4. Women negotiators: Unleash your innate skills

Women gain power as negotiators when they trust their intuition, Thunderbird Professor Karen S. Walch, Ph.D., said Nov. 12 at the Arizona Women’s Leadership Forum in Phoenix.

Walch, who teaches cross-cultural negotiation at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz., said women often find themselves in predatory negotiation environments where the other side views them as an opponent to be destroyed. But women understand intuitively that successful negotiation doesn’t have to be so harsh.

Walch said women know better than men that win-win solutions often emerge when negotiators learn to collaborate as partners rather than fight as enemies. “Our intuition tells us that this is possible,” Walch told an audience of about 400 women professionals at the J. W. Marriott Desert Ridge Resort & Spa. She shared at least three strategies to help women negotiators find these win-win solutions.

Advocate for yourself

Walch said research shows that women negotiators perform about 20 percent better than men when they advocate for a cause.

She said women find a powerful voice when they speak on behalf of other women, children or groups. “We excel at that type of negotiation,” Walch said.

Women negotiators can use this same power on their own behalf when they learn to step forward as their own advocates. “Step up and say what you believe in,” Walch said. “Be an advocate for yourself.”

She said women who do this show up at the negotiation table with a different mindset. “They ask for credibility,” she said. “They ask for respect.”

Use your whole brain

Walch said women also gain an edge when they learn to negotiate with their whole brains.

She said some negotiators favor the left brain, which processes information in an analytical and sequential manner. Other negotiators favor the right brain, which processes information in a holistic and intuitive manner.

New brain research also shows important activity takes place in the prefrontal lobe, which controls a person’s sense of higher purpose and mystery in life.

“You integrate this with the left and right brain, and we find that this is the most powerful source to accomplish anything you want,” Walch said. “Power is in this alignment of using your emotional skills and intellectual skills.”

Walch said women who use their whole brains in negotiation have an innate ability to discover the mutual interests they share with the other side. They watch for nonverbal cues and pick up unconscious signals.

“Women have innate skills to coax out of someone what are the real problems they are facing,” Walch said. “This can lead to win-win solutions.”

Be a problem solver

The final thing women can do to gain power in negotiation is to view themselves as problem solvers.

Walch said negotiators who seek win-win solutions through collaboration sometimes run the risk of becoming too soft. They can make too many concessions to preserve the relationship. Predatory negotiators who seek win-lose solutions through competition run the opposite risk. They can be too hard.

Walch said a third option usually works best.

“We’re not just friends, and we’re not just adversaries,” she said. “We need to change our mindset to: We are problem solvers together.”

She said problem solvers use empathy to figure out what problems the other side faces. Then both sides collaborate to find mutually beneficial solutions.

“Think of negotiation as a problem-solving exercise,” Walch said.

5. Or Gender Peace And Prosperity?

Victoria Pynchon, 09.18.09, 06:00 PM EDT

They say that men and women negotiate differently. If that's true, let's learn from one another. Then maybe, we'll all get what we want.

I am indisputably a "woman lawyer," but I have never thought of myself in those terms. I'm a lawyer. And I'm a woman. (I'm also a writer, a stepmother, a wife, a daughter, a river rafter and an aficionado of squash--the game, not the vegetable--photography, literature and theater.)

I was forced to become more conscious of my gender when I became a commercial mediator and arbitrator five years ago. Although I'd walked into a "man's" world when I began practicing law in 1980, any vestiges of the disrespect I experienced in my first few years of practice had evaporated by the end of that decade, if not earlier.

Yet, here I was, practically back in the 1980s. Because mediation and arbitration tend to be "wisdom" and "authority" jobs, my new profession looked pretty much like my old profession had in 1980--primarily old and white and male. And though women are well represented in the ranks of family law and employment dispute mediation (which, after all, involve emotion) there are still precious few women "neutrals" mediating and arbitrating the type of complex commercial litigation that I'd handled for more than two decades as a lawyer. Overnight, I became very aware of that "woman" part of me.

Naturally, I began to research differences in the negotiation styles of men and women. What I learned isn't surprising, but it is empowering. Although men and women do negotiate differently, if we learn to move more easily back and forth across gender lines, we can all become better negotiators.

Not only have women historically felt themselves to be less capable competitive negotiators, they have also suffered negative social and professional repercussions when they do behave in a competitive manner. Linda Babcock, author of the groundbreaking book on negotiation and gender--Women Don't Ask--reminds us that we are still taught that "competing against a man can threaten his ... masculinity," making the use of "hard ball" negotiation tactics by women taboo. The cultural expectations of women, however, persist.

The good negotiation news for women is that they are better negotiators than they think. As Babcock reports in her book, women are more likely to plan their negotiation strategy more carefully; to see the big picture more clearly; to work through impasse by sharing experiences more often; to concentrate more on what their negotiation partner needs to close the deal; and to create more options whereby both sides can get more of what they want than men do.

While these general tendencies of women (understanding that we all operate on a sliding scale of "femaleness" and "maleness") were previously believed to be negotiation deficits, they are now perceived as negotiation assets.

Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and author of The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator, for instance, reports from her own controlled experiments conducted in 1991, that 93% of all negotiators fail to ask "diagnostic questions" of their bargaining partners when to do so would significantly increase the negotiation outcome for both parties. Asking diagnostic questions--what do you want, need or prefer and why--is something women are skilled at and that men too often avoid.

But let's not get all gender wars about this. Let's instead focus on male negotiation advantages that can be adopted by women and female negotiation advantages that can be adopted by men. The male advantages? Once again remembering that we are dealing with social and cultural stereotypes, they might include: believing you have the advantage, feeling entitled to rewards and compensation, having a greater sense of pride and self-importance, ability to speak up more aggressively, successfully pushing your weight around and simply seeming to know more than everybody else.

It's time to get strong and adopt, ladies.

Victoria Pynchon is an attorney-mediator with ADR Services, Inc. and an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association’s Expedited Commercial Panel, both in Los Angeles, Calif. Ms. Pynchon blogs at the Settle It Now Negotiation and IP ADR blogs.