When it comes to job or salary negotiations, one of the biggest challenges is adequately communicating your value to the company or team. This can be especially difficult for women in professional spaces. Crystal Ware is an attorney, Insurance Strategist and Growth Coach who has a passion for helping women learn and grow into careers that they truly love. She joined Negotiate Anything to share her expert advice for identifying, embracing, and communicating value in our most important job and salary negotiations.
Assessing Value: Challenges and Misconceptions
When it comes to leveraging value, one of the first struggles professionals face is defining it. This can be particularly difficult for women. According to Crystal, one theory is that this stems from our cultural expectations around women, jobs, and money. As a society, we discourage conversations around finances. Additionally, women have traditionally been encouraged to be polite and demure. Beyond that, there is rarely a quantitative value placed on caregiver roles, which have also traditionally been held by women. All of these factors combined can make it difficult for professionals, especially women, to clearly define and embrace their value in the working world. According to Crystal, these factors also play a role in the pay gap, which data show increase with age.
How to Begin Embracing Your Value
Many of the factors outlined above, as well as others, can be difficult to process emotionally. Identifying your inherent value will likely require some deep reflection and internal work. Crystal recommends people see therapists or other mental health professionals where it may be necessary.
It’s about understanding that everybody has an inherent value that,” she shared.
Otherwise, to begin tapping into that value, she recommends doing an analysis of your work and/or educational history to identify projects you’ve worked on, deals you’ve managed, sales you’ve made, or other ways you’ve contributed to the success of the team or company. Consider skills or tasks when you have been better at the job than those around you.
Crystal also recommends considering Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) as well.
Here is a list of questions you can ask yourself:
Are you working on a certain number of contracts?
Are you doing a certain number of invoices?
Are you touching a certain number of clients?
Are you making the lives easier of the people that are making money?
If you have these numbers already, you’ve already begun building a strong foundation for your upcoming negotiation. If not, set some KPI-related goals to achieve before your next important conversation. If you’re really struggling, Crystal recommends talking to family, friends, and other colleagues. Oftentimes they can see strengths we don’t see or remind us of accomplishments that we’ve forgotten or downplayed.
Nevertheless, keeping a running list of your strongest skills and contributions can help recognize and build that sense of internal value.
Expanding Your Perspective of Value
While inherent value is critical to confidence in negotiations, it’s equally important to consider how your organization quantifies value as well. While Crystal is sure to emphasize that salary is not an objective measure of your worth, it can say a lot about how much your company values you as an employee.
“That’s a good place to ask: are they valuing you in the same way that you feel you should be valued?” she shared. “You want to have some alignment in those values because if you are not aligned, that’s where people start feeling unhappy.”
This unhappiness has the potential to bleed into other areas of your work, impacting performance, which will certainly impact the success of your salary and career negotiations.
Beyond value alignment, Crystal encourages her clients to expand their perspective of the value they are receiving from their company.
While salary is important, there are other types of value to keep in mind during negotiations, including health benefits, bonus structure, long-term stock incentives, flexible work arrangements and more. She advises workers to identify their top three priorities, as it’s unlikely to see gain or improvement in every area.
Get Comfortable Asking
Even after identifying and embracing your unique value, making the ask can still be intimidating. Crystal refers to this action as simple, but not easy. Based on her experience, it usually comes down to believing that you are actually worthy of what you are asking for. This is a great time to lean on the feedback you received from your friends and/or colleagues or refer to the brag list you started keeping of all of your accomplishments. Remember, these lists are meant to serve as a self-reminder of our strengths and qualifications.
From there, Crystal recommends practice. Not only should be practice making the ask, but we should also make more time for talking about our accomplishments, even if it’s only among friends and family.
“When you are valuing yourself in the way you want to be valued and celebrating the things you’ve done, it allows other people to celebrate and share with you,” Crystal said. “I think that is the biggest thing holding people back from asking.”
Follow Crystal Ware on LinkedIn. To listen to the full episode, click here.