A five-book guide to negotiation for women (and men)

Maybe a year ago I decided to do something about my negotiation skills.

I needed better outcomes distributing tasks and resources for my teams at work, and I certainly wasn’t great at negotiating pay rises. As women, it seems, we often hold back at such times — and that doesn’t help with the gender pay gap, does it?

I started in on some reading, and found five great books, books that gave me the confidence I needed to navigate my own negotiations. I also completed an 8 week negotiation training course, Wies Bratby’s Women In Negotiation. Discussion and practice were key to developing my skills, so the course was great way to move beyond just thinking about the new skills I was learning.

Using the insights from the books and the course, I now have a set of principles that I use and recommend for all medium to high importance negotiations:

1 — preparation is your key to good negotiation outcomes. At a minimum you need to carefully consider your own and your counterparts’ negotiation goals and why each of you wants what you want. You also need to know the value of what each of you brings to the negotiation.

2 — listening is where you get your power. Listen a lot more than you talk. Listen to test assumptions you made in your preparation (what does the other side want and why), listen to develop real empathy and help the other person to feel like you are on the same side. Listening carefully can also help you avoid giving…