Keys To Negotiating In A Toxic Environment

Negotiating is a way of life. Some might say it is the essence of life. From the personal to the professional, whether you’re on your way up at work or the CEO, knowing how to argue for your point of view—or yourself—is critical.

Ana Dutra knows a thing or two about how to negotiate well. She’s been a global CEO, proxy officer and P&L leader with companies such as IBM, CSC, Marsh & McLennan, Accenture and Korn/Ferry International. Over the last two decades, Dutra has served on seven global public company boards, 11 private company boards and multiple nonprofit boards. She is currently a director on the boards of Carparts.com and Pembina Pipeline.

Dutra, who is also the author of Lessons in LeadershiT: Detoxing the Workplace, will join us in our next Women in Leadership online discussion on September 24, Mastering the Art of Negotiation (join us!) to talk about difficult leadership types, how to negotiate with them and the special issues women deal with in that arena. She spoke with StrategicCHRO360 ahead of the event.

What do you mean by “detoxing the workplace” and how toxic have things gotten?

About 10 years ago I was doing a lot of teaching and public speaking on leadership. A couple of publishing houses approached me and asked if I’d like to write a book on the subject. There are literally thousands of books on leadership: what great leaders do, biographies, best practices, you name it. So I stopped right there, not interested. It’s going to be just one more book. And then they asked me, what would excite you?

And interestingly, I had just come out of a conversation with a colleague in which I was very frustrated about the company I was in at that point. I said something like, you know what drives me crazy is that we are spending our lives teaching leaders how to be better and how to be great, and yet we only deal with leadershit in our own company. And this guy looks at me and he’s like, you just made this up. And I said, yeah, maybe it’s the way we think when English is not our first language, but “ship” and “shit” are close for me.

You saw a way you could contribute something new.

Yes, and I wanted it to be science-based.

So I used all the Hogan research and databases and did 80 interviews. And then a friend who is a Cal professor on leadership allowed me to handle her class’s last assignment stories. The students essentially created case studies. I thought I was going to find all-over-the-place behaviors, but the patterns boiled down to pretty well-defined ones, which is what you’ll find in the book—the irritable tyrant, the chameleon, the manipulator, etc.

And specifically, how do you deal with these types during negotiations?

Yes, what happens when you’re negotiating with a client who’s going to use all the bullying weapons in the negotiation process? What happens when you’re negotiating with somebody who is wishy-washy? Someone who never commits or just somebody who is a bad communicator, very unclear? So I wrote this book about different types of bad leaders, essentially, and how they show up in negotiations.

It starts with awareness.

Yes, it’s about seeing who is actually putting in time and effort to develop themselves as leaders, as human beings. The farther and more advanced you are in that journey, the more obvious bad leadership around you becomes. But you have to be careful because not everybody’s even interested in being on the journey.

Not everybody’s even aware of how they come across. You’ve got to be careful you’re not judging the entire world. You’re doing your part and you’re not allowing what is not positive to get under your skin. You deal with that, resolve that and then you move on to the next thing. Don’t get on a high horse, right?

Right. But I do think there’s more openness now to being emotionally intelligent, to being empathetic, to looking at behaviors more than people used to in business, say 10 years ago, don’t you think?

Yes, but everything has a flip side. You ask the question, is the workplace more toxic now? Yeah. There were two major movements, movements that made the workplace more real on one hand, but potentially more toxic depending on where people stand. One was #MeToo, addressing women directly. The problem when you open the lid and everything starts to percolate, on one hand it is liberating because you’re talking about those things, you’re addressing those things. On the other hand, it is difficult because then it’s in your face. You can no longer swipe it under the rug. So that is one. And the second one is political divisiveness around social justice issues being brought into the workplace.

Some companies decided, we are not going to allow anybody to talk about it. Other companies ran campaigns. So I think that what that is doing is making it more obvious for people whether there is a fit or not, between them and their values and motives and principles and the values and motives and principles that organizations espouse in their cultures. Because when all that stuff is no longer under the rug, then everybody knows where everybody stands.

And what I think that did was to make it more obvious for people who don’t have a good cultural fit with an organization that they have to decide whether they’re going to take a shot at changing it with others, or when is the point that they just say, this is not the place for me. So it’s good in terms of the openness but it has also brought difficulty and a lot of stress and anxiety into the workplace.

