Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen by Zoe Chance

Author:Zoe Chance
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Collecting the Ingredients for a Bigger Pie

Most potential negotiations fail before they begin because we don’t realize negotiating is even possible. As you start negotiating more often, eventually it dawns on you that negotiating is always possible. You won’t always succeed, but you can always try. You can say things like “I know it might not be possible, but is there any chance you could do some magic here?” When you’re asking with warmth and a sense of humor, people don’t get mad.

When you have this lightbulb moment about negotiating, you’ll feel elation—and then maybe a twinge of regret over all the opportunities that went whizzing by unnoticed. Up to this point, most of us have been following the advice and role modeling of our parents, which varies widely. It’s also unevenly distributed along socioeconomic lines. In Negotiating Opportunities, sociologist Jessica Calarco describes a years-long study in a middle school. She observed which children tried to negotiate extra help, better grades, or better situations. She also interviewed parents about what they were teaching their kids to do and interviewed teachers to understand how they made their decisions.

The findings were stark: Kids from middle-class families negotiated with their teachers seven times as often as kids from working-class families did. Teachers weren’t biased in granting requests; they tried to say yes to everybody when they could. But as Calarco writes, “Middle-class students rarely took ‘no’ for an answer. Instead, they treated ‘no’ as teachers’ opening gambit in a back-and-forth negotiation.” Kids from middle-class families negotiated circumstances that allowed them to be more creative, feel more comfortable, and suffer fewer punishments. Kids from working-class families tried to figure things out on their own, spent more time struggling, and completed less of their work. Calarco describes middle-class parents as teaching their kids to be influential and working-class parents as teaching their kids to be deferential.

What we’re seeing here is that privilege is at least partly negotiated. In order to open a world of possibilities and advantages, first you need to know that negotiation is possible. Then you need to be comfortable doing it. This isn’t just true for kids in school. When Accenture, the management consulting firm, conducted a study of thousands of executives across the world, they found the biggest dissatisfactions with work centered on low pay and lack of opportunity—yet the majority of those executives had never tried to negotiate a raise or a promotion. (When they did, though, 72 percent got what they asked for and 25 percent did even better.) These were smart, successful people. Some were probably coaching their kids to negotiate with teachers, but they weren’t doing the same with their own supervisors. Most people find job negotiations scary.

But they don’t have to be. Once you leap the hurdle of realizing that everything is negotiable, the next step is getting past the zero-sum, win/lose mindset that activates the Gator’s defenses and brings out the worst in us as negotiators—or keeps us from negotiating at all. If we employ

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