Negotiating Your Way to Success in a New Role

By Michael Watkins

You make your endings in the manner of your beginnings.” This old English adage certainly applies as you negotiate for a new job. Why? In part it’s because the way you negotiate with potential employers sends powerful signals about how you will negotiate for them if they hire you.

Your reputation will be strongly shaped by your interactions with your future bosses during the recruiting process. They will rightly ask, “What does the way he or she negotiates with us say about how this person will conduct critical negotiations with customers, suppliers, and other key stakeholders on our behalf?” Negotiate too hard, and they will wonder if you will be too abrasive. Fail to negotiate hard enough, and they will wonder if you will be too soft.

At the same time, your early negotiations set you up for success or failure once you are in a new role. Remember: you begin negotiating expectations and resources the instant you start talking with potential bosses. The understandings that result from this pre-hire dialogue set the stage for everything that happens once you formally take a new position.

Steps to Taking the Lead

Skill in negotiating becomes even more critical once you take a new job. In the early days in a new position, you must engage effectively in numerous negotiations in a network of internal stakeholders whose support will be critical to your success. As you strive to create momentum in the early months in your new job, you will have to:

Further negotiate expectations and resources with your new boss (or bosses).
Build relationships and negotiate for support and resources with your peers.
Negotiate goals and expectations with your direct reports.
Establish productive relationships and build support for key initiatives with other key internal constituencies.
The upshot of all this is that negotiating is the single most important skill leaders exercise, as they seek new roles and transition into them. Effectiveness in negotiating not only gets you the right job with the right package, it sets you up for success during the critical transition period.

What does it take to be successful in conducting critical new-role negotiations? Much more than simple bargaining skills. And the starting point for success is pursuing the right objectives, right from the start.

Four Key Goals

Through my studies of hundreds of leaders entering new roles, I have come to believe that there are four fundamental objectives that you should seek to achieve in every negotiation you undertake during the hiring process and beyond. Together they provide the negotiating equivalent of a “north star” to guide your actions; if you keep your eye on them, you won’t lose your way. So as you negotiate with potential employers and then enter a new role, seek to do the following:

Create value to the greatest extent possible. This means working tirelessly from the very first moments of your transition to identify the potential for mutual gains in the many relationships — inside your organization and with key external constituencies — which are key to your success. It means identifying alignments of interest that can help you, and those with whom you seek to collaborate, to tap sources of potential energy, and channel them to achieve desired goals.

Capture an appropriate share of the value that gets created. Be sure that the agreements you enter int o with other influential players really do advance your agenda. After all, you have important goals that you are trying to achieve. While it can be rewarding to help others, you can’t afford to be too altruistic. You need to set and enforce boundaries, lest your energy end up being harnessed too much to helping others achieve their ends at the expense of your own.

Build and sustain critical relationships. Don’t try to capture so much value in your negotiations that you sour relationships. Also, be careful not to exert influence in ways that are perceived to be self-serving or manipulative. Relationships are hard to build and easy to damage. Trust is particularly hard won. Once lost, it can be difficult or impossible to regain.

Enhance your personal credibility. This means establishing your reputation as a “tough, creative and trustworthy” negotiator. It also means viewing every negotiation you undertake, inside and outside your organization, as an opportunity to build and reinforce your reputation. A good reputation is a priceless asset for a leader in transition; you must strive to build and sustain it in every interaction.

If you stay true to these principles, and learn how to put them into practice in everything you do, success will follow.

Michael Watkins is a Professor of Practice at INSEAD and founder of Genesis Advisers, a leadership development consultancy (GenesisAdvisers.com). His new book on negotiation is Shaping the Game: The New Leader’s Guide to Effective Negotiating (HBS Press, 2006). He also is the author of the international bestseller on accelerating transitions, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels.