Kathryn Valentine, Worthmore Negotiations

How and why you should negotiate like a woman

 

Kathryn Valentine, the founder of Worthmore Negotiations, offers insights—and more importantly, concrete solutions— for women to negotiate successfully for the life and career they deserve. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein in a conversation described as “a masterclass, both for employees looking for a more rewarding career and employers who want to retain their top talent.”

 

The (male) art of negotiation

Kathryn tells Sam that she first became interested in the topic of women and negotiation when she was in business school. “I was blown away by the fact that my male peers were negotiating all kinds of amazing things,” she recalls. “These guys were doing it every day, to get business school paid for, to have their relocation to business school paid for (which I had never heard of), to do a one-year rotation with a really cool company that was a client of their main company, just all kinds of amazing things.”

She soon tried negotiating her own MBA internship, and she calls the result a disaster, “probably one of the worst negotiations anybody’s ever had.” So she spent a year researching the art of negotiating, and she learned that while negotiation is typically taught as if it's a gender-neutral skill, it's actually a highly gendered skill.

She emerged from her research with two major insights. One was that many women were leaving jobs for reasons that were actually negotiable, but the women just didn’t realize that they were. The second was that “negotiation is this incredibly powerful professional tool that a lot of women aren't able to fully leverage because the way that it's talked about and the way that it's portrayed as a way that feels really inauthentic to us.”

 

Reframing negotiation as collaboration

Kathryn identifies a focus on salary as one male-centric quality of most negotiations. “I think our minds automatically go to money and that’s important,” she says. “I don't want to downplay that there is a gender wage gap that needs to be paid attention to.” But often, she notes, women can negotiate something else—such as a more flexible schedule, or more autonomy or recognition—that will be “worth” more to them than salary.

She describes the importance of reframing negotiation as less of a competitive strategy and more of a collaboration. “The best negotiation ends with both parties walking away, feeling like they got something great,” she notes. “This can happen a majority of the time if we change how we think about it. The competitive strategy has seized our cultural mindset, so that's what we think of. However, the collaborative approach works significantly better for women—it eliminates the risk of backlash and enables both parties to walk away more satisfied.”

 

Practicing the micro to prepare for the macro

Kathryn also tells Sam that many women can be intimidated by the very idea of negotiating—but, like everything else, practicing the skill will help them improve. She suggests that women can practice negotiating on small, everyday facets of their work life (what she calls micro areas such as deadlines, meeting attendance, etc.) in order to be prepared for the macro negotiations that come with promotions, employment offers, and other milestones.

“I think of micro and macro in sort of two different ways. So for micro negotiations, the steps that I recommend are collect your data, craft your ask, and then get feedback because you do them so often that you can actually really improve quickly,” she says. “And then there are macro negotiations, which is a more complex process.”

For the macro negotiations, Kathryn suggests that women don’t negotiate just one thing, but negotiate three or five things at the same time. Her company offers guidelines that encourage women to focus on three areas: opportunities to increase their impact in the workplace, the support they need to be successful, and flexibility, which she notes is really “support by a different name.” She also notes that the recent pandemic offers opportunities. “You have a lot of really good tailwinds right now. COVID has proven that remote work is not the scary monster we thought it was two years ago. Now is the time to negotiate flexibility.”

 

To learn more about Kathryn’s work, go to worthmorenegotiations.com.