Thursday, January 16, 2025

Negotiating a Job Offer: Step Back, Think Broadly


As the new semester begins, many soon-to-be-graduates are deeply immersed in the job search process.  Some already have job offers and are contemplating whether to accept those positions.  During this process, many students and recent graduates ask me about negotiating with their potential employers.  Can I negotiate? What should be the focus of my negotiation?  How do I make sure that I don't harm the relationship before I even start working?   For those students, I highly recommend a Harvard Business Review article by my friend Hannah Riley Bowles and her co-author Bobbi Thomason.  They write:

Although reaching agreement on pay and benefits is important, failure to think more broadly about your career could mean losing valuable opportunities for advancement. For instance, women are increasingly urged to negotiate for higher pay as a way to close the gender wage gap. However, studies have shown that women’s “80 cents on the dollar” is explained more by differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories than by differential pay for doing the exact same job. Our research and our work coaching executives suggest that negotiating your role (the scope of your authority and your developmental opportunities) is likely to benefit your career more than negotiating your pay and benefits does. And at times of work-life conflict, negotiating your workload and the conditions that affect it (including your responsibilities, your location, and travel requirements) may be critical to remaining gainfully employed and moving forward professionally.

They offer terrific advice for job-seekers.  Step back from your focus on the job offer that presents itself at the moment.  Start instead by considering your long-term career goals and aspirations.  How can this job help you achieve those longer term objectives?  What will it take to achieve those goals?  How can you craft the opportunity in front of you to help fulfill those aspirations?  Work backward from this focus on career goals to the more immediate issue of the potential job you are considering.  Most importantly, think broadly about all aspects of the opportunity, rather than simply about compensation.  I find this last point so important, particularly for new graduates.  An extra $5,000 may sound enticing to a student with very little remaining in their bank account at the end of college.  However, taking the long view is so critical in that situation.  Investments in growth and development, with ample opportunities to learn, will provide a long-term payoff that far exceeds that extra compensation here and now.  

Saturday, January 11, 2025

How to Ask for Advice (and Why Many Ask Incorrectly)

Source: WikiHow

When we ask for advice from others, we would like their independent opinion.  In other words, we would benefit a great deal if we did not influence their response.  However, many of us frame our question or request in a way that does bias the advice we receive.  

Jessica Reif, Richard Larrick, Jack Soll have published a new paper titled "The inclusion of anchors when seeking advice: Causes and consequences." They write, "Sometimes advice seekers include their own thinking in their requests for advice, providing anchors that make it difficult for their advisors to access their own independent judgments."  For example, you might ask a colleague: How many people should I interview for an open analyst position on my team?  Alternatively, you might ask: Do you think that interviewing five people is appropriate when searching for a new analyst for my team?  In the second case, you have anchored the other party by providing a number to them.  In the first case, the more open-ended request for advice improves the chances of receiving an unbiased perspective.  

It seems obvious, right?  Don't anchor others when seeking advice. Yet, many of us do just that. Why?  The authors find that people who worry about appearing competent and/or diligent are more likely to anchor others when soliciting advice.  In other words, we often worry about the impression that we are making.  Asking a completely open-ended question makes some us feel as they though we may seem clueless to the other party.  

How does one signal competence without anchoring the other party (i.e., while preserving the independence of the other party's advice)?  Feif, Larrick, and Soll demonstrate that one can do so by using a "preparation signal."  They offer an example: “I have calculated what I think is reasonable but am interested in hearing what you think."  In short, let the other party know that you have done some research and come to your own conclusion, but you do not wish to disclose because you want their unbiased advice.  In one of their studies, they tested the usefulness of such a signal.  They concluded, "The key insight is that a preparation signal– an indication that the advice seeker made an estimate prior to the interaction but is withholding it– may be similarly effective in accomplishing impression management objectives without introducing potentially biasing information into the advice interaction. This finding is important because it offers advice seekers a strategy for simultaneously accomplishing impression management and independence goals."

Tuesday, January 07, 2025

Withstanding External Pressure When Making Decisions

Source: NFL.com

Conventional wisdom often asserts that strong familiarity and cohesion within a group leads to a high risk of groupthink.  In other words, a strong sense of social belonging within a team can lead to pressures to conform, which in turn can diminish the quality of decisions that a team makes.  However, might that strong in-group familiarity be helpful when it comes to resisting external pressures?  Amanda Ferguson and her colleagues studied that question in a new paper titled, "Relieving the Pressure: Team Familiarity Attenuates External Conformity Pressure on Team Member Decisions."  

Ferguson and her colleagues conducted an ingenious study of NCAA football officiating crews.  They examined data from 2012-2015 to measure "crew familiarity" - i.e., how often had referees worked together.  Then, they evaluated officiating crews' performance during the 2016 football season.  Ferguson and her co-authors studied whether crews with more experience working together were more or less vulnerable to pressure from the home crowd when making penalty calls.  In short, the home crowd represented what they called "external conformity pressure."  They discovered a meaningful relationship between in-group familiarity and external conformity pressure, particularly when the stakes are very high: 

"Crews with 20 games of experience working together call 0.92 fewer penalties on the visiting team when under high pressure, and crews with 30 games of experience working together call 1.56 fewer penalties on the visiting team under these conditions. Although the magnitudes of changes in penalties may seem small, they represent anywhere from a 15% to 25% difference from the average number of visiting team penalties, which is consistent with effects reported in previous studies on the influence of crowds on referee penalty calls."  

In other words, in-group familiarity and cohesion seems to provide a protective effect, leading teams to not be as susceptible to external conformity pressure, particularly in high-stakes situations.  The scholars conducted a second experimental study examining the same factors.  That study largely corroborated the findings from the NCAA referee research. 

What's the practical implication for business leaders?  We know that many managers feel pressure to conform to industry standards and conventional wisdom.  Companies often tend to exhibit herd behavior in industries, with competitors mimicking the actions of industry market share leaders. Perhaps, more seasoned management teams with a history of working together are less likely to succumb to the pressure to conform to "standard practice" within the industry.  They might be more likely to take risks, be different, and stake out a distinctive competitive position.  Teams with less familiarity may not be able to resist the pressure to conform to conventional wisdom.