Let’s say you decide you want to stay, and let’s look specifically at women. Women are generally seen as better communicators than men, and are often encouraged to lean into their EQ. But something happens in a toxic work environment and women can have a harder time than men. How is it different for women?

What gets in the way for women is imposter syndrome, believing that the person across the table is stronger, more experienced or more leveraged than they are, which is not always the case. But we do play that. What are the two major types of negotiations? It’s either work-related—negotiating to get into a job or getting out of a job or getting a promotion—or M&A. What I see more often than not is women shooting themselves in the feet in work negotiations. And then in M&A deal negotiations it’s taking second chair for somebody else. It’s all about how imposter syndrome influences behavior and success, quite frankly, when women are negotiating.

What are some specific steps to dealing with a toxic environment or toxic personalities?

The very first one is to be very realistic about your power position in the company. If you don’t have support, or if where you stand is diametrically opposed to the powers that be above, you don’t have a fighting chance to win. You’re going to be very exhausted and very stressed.

But let’s assume that you do have a fighting chance and you’re up for the fight. Then the next step is to look around and see, okay, who are either my personal supporters or who are the people who espouse the same values, and create a coalition. We’re seeing this a lot in this new generation. They are really good at creating coalitions in the workplace.

I always tell the story about the board that I served on, and they were making a location move. They had bought and were revamping a building, and were going to move headquarters there. And they had an ESG report and were frequently saying that they were very environmentally conscious. Then the employees discovered that they would have Keurig coffee machines on every floor. As you probably know, the Keurig coffee pods are not recyclable. So the employees talked about it, said, we don’t want that. Put something else in there. And management said, we’re not going to return hundreds of coffee makers.

Here’s what happened: This group discovered similar situations in other companies in the same city. They got together and they went to the media. Think about how uncomfortable it is to be on the board and you hear about this movement going on across several companies.

All of the companies did the right thing in the end. So, find your allies, find your personal supporters, the people who have your back personally. Because there is power in the numbers. And then think strategically about how we’re going to address that, particularly for us women, so we don’t come across as whining. Have a business case.

Isn’t it unfair to put that characterization on women?

One of my leadership archetypes is the land grabber. And in that one, I have discovered that there’s no difference between women and men. There are women who are major land grabbers; there are men who are major land grabbers. What is different is the way that the victim deals with the issue according to gender. Men are going to get in others’ faces, asking who the heck is stealing my account or my employee or my budget? Women will, more often than not—and I’m very careful not to generalize too much, but more often than not—let it happen and then whine to the boss.

And that doesn’t work. Because what the boss is going to look at is number one, why didn’t you bring it up when it started to happen? Number two, look at that. He’s making really good use of those resources, and you are here spending your time whining. Yeah. So step ahead of the game on that one.

OK, find your allies. And that’s true even for a CEO, right? You might be the most powerful person in the company, but you have to get people to agree with you, with a board to answer to.

So often your biggest allies and support network are not necessarily the people above you but the people who report to you.

If you’re a woman CEO, knowing that your employees have your back and your employees are with you in a particular controversial issue is super important. Because one thing that every board looks at, and people forget as soon as there’s a delicate topic or tough decision to be made, is what is this person’s support network? Or if we fire this person who’s going to care? Understanding your own followers as well as other people’s followers is very important.

What’s another negotiating tip?

Understand in any negotiation, number one, who the final decision-maker is, and number two, what motivates that person? A guy came to my house today to talk about putting down turf grass—a very, very good salesperson. He shared with me that the owner of his company never wants to give anything extra, but the head of sales has a quota so he will and that that’s the person he talked to about the estimate. So he’s already telling me that he’s fighting for me. He’s saying, don’t worry about it. I’ve got your back.

Having that type of instinct is critical. And he did something really interesting because both my husband and I were talking to him and I noticed that along the course of the conversation, he started to address all my husband’s technical concerns. But every time he talked budget and price, he looked at me. I was looking at this guy and thinking, you probably have not even gone to college, and yet your instincts as a negotiator are spot on. So watch that too.

Is it better to negotiate with a bad negotiator?

I would much rather deal with somebody who knows how to negotiate than somebody who doesn’t. Because a bad negotiator is a loose cannon ball. With a good negotiator, you both know the dance.

Children are so good at negotiating when they’re little. And then the world kind of stifles that and they have to relearn it. When you want to achieve something in your life, remember what personality traits you led with. Make sure you balance your intellectual skills with your social skills, the skills you learned at the very beginning. They’ll help you get to your goal now.