Know Your Value by Mika Brzezinski

Author:Mika Brzezinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Asking for More

Kate White urges women to push the envelope. “You cannot be afraid to ask for more. But you have to do it in a way that is not emotional.… What you really have to do is make it about what your value is,” she says. “Stay very neutral and say, ‘I’m very happy to have the offer. It sounds like a great job. I was looking for $90,000 based on my experience and skills.’ They always—almost always—have more. As a boss I know that if you really want somebody, except in a recession where sometimes your hands are tied, you can go back and get more.”

White says that after years of working in women’s magazines and publishing articles about women’s issues, she learned not to apologize and not to overexplain. But it takes practice. She says that when you try to negotiate an offer, management might very well be shocked by your audacity. In which case, “You’ve got to learn to be very careful and keep it neutral and light, like a game,” White tells me. You have to walk a line between being too deferential and too aggressive, and you have to learn to recognize when the line has been crossed. But practice makes perfect.

“Every time you have one of those conversations, you get better at it. I had a situation once where I was using a lawyer, and they were giving the lawyer a terrible time. Basically they were indicating that they were getting frustrated with me because they felt I was asking for too much. I went in myself at that point and had a conversation, and in that conversation I realized, okay, I’ve got to back off a little. I said some things like, ‘I sense I’ve really frustrated the hell out of you. I’m sorry about that.’”

Is White really recommending that women apologize for putting a number on their worth? “I wasn’t apologizing for what I was asking. I was apologizing that the lawyer’s situation had frustrated them,” she explains. “I corrected the situation in fifteen minutes and I remember the lawyer later said to me, ‘You’re better at this than you’re giving yourself credit for.’ I think that the more you do, the more you step back and learn from the previous experiences. I try to pay attention to body language, and of course to whether I get what I want in the end, so that the next time I can take all of that into consideration.”

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