Category: Jobs and professional relationships

  • Five responses to “equity concerns” in job negotiations

    You’re lucky enough to receive a job offer. But it doesn’t meet your expectations, so you muster the courage to counter. And then you get the response that every applicant dreads—the one that immediately diffuses your counter with ‘equity concerns.’ In other words, a response indicating that the employer can’t meet your demands because they…

  • Curtailing the never-ending meeting: The deadline effect

    Meetings: the great vortex that swallows most of our organizational lives. Is there anything – anything at all – we can do to make them negotiable? Luckily there are several tactics available. But here let me focus on a particularly helpful nugget of wisdom from the negotiation literature: the deadline effect. The deadline effect in…

  • Compromise: The bane of your next team presentation

    I have often contended that—contrary to popular wisdom—compromise is bad. The fundamental problem? Compromise takes two people’s desires and cuts them in half, leaving nobody particularly happy. Sure, it’s better than an impasse (sometimes). But it’s often worse than a variety of more creative solutions. Nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the creation…