Negotiation is not Psychological Manipulation

I want to take some time today to address something that was said to me recently that I’ve heard before but never really had a good answer for it. To the statement!

I want to see people coming from #career-advice answering the question “whoa, how did you find your dream job with your desired salary?” with “I worked hard and earned it” rather than “I psychologically manipulated them to giving it to me”

First of all, I want to say that “hard work and earning it” is always going to be a requirement. You still have to demonstrate your skills as part of the interview process to even get to the offer negotiation. You also have to actually do the work to keep the job. Negotiation is a very specific step in what is frequently a much longer process.

Since late 2015, I’ve been talking pretty publicly inside of the Orlando Devs community about salary negotiation. Ever since then, it’s been a hot issue because most people have just never discussed it. Some never even thought about it or realized it was something you can do. Inside of our #career-advice channel in Slack, as well as the one-on-one lunches that I do with people, salaries and negotiation get brought up a lot now.

So, let’s start with a couple baseline points before I move onto a deeper discussion about companies and manipulation. What’s the difference between negotiation and manipulation?

Negotiation is two parties working together to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

Manipulation is one party using their power, leverage, or deceit (sometimes unintentionally) to coerce the other into an outcome that is only beneficial for themselves.

I’m an extremely strong proponent of treating your career like a business. If you treat your skills as services rendered from one business to another, it takes a lot of the ambiguity out of the employer-employee relationship. And professional business people negotiate.

If you go into each job offer with the mindset of “I’m seeking the most mutually beneficial offer possible” that will inform a lot of your negotiation. You’re not negotiating to try and squeeze every drop possible out of the other party, but you are making sure that you get an offer that you’ll be satisfied with that they are also comfortable with.

You also negotiate for your own protection. Let’s take a look at some of the ways companies psychologically manipulate you into certain behaviors (intentionally or not) during the interview process:

• Asking you for salary details upfront: This is called Anchoring and it makes it very difficult to have a proper offer negotiation because it results in complete information asymmetry between the two parties.
• Asking leading questions to try to get you to verbally accept an offer: Ever get an offer letter in person with a question that looks like “How does this sound?” The answer they’re looking for is some variation of “this looks good” because that swings the door shut on the negotiation process.
• Exploding Offers: This is a trap that’s used to force you into answering an offer faster than you might be capable of, which disrupts proper negotiation and prevents you from seeking out competing offers.

And these are just a quick few off the top of my head. There’s more. It’s important to remember that when you’re going into a negotiation, you’re trying as much as possible to level the playing field.

Part of my goal with writing this up is to take away some of your apprehension that it’s somehow bad for you to negotiate every offer that you get. Negotiation is something that all businesses do with one another. It’s a perfectly normal practice that not enough people are utilizing. Make sure it’s part of your toolset when you’re searching for a job.

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