Did you know that not negotiating you salary can cost you more than $1 million over the course of your career? And that, in many cases, when a team is being onboarded, women usually take the initial salary offered and the men negotiate. Why? Some experts say it’s because women are afraid of hindering their reputations (i.e., being thought of as difficult, negative, aggressive or pushy) or the opportunity being taken away.

In part four of the Power Panel series – the “Power Panel” is a panel of executive women in the retail space who spoke during a session on leadership at the Women in Retail Leadership Summit in Miami last month – I recap the group’s thoughts on the art of negotiating. (Here’s part one of the series, here’s part two, and here’s part three.)

The Power Panel included Miki Racine Berardelli, president, digital commerce and chief marketing officer at Chico’s; Gerri Elliott, director, Whirlpool, Bed Bath & Beyond, Charlotte Russe; Devon Pike, president, North America, Givenchy; and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder and CEO, GLAMSQUAD.

During their session, the Power Panel shared personal experiences around five key leadership qualities that they believe are instrumental to their success. The five leadership qualities discussed were:

  • leaders are expert communicators;
  • leaders deal with failures gracefully;
  • leaders have emotional intelligence;
  • leaders are keen negotiators; and
  • leaders pay it forward.

When it comes to negotiation, “it doesn’t matter if you’re negotiating for your own compensation or for a deal for your company – if you don’t ask, you don’t get,” said Wilson. “It’s a very simple concept, and everyone who knows me knows that I’m a big believer in it.”

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Berardelli said that as a manager of people who come to her asking to negotiate things like their salaries — as well as being someone who has had to negotiate for herself — the best approach is to have “a good understanding of who your peer group is and to ask your manager if you’re being compensated fairly across your peer group.

“I’ve been amazed over the years at how many organizations aren’t properly calibrating peer groups,” Berardelli added. “And they all should be. So it’s fair and wise to ask the question, and it also makes you look pretty darn smart.”

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Negotiations continue to be as important, if not more so, as your career matures, according to Berardelli.

“When you’re about to join an executive team and having conversations with a CEO or a C-level hiring manager, negotiations are expected,” she said. “They’re hiring you for a job where you’re going to be negotiating contracts on their behalf, as well as carrying out and executing their vision and strategy, so negotiating your own terms is an opportunity to position yourself as a very wise and true businessperson.”

Elliott discussed what she learned in a course she took several years ago called the Executive Women’s Leadership Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. (Full disclosure: Elliot is on the advisory board for the program.)

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The first course is a negotiation class with professor Victoria Medvec, an expert negotiator. During the class, which Elliott said changed her professional life, Medvec talked about the five “F’s’ of negotiation. They include the following:

1. Be first. “You want to be first out of the chute whether you’re negotiating a deal, price, real estate or vacation days,” Elliott said. “You should be the first to anchor whatever it is you’re negotiating.”

2. Focus. “Put the focus on the business, not on you” Elliot said. “It’s not about you. It’s not about how long you’ve been in the job or how somebody else got the raise that you didn’t. It’s about the business itself.”

3. Framing. “Frame the conversation around the value that you can provide for the business,” Elliott said. “Again, it’s not about you.”

4. Be flexible. “Always give MESOs (multiple equivalent simultaneous offers),” Elliott said. “So, if it’s a raise, say you’ll take it if you get more vacation days or anything like that. The bottom line is that if you appear to be flexible, the other side will have to be more flexible, too.”

5. Don’t be feeble; be bold. “You’re worth more than you think you’re worth,” Elliott said.

In the fifth and final part of this series next week, I’ll report on the Power Panel’s thoughts on paying it forward.