Eight Ways to Negotiate on an Equal Footing

Why confidence, technique and the ability to read a room are key – and if walking away was never an option, you shouldn’t even be at the negotiation table.

       By author and businesswoman Elle Lorenzoni

In 1976, three men founded a company that would eventually be worth trillions. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak walked away with forty-five per cent each.

Ronald Wayne, who drafted the partnership agreement himself, took ten per cent, then sold it back twelve days later for $800, wary of the unlimited liability it carried.

That stake would now be worth up to $400 billion.

Wayne understood the paperwork better than anyone in the room; he simply had no distance from his own risk.

I have spent twenty-five years negotiating for other people, drafting and negotiating contracts across a variety of industries and internationally since 2001.

I was never outmatched.

Twice I negotiated for myself: an animated series which I refused at the finish line and which has still never been made.

The other was a feature film script of my own, whose terms I accepted against every instinct, and which cost me eight months, money, and, briefly, my name on my own script.

Between negotiating for other people and negotiating for myself, only one thing changed: whose risk I was protecting.

Once the work, the terms and the consequences were mine, I lost the advantage every good negotiator relies on, distance.

For other people, I had always used a dark side without apology: the willingness to protect someone absolutely, at any cost, for as long as the deal stayed open.

Negotiating for myself, I put it on pause, and didn’t notice until both deals were already going wrong.

That is not a personality quirk, and it isn’t only mine. Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock and Kathleen McGinn found that women secure better terms negotiating for someone else than for themselves, with none for men, a finding men have, for some reason, felt no urgent need to correct (Harvard Kennedy School).

Whatever I call that instinct, it ran on the same asymmetry: available on request for other people, off duty the moment the negotiation became mine.

Women who advocate assertively for themselves meet a social penalty that does not attach to the same behaviour performed on someone else’s behalf, and they know it before they open their mouths.

An equal footing is a position, not a performance. Use that same instinct on your own behalf, unapologetically, whatever you call it.

The person across the table may bring their dark side to take your credit, your fee, or your name off the work entirely. Yours exists only to stop them. In business, a man who uses his dark side is called strategic and savvy. In a woman, it gets shortened to a word starting with B: if someone uses it on you, don’t argue the word.

Always insist on the honorific: Ms. ‘B’. Aim for the win-win. But know, before you sit down, exactly where you can bend and where you categorically cannot. Once you’ve drawn that second line, do not move it because someone raises their voice, or because you want to be liked.

Here is what both deals cost me, so you don’t have to run the experiment yourself. The first six lessons come from the series. The last two come from my feature film script.

1. Renegotiate when the job changes, not when you resent it

I once wanted to become a film and television producer. When the creator of an animated series, a wealthy man with a project in mind hired me to assist, I said yes, hoping it would open a door.

I began as an assistant. I was doing the job of a producer-level: shaping characters, writing the pilot, liaising with a well-known rapper’s lawyer, negotiating with the talent agency. Our agreement never changed. Psychologists call this anchoring: the first figure encountered sets the frame for every subsequent judgment. The creator never mentioned anchoring. He didn’t need to; the number was already working in his favour, for free.

Do this: Ensure good-faith renegotiation terms are in the agreement, and when the scope changes, don’t ask to revisit it: replace it, in writing, within a week. A request invites a discussion. A draft forces a decision.

2. Take the credit, then ask what it is worth

He and I never discussed changing the agreement until the network needed to know my credit. I assumed the work I’d already done made the answer obvious. He acknowledged the work, then refused to give me the credit.

Being seen satisfies something that being paid does not, at least in women.

Do this: If someone admits what you did but still won’t pay for it, you already have your answer. Leave while it’s still cheap.

I stayed. I paid twice for the same information.

3. Know who you are negotiating with, and believe it

There was a reason he could concede the facts and keep his terms: he was a misogynist. It is a remarkably efficient prejudice: no need to review the paperwork once you have already decided who wrote it.

I knew this about him but knowing was never the difficulty; I proceeded as though good work would suspend it. Psychologists call this general version reactive devaluation: a proposal discounted for its source rather than its content.

Do this: Set a limit on how many times you’ll make your case. Past that, stop talking and start building leverage.

4. Build leverage long before you need it

By then, I needed an agreement directly with the network. His own lawyer told him I would have grounds to sue if they proceeded under the original terms. I built that leverage over months, doing the work, not in the room.

Do this: log what you deliver the day you deliver it: evidence, not a diary.

5. Slow down when the deal is nearly done

By then, the series had network buy-in, the rapper was attached as a voiceover artist, and my agreement was one of the last pieces needed. The sunk-cost effect is most persuasive here. At the finish line, exhaustion begins to speak the language of pragmatism, and I came very close to signing.

Do this: before talks begin, set the floor you won’t go below and the date you’ll walk. Check it at the finish line, when you’re least able to hold it.

6. Know the price of walking away before you do it

I didn’t sign. The series was never made, not then, not ever since. My refusal cost me the project for good, and, since my pay, even as an assistant, was contingent on the project being picked up, it cost me payment for the work I’d already done too. That money would have helped; it was never going to be the start of the producing career I actually wanted. Refusing left the question of whether the series would have succeeded unanswered, but settled, once and for all, the terms I was willing to accept.

What a no costs you depends on what else you have. If one client provides a third of your income, hoping to be renewed is the real negotiation you’re having.

Do this: Price the ‘No’. Set a number against what refusing costs, and one against what accepting costs, precedent included. Trust the numbers, not the feelings.

7. Never negotiate from desperation

By 2024, my script of mine sat with a development producer for a year, doing nothing. Then I met someone else being considered for the same role who made it clear she could get the film made. She was aggressive, caustic, manipulative and insulting. I hired her.

Desperation kept every piece of evidence intact and simply relabeled it: aggressive became driven, caustic became honest, manipulative became well connected, insulting became blunt. My instincts hadn’t failed so much as gone unheard.

Do this: Name the three things you’d refuse to do without pressure. Hand the list to someone with nothing at stake and call them before you agree to anything.

8. Distrust the industry story that turns a warning into a credential

The sentence I use to myself is ‘this is simply what Hollywood is like’. Every industry has one: finance has the difficult man who delivers, technology has the brilliant jerk. They persist because they are useful, most of all to whoever has already decided.

Do this: Name the sentence you use to excuse the warning, then ask what would make you drop it. If nothing would, stop calling it a view. You’ve already made the decision.

I always had confidence, technique, and the ability to read a room. None of it made the footing equal. Having other options before I sat down at the table did that, along with knowing in advance what I was owed if everything went wrong.

Negotiating for myself taught me that the distance that makes you formidable for someone else is the first thing you lose negotiating for yourself. Ronald Wayne had the paperwork. I had the psychology. Neither of us called on the colder, more protective side of ourselves when it would have cost us the least. Apple, for its part, seems to be doing fine without either of us.

If walking away was never an option, you shouldn’t even be at the negotiation table.

Elle Lorenzoni is an entrepreneur, writer and commentator focused on gender, power and professional life.

She holds a BA in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, a Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and an LL.M. from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She began her career at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles before developing ventures including Planning Pretty Picnics and The Spoken World, a platform for spoken word and diasporic storytelling.

 

Elle is also Creative Director of NO! Why Women Always Start Like This? (And How To Survive The YES That Comes After), which examines women’s refusal, autonomy and the social and professional consequences of boundary-setting.

ENDS