Would business be better if we didn’t have to negotiate?
This comes on the back of two small incidents in my working week, but it has been on my mind for some time.
Firstly, The Apprentice — which I never watch because it represents everything about the aggressive ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘killing it’, ‘crushing it’ startup mentality that puts my teeth on edge. But I accidentally turned it on to hear Sir Alan disparaging a hapless candidate with the phrase “You just have no business acumen, I don’t like you.”
That was rapidly followed by finding myself in a situation where I would have to negotiate a fee for some unexpected work — which has a similar effect to The Apprentice on my teeth! As I gritted the same teeth to work out how to respond, I could hear Sir Alan’s sneer in a corner of my mind “Jenny, you just have no business acumen.”
Why do I have a problem with negotiating? I don’t think I used to have a problem with it, but I could be mis-remembering. Is it because I’m female? After all, there’s a lot of business research that says women are better leaders in most every context with one glaring exception — negotiating.
So a little context. As I was sitting in my jim-jams with my second coffee of the morning getting stuck into a writing day, the phone rang. The keynote speakers for a seminar on self-management hadn’t managed to get their flight and wouldn’t make it. Any chance I could deputise? Now as the writing genes weren’t exactly flowing that morning, it was the perfect excuse to leap in the car and escape the pain of writers block. It turned out to be a brilliant day with a brilliant group of people.
But with little time to spare we hadn’t talked about the ‘fee’ word. At the end of the day I was asked what I would like to charge, and that’s where the ‘stuckness began’. I didn’t have an appropriate fee to cover this eventuality. I had a consultancy fee for charities and corporates. A speaking fee for corporates if I had to produce wholly new material, and one for my normal keynotes. I had a facilitation fee. None of those seemed to quite fit the bill. And I had no idea what their normal rates were. So I was left in guesstimate land.
It’s at that point the uncomfortable narrative arises in my head. I’ld like to do more work for this organisation, so how will the number I respond with impact the chances of that? I don’t want to under-value my contribution, but really all I had to do was leap out of my jim-jams and pluck some knowledge out of my head at double-quick speed. Not that hard for me. And then I hear the voice that say ‘hey it has taken 30 years of work, and the last 5 years investing an additional £100k in new training like biomimicry, organisational psychology, ecosychology, organisational design, facilitation — you name it — to build up that brain power that you can so easily pick and that has value; don’t be a dork about this’. And then my natural empathy kicks in, and I know they are in a position where they have to pay me in addition to the original speakers, and I don’t want to take advantage of an ‘act of Easyjet’.
And because I’m not as stupid as I sound, I know I’m giving myself the psychological run around to avoid giving a figure. So I take advantage of Fred Laloux and offer up parameters from my lowest to highest day rate and ask them to select a fee based on what they normally pay — successfully making it their responsibility instead of mine!
Sad to say that didn’t work quite as I planned! Because they came back with the lowest figure. And although I was quite happy with that, a new narrative starts up in my head about not being good enough, of value, and how could I have done better!
I share this story not to make it obvious to you that I’m a complete mental wreck when it comes to negotation. I know ‘how’ to negotiate, but I just don’t like it and I wish it could be made unnecessary. I share the story selfto highlight an important point about the future of business design, and it’s this.
The course was about self-management. Anyone who knows anything about self-management as a business design model, knows that a high level of transparency goes with this territory. Which is ironic given the above story. There is transparency about what your colleagues do, when they work, what their responsibilities are, and what they earn. Shining a light on this kind of information causes its own problems, but it does make people have difficult discussions on a regular basis, and confront all their deep-seated issues around such subjects as personal value, status, weaknesses, opportunites for growth — all those good things.
Indeed my experience of self management is that it’s one of the best vehicles to deliver psychological growth. Every organisation I know that has implemented it, and that has measured the change in their people, show up as having moved their level of consciousness ‘up’ a notch. (Note I don’t really like ‘up’ because it contains a notion that further ‘up’ the scales of psychological development is better and that growth is linear — neither of which is true).
Similarly those companies who have implemented a deliberately developmental approach to their people management, prior to embarking on self-management have found the whole process a lot easier. Big broad brush statements, but in general I have found them true.
Negotiation comes about when there is no set price for something. You can’t go into Waitrose and negotiate the price of a packet of pasta. Well, maybe Sir Alan would give it a go, but most of us just pay up. Speak to anyone in the consulting, training, facilitation world and you will find it’s incredibly hard to get them to share information about fees. Why? What’s the harm? What is that reluctance based in? I have no hard evidence to offer but I suspect it’s based in the narrative of competition; the idea that everyone and anyone is your competition. If you reveal what you’re charging you give someone else an opportunity to under-cut you, and God forbid! — you might lose out! The mindset of scarcity.
Similarly organisations don’t publicise what they are prepared to pay for services either, unless they are public tenders. Even then organisations like the UN have a simple policy of taking the cheapest quote, a policy which in most cases delivers a race to the bottom instead of a quality service.
So here’s what I did. I shared the narrative in my head with the client. I was completely transparent about my difficulties with negotiation and coming up with what I thought was a ‘right’ fee. And guess what — we found a more comfortable way through. I still hadn’t avoided the pain of negotiation but transparency had made it easier.
So here’s the moral (if there is one) of this little tale. Implementing transparency of pricing takes away a lot of unnecessary pain in a self managed environment and allows people to get on with the job in hand. Trying open and honest transparency about my personal narrative resolved the negotiating issue for me.
There is a role for transparency that does away with negotiation. There is a role for transparency that makes negotiation easier.
Caveat: I was dealing with a very conscious human being and not Sir Alan. He would have fired me.
