negotiate to fulfill your dream of a career in tech?" After all, her lifetime earning potential could be higher in that booming sector than in consulting.

They understood that being successful in one setting doesn’t guarantee success in another, so the compensation package was just one aspect of the job offer to consider.

Understand What You’re Negotiating For

Depending on whether you are in an asking, a bending, or a shaping negotiation, you will need to vary your arguments to win your counterparts’ support. If you are asked to do work that would move you away from your career goals, see if there is room for negotiation. Another option is to agree to do the job for the sake of organizational needs in exchange for some other career-advancing opportunity. For example, you might say, «I will take on this role to help us out of the current crisis, but I would like to rotate into a job with more P&L responsibility after two years».

Consider the case of Bela, who wanted to move from finance into a leadership role in IT as her company launched a digital transformation. Bela explained why her deep knowledge of the company’s financial systems and her track record managing cross-functional teams prepared her to succeed in this IT role or, at a minimum, keep the company on solid footing until she was replaced by a new hire. Although any negotiation can backfire, bending negotiations are particularly risky because they may give the impression that you’re a prima donna seeking special treatment or unwilling to pay your dues. Because that commonly means seizing leadership opportunities, shaping negotiations typically involves more parties and the backing of allies.

Depending on whether you are in an asking, a bending, or a shaping negotiation, you will need to vary your arguments. Consider Samir’s desire to lead a restructuring of his firm, which was run by an elite old guard that he saw as out of step with globally competitive business practices. Finally, with his spouse’s support, Samir worked out a plan to relocate internationally for another position if the firm rejected his proposal. He then began the negotiation process with confidence that he had enough buy-in within the firm to lead a transformational change, but also a satisfying alternative for himself and his family if that was not possible.

Organizations may be especially receptive to bending and shaping negotiations during challenging or fast-changing times, when people are looking for ways to adapt and innovate. For instance, in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing restrictions, many employees need to change the way they work. Their collective bending negotiations are a useful source of information and experimentation for organizations and individuals trying to figure out how to maintain high morale and productivity during the crisis. Organizations are also welcoming shaping proposals from employees who have ideas about how to redeploy resources and open new markets in response to economic disruptions at home and abroad.

No one would ever advise walking blindly into a potential negotiation, but people do it all the time. That case has been highlighted as an example of women’s failure to negotiate, but the underlying problem was a lack of information on what was negotiable. Increasing transparency is obviously the responsibility of organizations, but individuals can take action too.

A LinkedIn search can help you find professional contacts who may tell you more about a hiring manager or a department. Although your personal and professional networks can be a valuable source of information, you should not rely on them alone to get an unbiased understanding of the situation. Think of a field in which men tend to be better paid than women. Stretch your inquiry beyond your closest networks to ensure that you have the broadest information possible.

Recently many people have been learning from how organizations in other industries or geographies are responding to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Enhance Your Negotiations Through Relationships—and Vice Versa

As you aim to reduce ambiguity, you will undoubtedly think of people you might go to for information or advice. Connecting with people who can be helpful is what we mean by enhancing your negotiations through relationships. Consider the example of Brandon, an engineer who landed a job as a private equity associate after finishing business school. Explain that you’re seeking input on an idea you have, and meet early with people who might block your proposal if they felt you weren’t consulting them.

Many of the negotiation cases we studied were rife with tales of conflict and resistance, but you needn’t settle for compromises that leave both sides unhappy. business units required numerous rounds of conversation in which she seeded and got feedback on her ideas. Most of the career negotiations recounted to us by senior executives, managers, and other professionals lasted weeks or months.

They started with preliminary conversations that gradually evolved, particularly as new information or the entrance of new players influenced the way various parties perceived their interests and the alternatives to an agreement. Your narrative will be co-written with work and life partners, and negotiation is at the heart of finding mutually gratifying ways for that story to unfold.