Gender Training: The $50 Million Dollar Mistake
August 11, 2008
By Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis
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 than 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.gendertrainings.com.
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