Gerta’s former MIT professor breaks down salary negotiations
Gerta learned negotiations from him 15 years ago. This week, he’s on our podcast!
One of Gerta’s first negotiation classes was a graduate course she took at MIT more than 15 years ago while she herself was a college student. The professor who taught the popular “Power & Negotiations” course was Ofer Sharone, and this week we had the privilege of interviewing him on the Gentle Power Podcast (gentlepowerpodcast.com).
Professor Sharone’s path to teaching negotiations took many turns throughout his career. He earned his JD at Harvard Law School, spent his early working years negotiating $100M+ finance deals in Japan, then left law to earn a PhD in sociology and to research how people navigate the job search and workplace. MIT brought him in to teach negotiations on the strength of his legal background, and today he teaches negotiations at University of Massachusetts Amherst’s School of Public Policy.
It was an honor to bring on one of Gerta’s earliest teachers and influences on the work we do today. Listen to the full episode here (YouTube | Spotify | Apple), and below are key takeaways from our convo:
1. True power doesn’t come from aggression
On the last day of one of Professor Sharone’s “Power & Negotiations” classes, a student raised his hand and told Professor Sharone he’d enjoyed the class but felt they’d spent the whole semester on negotiations and crafting deals, but nothing about gathering and utilizing power.
Power, as Professor Sharone puts it, isn’t about enacting force or wearing the other side down. He sees it as getting the outcome you want through strategy, building relationships, and reflecting on the situation in front of you rather than defaulting to the instinct to win at others’ expense.
It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. If you can nudge the person across the negotiating table to work with you in finding collaborative solutions, the more power you accumulate.
This is why we recommend that you never play it cool or hard to get during salary negotiations, even if you have many competing offers. Staying collaborative, professional, and polite always goes a much longer way in thawing the other side’s resistance to making concessions than the aggressive route.
2. Treat the salary conversation as joint problem-solving
Continuing from the previous point, Professor Sharone’s recommended approach is to treat salary negotiations as a “joint problem-solving exercise”. No hardball tactics, no extreme anchor, no haggling-towards-the-middle games. You come in having done some research and thinking about your priorities, enter the negotiation with curiosity and questions to learn about their priorities, and figure out together what they’re willing to pay to hire you.
Remember, you’ll never out-data the company. Employers, from startups to large public companies, buy access to accurate, stat-sig compensation data, while you’ve got Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and anonymous posts from people on Reddit and Blind. Doing some research can still be directionally helpful (Professor Sharone calls this a “signaling function”), but don’t over-rely on it.
You’ve heard us say this many times over, but we believe doing deep market research on salary ranges is largely a waste of time, and it can even backfire if you use it to lead your negotiation strategy (we wrote a case study about all this here).
3. Hearing “non-negotiable” is not the same as hearing “no”
Professor Sharone experienced this first-hand when we was negotiating his role to teach at MIT. He got on the phone with the Dean, was extended a genuinely generous offer, and did what he teaches his students to do: he asked for a few days to think about. The Dean said sure, but then added, “just so you know, Ofer, this is not negotiable.”
Hearing this threw him off at first, but Professor Sharone called a colleague at the school to gather some intel. He learned that the offer he received was indeed generously at the top of the department’s budget, and also discovered that even though the salary line item was fixed, his relocation and research budget was likely more flexible.
Professor Sharone went back to the Dean and didn’t ask for more salary. Instead, he asked to double his research budget and relocation bonus, which the Dean ultimately approved.
When you’re negotiating with a company and they say that something isn’t negotiable, don’t let that stop you from continuing to look for other areas where you can lock in additional value. There are countless more variables that you can play with, such as title, start date, signing bonuses, remote work days, more vacation, which office you’re located in, accelerated vesting, shorter equity cliffs, higher transportation and wellness reimbursements, and more.
There was so much in this episode, this newsletter covers only the first half of our convo with Professor Sharone. We’ll follow up next week with Part 2 of our conversation, where we discussed how companies think about who they’ll actually hire and the future of work in the age of AI.
To listen to the full conversation now, check out here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple
Learn more about Professor Ofer Sharone’s work here: LinkedIn
Warmly,
Gerta & Alex
Founders, YourNegotiations.com
P.S. Are you job searching or have upcoming negotiations?
If you have an offer coming or are mid-process, we’re always happy to help you think through how to approach it. Book a free call here: https://calendly.com/alexhapki/call
P.P.S. Know someone interested in negotiations?
Send them our way and we’ll thank you with $250 for each person who becomes a client. No cap.
A quick intro or an email to alex@yournegotiations.com works.
