How Millennials Can Conquer Their Fear of Negotiation

A lot of pieces have been written about the fact that Millennials don’t negotiate in their jobs. Whether it’s fear of backlash, lack of confidence, or fear of losing their job in a bad economy, Millennials aren’t negotiating and it has the potential to hurt a lifetime of salary.

Here’s another reason why it might hurt you if you don’t ask – negotiation is a skill that can affect your quality of life beyond pay. Studies have shown that when employees can negotiate parts of their work beyond pay (like flexible working arrangements or professional development), it can decrease stress and increase their productivity and even enjoyment on the job.

The key is to collaborate with your boss. Collaborative negotiation is a cooperative form of negotiation. It is a communication skill that helps you creatively solve problems while building trust with your boss and colleagues.

In collaborative negotiation, it is important to have a clear sense of what motivates the people you are negotiating with. It is also important to be transparent with your suggested solution. That transparency can help your creativity shine and lead you to all sorts of success.

Here’s an example: I once saved my boss’s boss $500,000. I saved her deferred costs because I understood data in a way no one else did at the time. This was in 2005, and I was a nerdy kid from a technical university that had somehow stumbled into the job. Just like any Millennial in the workforce right now, I did not have seniority or authority, only five years into the workforce. But I had a completely new way of solving the problems the organization faced. Having technical skills in a place where very little of that knowledge existed before my arrival could have been a burden. It could have made people feel defensive. I transformed it into a benefit by being transparent through communication.

I had heard my boss and the director talk about a dilemma they had — a big set of records was set to expire, which was bad news for the organization. I examined the data, and found that the “expiration date” was 6 to 8 months away, not a week away (as the boss and director had thought.) It hadn’t occurred to anyone to look for this code in the data, but I found it and I managed to “rescue” about 125,000 records.

I knew from previous campaigns that we would spend anywhere from $3 to $5 per acquisition of a record. I multiplied the number of records that I had “rescued” by $4 (the average) and arrived at $500,000. I wrote up a memo and presented it to my boss, who presented it to the executive director. I had helped squash a disaster, and had clearly shown my supervisor and boss how I had arrived at my work which built trust in my judgment.

Through building that trust, I was able to do something no one had before – I secured approval to work an alternate work schedule. I negotiated a compressed four-day schedule so that I could work on a personal project one day a week for 3 months. The bosses helped me create the agreement so I wouldn’t have to quit my job. Instead, they helped me expand my work life to make space for the personal project.

Most importantly, I never doubted my usefulness to the organization. I knew my worth. I could explain the value I was bringing to the organization because I had to explain what I was doing. As Nanette Fondas notes in her article on the Art of Negotiation – “The bottom line here is that to negotiate opens up the potential to achieve a small win for yourself that may engender a larger gain for others.”

Collaboration is a vital skill, and it allows you to create your way into a more empowered future. Being able to articulate the value you bring to any situation — and creatively generating solutions where there might appear to be none — is vital skill, particularly for Millennials, who can help lead the way to innovation in the future.

photo credit