Why women are naturally excellent negotiators, despite many not feeling confident doing it.

Typically, negotiation is seen as something men excel in, and it’s viewed as being an uncomfortable and often aggressive activity from which most women shy away. But women have a number of natural skills that make them excellent negotiators; they’re usually just lacking the strategy and belief that they will succeed.

In their book Women Don’t Ask – Negotiation and the Gender Divide (which I highly recommend reading), Sara Laschever and Linda Babcock suggest that women take a very different approach to the negotiating process than do their male counterparts.

They note that women bring a “collaborative or cooperative approach to negotiation …which often produces creative solutions to problems that might have been overlooked by men taking a more competitive or adversarial approach. Also, by looking for those win/win solutions, women tend to preserve and enhance long term business relationships – they don’t burn as many bridges as men who focus on short term gains.”

One of the most important skills women naturally possess is active listening, and this is crucial to a successful negotiation.

Women also bring problem-solving skills and personality traits to the table that make them highly effective negotiators. Compared with men, women tend to be more cooperative, empathetic and ethical, and these traits are linked with an increase in long-term value for companies.

These traits also make women highly effective problem solvers. According to 2017 research from Laura Kray at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jessica Kennedy at Vanderbilt University, women excel at generating goodwill through problem solving. The researchers found that “women possess unique advantages as negotiators, including greater cooperativeness and stronger ethics. But often those strengths are overlooked or severely undervalued.”

A 2015 meta-analysis by Jens Mazei et al. at the University of Münster examined 11,000 data points on gender differences in negotiation outcomes and found that women excelled in negotiations when they had negotiation experience, received information about the bargaining range and negotiated on behalf of another individual. These studies and others point to the advantages women bring to the negotiating.

Enhancing women’s natural skills, together with the right training in develop those skills further, teaching them how to create a winning strategy, creates the right mindset and confidence to succeed in any negotiation.

If you need some personalised help with an upcoming negotiation, have a team within your business that would benefit from improving their negotiation skills, or you’re ready to invest in your future and learnt to negotiate successfully today please get in touch as I’d love to work with. Contact me at kate@katelalak.com and we can organise a convenient time to have a chat.