Glin Bayley, author of The Negotiation Playbook is a negotiation expert, non-executive board director, speaker, and writer. In this extract, she shares her distinctive approach to improve your negotiation skills and emphasises a transformative mindset: that true success lies not just in what you achieve, but in who you become along the way.
As women, I feel we’re more prone to being labelled than men when it comes to how our behaviour is perceived. Throughout my career, I’ve been a hard worker, always giving myself fully to my work and priding myself on having the business’s best interests at heart. This strong work ethic was instilled in me by my mother, a single parent and a strong Indian woman who taught me to stand on my own two feet financially. Growing up with an absent father who didn’t contribute financially or otherwise to raising my sister and me only reinforced my focus on being self-sufficient.
As an Indian girl raised by an uneducated, non-English-speaking mother who valued hard work and contributing to others, receiving feedback that I was ‘spikey’ packed a punch.
I built a career in finance as a management accountant, and in my early twenties, I was formally trained in negotiation skills. So, when it came to ensuring that the business deals I oversaw made commercial sense, I didn’t hesitate to advocate for maximising value.
While I negotiated externally with retail buyers, most of my negotiations happened internally between teams and across different functions. ‘Spikey’ wasn’t the label I wanted, but as a strong and assertive woman handling numbers and vetoing deals that didn’t stack up, it seemed inevitable. At the time, I didn’t know how to be warm and friendly while still getting the best deal for the business. Under pressure, I was all business, and as a result I’d appear colder and more transactional. Men could be transactional and not be labelled, but that wasn’t true for women.
Our model for negotiation has traditionally been defined by our male counterparts, and yet when women assert power, we’re often labelled bossy, the perfumed assassin, aggressive, or, in my case, spikey. In my formal negotiation training, no-one had considered who I was at my core, and how the context would influence the way I negotiated.
How I learnt to redefine power
Over the last two decades, I’ve learned how women can redefine power in negotiation, and it begins with understanding our intrinsic worth. This allows us to overcome any external perceptions of our value and negotiate from a place of strength. Many women struggle with self-doubt and undervalue themselves in negotiations, but once you know your intrinsic worth is non-negotiable, you realise the only person who can diminish your value is you.
Next is using compassionate power. In contrast to the outdated view of power as dominance, women are uniquely capable of embracing compassionate power—a combination of empathy, emotional intelligence, and assertiveness. Bringing compassion to the table transforms negotiations into more collaborative and value-driven experiences.
Compassionate power shifts the focus from winning at all costs and from control toward influence. It moves us from being in our own heads to understanding the needs and interests of the other party. This helps us uncover what they truly value and allows us to create extrinsic value and mutual benefits, leading to long-term sustainable success.
Compassion is often seen as a weakness in negotiation because the assumption is that if you’re compassionate, you give away too much. Compassion, however, is empathy in action. In a post-pandemic world still troubled by wars and global challenges, it’s women that will change the paradigm of negotiation from a scarcity driven competitive approach to an abundance driven collaborative one. There is a growing need to move from traditional masculine negotiation styles to feminine strengths like collaboration, empathy, and intuition. As more women stop questioning their intrinsic value, they gain the strength to explore the extrinsic value others seek, understand what isn’t being said, and uncover what’s truly needed.
What happens when you embrace compassionate power
Embracing compassionate power also allows us to be our authentic selves. Through my own experience, I’ve learned that I put up walls and became transactional in tough conversations because I had adopted a behavioural model that wasn’t true to myself. Now, I understand that influence is an extension of compassion. The more I focus on understanding the other person, the more powerfully I can exchange value without compromising who I am or my own goals.
Developing my negotiation skills transformed me into the woman I am today. Negotiation skills aren’t just about creating more value—they’re deeper life skills that help you hold your power without fear. By redefining my power in negotiations, I’ve not only become a better negotiator externally but also a better negotiator with myself. Compassion works as powerfully inward as it does outward. I no longer question my inner value; I focus on how, together, we can make more valuable agreements and leave an impact we can be proud of. Stronger, more confident women create more value.
Glin Bayley, author of The Negotiation Playbook (Wiley $34.95), is a negotiation specialist, a non-exec board director, author, and speaker. Glin’s unique approach to negotiation is centred around a powerful belief: It’s not what you do, but who you become in the process, that truly unlocks success. Find out more at www.thevaluenegotiator.com/playbook
