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Chapter 28 — Negotiating for Yourself, and for Your People
The economist Linda Babcock noticed something she could not un-see. Studying negotiation and careers, she and her colleagues documented a strange asymmetry: people who advocate skillfully, even ferociously, on behalf of others often go quiet when the person who needs advocating for is themselves. The pattern was especially stark by gender — men, the research found, ask for what they want roughly twice as often as women and initiate negotiations about four times as often — and the cost compounds cruelly. A person who simply fails to negotiate their starting salary can begin some four thousand dollars behind, a gap that raises calculated as percentages never close, so that over a career the failure to have one early conversation can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The asymmetry at the heart of that finding — that we negotiate better for others than for ourselves — is the key to this chapter, because it points to both the problem and its solution. This chapter is about the two negotiations that feel least like "negotiation" and trip up even skilled people: advocating for yourself, and turning the same skills around to lead and negotiate with your own team.
Why advocating for yourself is so hard
When the stakes are yours, everything that helps you stay clear with a client deserts you. The fear of rejection is sharper because the rejection is personal. The worry about seeming greedy or damaging the relationship looms larger because you have to keep living in it. And the emotional charge spikes precisely when you most need composure — it is very hard to "go to the balcony" about your own worth. You become the cornered, loss-averse, threat-responsive person this book has spent chapters teaching you to handle in others, except now there's no cool outside negotiator in the room. There's just you, flinching.
The fix follows directly from the diagnosis: if you negotiate better for others, then become your own agent. Represent yourself the way you would fight for a friend, a client, or your own child — people for whom you'd never accept the first lowball offer without a word. Reframe the ask not as grubbing for yourself but as advocacy for those you're responsible to: your family, your future self, the team whose budget your raise signals. This isn't a mind-trick; the research suggests it genuinely improves performance, because it routes around the specific inhibition that fires only when the beneficiary is me.
The mechanics are the book's mechanics, recalibrated. Anchor on objective criteria — market data is your friend, and "here's what this role pays in this market" is far stronger than "I'd like more" (Chapters 20, 25). Negotiate the whole package, not just the headline number — scope, title, flexibility, timing, development — because there is almost always more to trade than salary (Chapter 3). Use calibrated questions instead of demands: "How did you arrive at this figure?" and "What flexibility is there on the start date or the review timeline?" (Chapter 15). Lean on your BATNA — a competing offer is the truest source of leverage you'll have (Chapter 4). And time the ask for after they've decided they want you, when your value is highest and their switching cost is real. Throughout, remember you'll work with these people: hold your line, and hold it warmly (Chapter 16).
An honest complication
It would be dishonest to tell you that the gap is purely a confidence problem women and under-askers could fix by simply asking more. The same research program found a harder truth: women who do negotiate assertively often face a social penalty that men doing the identical thing don't — they're judged as less likable, more difficult, and it can cost them. The advice to "just ask" is therefore incomplete and a little unfair, because the playing field isn't level. The practical implications are real but partial: framing an ask with a clear, communal rationale ("this matters for keeping the team whole") can soften the backlash, and a relationship-first approach helps. But the deeper fix is organizational — transparent pay bands, structured offers, evaluators trained on the bias — not something an individual can fully solve by being braver. Name the reality honestly; don't pretend the gap is only in the asker's head.
The other direction: negotiating with your own people
Flip the role. As a manager or leader, you negotiate constantly — over workloads, priorities, performance, expectations, scope — and these negotiations have two features that change the game. The relationship is ongoing and unavoidable, and the power is asymmetric in your favor. Both push in the same direction: tactical empathy matters more here, not less. The temptation of positional power is to stop negotiating and start dictating, but a manager who "wins" against their team — who pulls rank, who manipulates, who treats alignment as compliance — loses the thing that actually produces results, which is people who are genuinely committed rather than merely obedient (the commitment-versus-compliance distinction from Chapter 22).
Two principles govern it. First, you owe your people the truth — the "truthful-answer duty." You can decline to share what you can't share, but you must not manipulate the people who depend on you and trust your word; the influence techniques in this book are for moving counterparts toward fair agreements, not for handling your own team like marks. Second, your aim is to align, not to defeat. Use the skills — labels, calibrated questions, summaries — to understand what your people actually need and to bring their goals and the organization's into the same line, so they leave the conversation feeling understood and bought-in rather than steamrolled. The skills are identical; the purpose is different, and the difference is the whole point.
Self-advocacy and leadership are different arts built from the same toolkit, joined by one through-line: in both, the relationship outlives any single deal, so you negotiate for the long game. Sometimes, though, the person across the table isn't a partner or a teammate at all, but a genuinely difficult actor — or a whole roomful of competing ones.
Try this. Before your next ask-for-yourself, write the case as if you were presenting it on behalf of someone you'd fight for — "My client deserves this because…" — and then deliver that case. You'll advocate more clearly for "them" than you ever would for "you," which is exactly the point.
Sources & notes
The self-advocacy gap, the asking/initiation differences, and the starting-salary cost are from Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (2003); the ~$4,000 starting disadvantage and the figures that men ask about twice as often and initiate roughly four times as often are reported there. The backlash effect — that women who negotiate assertively can face social penalties — is from Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai, "Social Incentives for Gender Differences in the Propensity to Initiate Negotiations" (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2007). The "become your own agent" reframe builds on findings that people negotiate more assertively on others' behalf. Commitment-versus-compliance connects to Chapter 22; the truthful-answer duty is this book's standing ethical principle.