Harvard Negotiation Guru Bets on Women (By Victoria Pynchon)

There’s no one more famous for popularizing the collaborative, interest-based negotiation we teach at She Negotiates than Harvard’s William Ury, co-author of the ground-breaking Getting to Yes and author of the more recent Power of a Positive No.


With the tsunami of advice to women to change what they naturally do in favor of behaving more like the guys, it's refreshing to hear anyone, let alone the esteemed William Ury, say women's natural style of negotiating is better than the guys'.

Is It Better to be Cruel or Kind?

In a lengthy interview at the Huffington Post - Fearless Negotiation - Ury places his bet on women’s natural relational negotiation style as the “winning” bargaining strategy for the future.

Women, says Ury, have a bargaining advantage because we’re “more tuned to relationships.” That’s a strength in an economy that is discarding its old top-down pyramid structure and replacing it with loose, horizontal structures that depend on the maintenance of good on-going relationships.

“Men,” says Ury,

have more of a tendency to treat negotiation like a transaction where one side wins and the other side loses. It has its place in certain negotiations, but it’s increasingly less relevant than a relational approach, where you look for solutions that work for both sides.

Practicing “harsh, ruthless, win-lose negotiation” is a recipe for failure in a system that is increasingly dependent on people who choose to work together. Although men might “win” one negotiation with a take no prisoners' attitude, their bargaining partners will find someone else to work with in the future – someone capable of being “soft on the people and hard on the problem.”

“Right now,” Ury mused,

I would say that asking the traditional question of, “Who’s winning this negotiation?” is more and more like asking the question, “Who’s winning this marriage?” If you’re asking that question, your marriage is in serious difficulty!

Do We Need Legislation? We’re Good to Go Without It

We're all still licking our wounds from the defeat of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have made compensation more transparent, a good thing for women who have been shown to ask for raises when they know they are negotiable and to engage in more "claiming" behavior when they have a known target to aim for.

Though the failure of Congress to pass the Act was disappointing, I'd say we're good to go without it given our strong relational communication skills if we learn interest-based negotiation strategies nested in the gender culture in which we do business.

There are plenty of people out there now with the knowledge, skill and wisdom necessary to teach women how to best marry our natural talents to the techniques William Ury has been teaching for a quarter of a century – interest-based, relationship enhancing, collaborative negotiation.

We transformed the business world forty years ago when most of us were still in our twenties. We were barely out of blue-jeans, work shirts, and hippie beads when we entered the professions, finance, skilled labor, sports and business of every kind by the millions.

Today, those of us who saw the beginning of the women’s revolution are re-igniting the fire of our former activism from positions of influence and power. Some are working on leadership while others are helping women make their way onto Boards of Directors. Some have taken the negotiation beat like we do at She Negotiates and others financial literacy, work-life balance, and entrepreneurism.

If you want to learn how to negotiate “like a woman” you could start by listening to the free podcast Earn What You're Worth sponsored by the Massachusetts Conference for Women or take the upcoming interactive low-cost Negotiation 101 webinar available through Take the Lead. If you want to go a little deeper, sign up for our Strategic Negotiations on-line interactive seminar starting in September.

Studies have shown that negotiation courses that do not factor into their program women's unique workplace concerns fail to give women the confidence necessary to use the techniques taught. Whatever you do to learn negotiation strategies and tactics, make sure you're talking to one of the dozens of women who include implicit gender bias in their work along with ways to overcome it - both internally and externally.

I'm happy to share my network of women working in this field with anyone who wishes to contact me through LinkedIn.