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 The 50 Million Dollar Mistake
Published in TrainingMag.com,
August 11, 2008.
LEADERSHIP
AND THE SEXES: USING GENDER SCIENCE TO CREATE SUCCESS IN BUSINESS - Michael
Gurian with Barbara Annis. Jossey-Bass, $27.95 (272p) ISBN
978-0-7879-9703-8. To learn more about the book click
here.
The title of this article grows from an actual case. A group of women
and men went into a negotiation for a $50 million dollar deal. After a
day of presentations and negotiation, two men came out of the meetings
high-fiving each other and saying, "We did it! This is a lock." They
felt that their negotiating partners on the other side of the table had
understood all the data they presented, and were ready to sign the deal.
The female partner said, "Not so fast." She brought up to her two
colleagues a number of signals she had read on the faces, especially of
two CFOs across the table. They needed more time, more listening, more
communication, she felt. She said, "I don't think this deal is a lock
at all. I think we need another meeting." Her two male colleagues did
not believe her. They outranked her, and they went to celebrate. The
deal did not close, for reasons the female partner had understood. $50
million dollars were lost to the company whose leadership team did not
fully understand and embrace the assets of women and men in the art of
negotiation.
A powerful new asset is growing in use among corporations and
businesses—neuroscience. Everyday we are learning more about how the
human brain accomplishes success (and when and why it fails). Within
the new field of neuro-business, one of the most successful areas is
gender science. Using PET, MRI and SPECT scans of the brain,
neuro-biologists have found more than 100 structural differences
between the brains of women and men. IBM, Deloitte & Touche,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, and many others, have generated significant
financial and human capital success from their gender awareness
programs.
Here are some of the brain and gender differences they’ve understood
and utilized to improve negotiations. They realized quite clearly these
differences don’t create one superior negotiator and another inferior
one. Rather, understanding both male and female neuro-biology helps
across the board—and can make a company a lot of money!
Women's brains pick up more sensorial cues than men’s brains, so women
tend to create more emotion-perceptions (a reason negotiations with
women leaders can take longer…there are more internal signals to
process in the woman). Men's amygdalas (a part of the limbic system)
send fewer signals to less complex verbal centers and more to spatial
or calculative centers (a reason men are often data driven and not as
emotion and word-centered in negotiations). The facial recognition
activity in women's temporal lobes are more revved up than in men when
they are in stress situations, such as negotiations, thus women will
often tend to pick up more facial cues regarding what others are
feeling and thinking). Men tend to carry more territoriality and
aggression responses in their amygdalic functioning than women. They
often go for the jugular more quickly th an women, and push more
aggressively for shoot-the-moon outcomes. For women, negotiations are
more often about relationship than men realize. There is so much
emotive and relational content moving through the female brain that men
risk losing a woman’s respect if they don’t understand how she is
operating during a negotiation.
Getting
Gender Smart
Gender intelligence, like any other kind of intelligence, is important
to negotiation. Companies that incorporate gender intelligence training
often finalize their training and professional development by looking
toward these gender-balancing leadership tools.
1. They make sure to put together a team of negotiators that includes
both women and men.
2. They include gender into the discussion of who the lead negotiators
will be, depending on who will be sitting across the table.
3. They include gender assessments of people they are negotiating with
(this is not stereotyping, but a process of understanding what makes
the other man or woman tick).
4. They use their training and gender intelligence to read gender
signals clearly during any negotiation, having gained the same sort of
knowledge and skill a jury consultant has.
5. They make sure to utilize both male and female talents in
debriefings after negotiation meetings.
Both women and men should learn from the other, and both women and men
should be valued in a room. You saw this need to learn from each other
played out in the "$50 million mistake story." Men and women can
"become like the other" in the small ways that matter, but success best
happens when we remain, at our core, naturally and authentically who we
are, women and men.
Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis are the authors of "Leadership
and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business,"
published by Jossey-Bass/John Wiley, September 2008. For more
information, visit www.genderleadership.com.
All copyrights are held by the original writer/owner of the article.
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