Employer/employee negotiations: a new way to overcome unpleasantness
Jennekin Dicks, past architect and owner of Management in Action
Negotiations tend to require compromise and some form of sacrifice by one or more of the participating parties, to arrive at an acceptable outcome. But I perceive a flaw in this logic because if we aim to negotiate, we are in fact aiming for a middle ground where none of us are really getting what we want.
What if we could change this? And what if the solution didn’t sit in what we can ultimately achieve, but in assessing what we want?
I left my architectural career over a decade ago, because it suddenly dawned on me that a brilliantly productive, creative and impactful ‘middle ground’ exists – one that could serve all of us well in our work, yet we tend to be resistant to it, or not even know that it’s there.
I needed to know why there is a reluctance to occupy this middle ground, and to figure out a way to help people clearly see the opportunities afforded by this space.
What’s the typical framework for employer/employee negotiations?
This is a deep, systemic topic – one that took me years of observation and learning to even start to come to grips with – but here’s what I’ve discovered: to measure our own success in our work (and thereby define what we want), we rely on three core drivers: our identity, our reward and our legacy.
Consider then a performance review with an employee who has built up the following detail around these core drivers:
Their identity sits in their career trajectory in relation to their peers.
Their reward is tied to personal financial and job title outcomes.
They hope to have a legacy that will be impressive to others.
For this person to achieve ideal outcomes in the performance review, they may need an offer of a better job title (identity), a salary increase (reward) and confirmation that they will be doing important work to raise their status (legacy). That is an awfully one-sided set of requirements, yet they are all entirely necessary for this employee’s sense of security. Anything outside of this outcome may cause them to believe they’re jeopardising their own success.
The difficulty arises of course when there is no overlap between this individual’s needs and the business’ strategic needs in the performance review conversation, because there is no positive common ground for the two parties to meet upon. Consequently, it’s a strained negotiation process, not to mention a less than optimal outcome for both parties.
Of course, it’s pretty easy to assume that the main problem here is the personality and mindset of the employee and yes, that is possible. Yet my experience has been that this self-focus is something that a business can switch on and amplify among its employees, to the point where it becomes a necessary survival mechanism for them.
For instance, if a business openly celebrates the achievements of senior positions only, anyone who is not yet in a senior position – but who still needs to see themselves as worthy (i.e. the identity driver) – will aspire to a more elevated title, whether they will enjoy or excel in that role or not.
Or in a business heavily focused on financial growth goals as the ultimate measure of success, financial reward can easily become the primary reward language for the employees in that business. People then operate under the assumption that it simply doesn’t ‘pay’ to invest themselves in a more balanced set of rewards. Where the business might have a practical need for its people to engage fully in, say, technical learning or leadership development, many might engage in the conversation initially and make some promises, but long term engagement and therefore real change in these areas is less likely.
What’s my new alternative approach?
My suggestion is therefore that as business leaders, we need to understand the messaging we create in the context of our organisations. If we knew how to reset this in a meaningful way, we could give people the opportunity to build mutually beneficial detail around their own success drivers. Then, a highly dynamic common space materialises, which people are naturally drawn into.
Let’s imagine our employee in a performance review again, but this time with the following detail around their personal success drivers:
Their identity sits in being a contributor to a meaningful external impact through their work.
Their reward sits across a balanced array of outcomes, including financial reward, impact, learning, problem-solving and camaraderie.
Their preferred legacy sits in how they support others through their own leadership. (As Simon Sinek says, leadership is not about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those in your charge.)
This paints a picture of someone who wants to be in a space where they are serving more than their own gain and doing this alongside others. This framework allows both parties to move away from a strained negotiation process where they had occupied opposing ends, to create a positive planning session in a shared, preferred space.
Yes, a big part of this relies upon the willingness of the employee to give to something beyond themselves. However, if thousands of meaningful interactions in all my clients’ businesses have taught me anything, it is that people’s heart and willingness is not the main barrier. (Rutger Bregman wrote a brilliant book on this if you’re interested – called Humankind: A Hopeful History.)
Ultimately we need to recognise the cues a business creates for its people around the concepts of identity, reward and legacy. We need to establish a framework where these meaningful cues are valued, so that people naturally seek to ‘make it’ in the business in a way that optimises good interactions and stronger group outcomes.
How can we do this? As I said before, it’s a big topic. I would however like to leave you with some key action areas to consider:
Build identity in service, not glory. Develop and embed across the whole business a broad range of strategic focus areas, ideally around external impact and service outcomes, not simply inwardly focused on the growth and sustainability of the business.
Build reward in impact, not gain. Broaden the focus on what is celebrated and elevated. As the author Mary Simonsen had said, “Determination, effort, and practice are rewarded with success.” Is it though? Ask yourself if all the people around you who show determination, effort and practice in their work are actually celebrated for their successful impact on others? If not, address this. Consider what creates positive impact both inside and outside the business, and pay as much attention to these factors as you would to someone’s contribution to the business’ financial success.
Build legacy in community, not status. We need connection more than we need status. In reality, status isolates us in separated groups, creating barriers in interaction and ultimately making our work more difficult. We therefore need to reshape hierarchy in a way that leaves healthy responsibility and accountability structures intact, but that also allows people to connect horizontally in their function and communicate properly, wherever it is needed. This requires a flattened circular human resources model – where we consider how people are dynamically grouped and connected into key conversations – rather than isolation of information strictly related to status levels.
We’re only really scratching the surface here, but the good news is that these things are not alien to us – they sit in our natural preferences for connected, meaningful success. And they certainly are achievable, as I have seen often enough in our industry. We only need to properly bother to look for that common space to interact effectively.
Jennekin Dicks is a past architect and owner of Management in Action – a consultancy business which has focused on supporting businesses in the type of internal development which both engages their people and manages excellence. With a particular passion for internal systems and processes that respond to people, practice and industry needs, Jennekin has made it her business to help business find valuable solutions for topics we know we need to give attention to, but are often too busy to investigate in detail and resolve in its entirety.
Contact Jennekin via email jennekin@miaction.com.au or phone 0414 914 239 or visit www.miaction.com.au