You might say that this book came about as a result of a negotiation. Several years ago a group of editors informed me that my book Everyday Negotiation would go out of print unless I revised it. I remember thinking this seemed not so much like a reality but like a bluff—a standard ploy in negotiation. But it got me thinking about what I wanted to write now, ten years later, in a book on negotiation and gender. When Judith Williams and I wrote The Shadow Negotiation in 2000 and then revised it for Everyday Negotiation in 2003, we were responding to dominant themes in the popular and scholarly fields about the negotiation process and how women fare in it.

The dominant discourse at the time was that women negotiate differently from men, and that compared to men, they come out deficient. In our interviews for those books, we set out to dig deeper and find out more about women's actual experiences when they negotiate. In so doing, we identified two nested challenges that women (and men) face: to be effective advocates for themselves at the same time that they try to establish collaboration and connection with other parties. By exploring these challenges—we called them the hidden agendas of bargaining—as well as how successful women (and then men) dealt with them, we identified what we called the shadow negotiation. The idea was that in our efforts to tell people how to get to yes and make good deals, we had not paid enough atten­tion to the hidden challenges parties face to get themselves into a good position to negotiate and establish a good working relationship with the other person. Although The Shadow Negotiation began with a study of women, it was clear that what we described had implications for everybody who negotiates. Indeed, when the book was named by the Harvard Business Review as one of the ten best books of 2000, its general application to all negotiators was identified as one of its major strengths. We think this is true for Negotiating at Work as well.

Despite the initial overture from the editors, I knew I wasn't interested in revising Everyday Negotiation, for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that Everyday Negotiation was already a revision; going back to it was like going back a decade in my own thinking and revising the book at its margins. I had no energy for that. What I wanted was to integrate the work I'd been doing on gender, leadership, and change into a practical book on negotiation for all leaders, but especially women. Trouble was, I didn't know how to do it.

Over the past fifteen years while I was the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership at Simmons College School of Management and after retirement, I've been involved in both leading and participating in Women's Leadership Development Programs (WLPs). In them, I always teach a negotiation module that asks participants to focus on issues they want to negotiate at work. This is a departure from the negotiations we considered in Everyday Negotiation, where we covered a wide spectrum of bargaining situations. Those included the many places in which people negotiate: buying cars, dealing with office space, rallying community boards, convincing loan officers to lend, engaging faculty colleagues, seeking refunds on travel, and other such topics.

What distinguished the negotiation topics in the WLPs were that the women were negotiating for themselves—as principals, not as agents. At first, I used the frameworks from the Shadow Negotiation in these programs, programs that I ran in corporations and in nongovernmental organizations in the United States and abroad. Over time, as I listened to the stories of these participants, I began to see new facets of negotiation that I hadn't noticed before. I started to appreciate nuances in how these women (and some men) handled tricky situations in their organizations. Over time, I began to capture their stories. These stories became the data for this book.

Several examples are especially salient for understanding the trajectory of this book and how it differs from the previous ones. Leading Women Executives, a Chicago-based program for senior-level women from different companies who attend a multisession program, has been an important site of learning for me. As academic advisor as well as an instructor, I develop a strong working relationship with the participants. That relationship gives us multiple occasions to discuss their negotiation experiences. At the conclusion of one of the programs, a graduate saying good-bye to me whispered in my ear that I had changed her life. Wow, I thought. What is that story? It is a fascinating one—and it appears in this book. That led me to become more deliberate about capturing the stories about how these women and others used the negotiation module to get something they previously thought was not achievable.

The second incident occurred in another program where we taped women negotiating their own everyday negotiation, and we did the role play twice. The first time was after the negotiation module; the second time was after colleagues Robin Ely and Carole Levy did a session on leading with purpose. Two insights came from that experience: first, that one has to create occasions to negotiate at work—they are not always obvious—and, second, that focusing on the link between what is good for you and for your organization seems to work better at engaging the other party. We discovered this in the videos of the role play, as well as in the results the women reported. This experience led me to consider the various ways that people situate their negotiations in the context of ongoing relationships. It also helped me see that those who can connect their interests to their organizations are empowered to advocate more forcefully for what they want.

A third experience comes from a story that a very senior leader told in one of the programs. She wanted to negotiate a complicated office arrangement with her CEO. They had a good working relationship, but she expected this to be a difficult negotiation. In her story, she described how she let him know of her accomplishments to remind him of her value. But she also let him know of the other choices she had—in a way that was appreciative and nonconfrontational. Although we'd written about making one's value visible in Everyday Negotiation, this story made me look deeper into the ways that experienced executives do so. Where we had talked about raising the costs of the status quo in the earlier book, I was never confident about how one could do that and not raise the other party's ire. I had dropped it from my teaching. But from this story, I could see how a seasoned executive could do this smoothly, and that led me to collect other stories that led to developing the ideas about an “iron fist in a velvet glove.”

A fourth experience led me to consider the limits of some of the strategies in the earlier books. This was particularly true in the context of “moves and turns.” The idea behind “moves” is that other negotiators can say things that can make you feel defensive. “Turns” are actions that enable you to respond. Moves and turns is something that people associate with the earlier books. I've written more about them, and the papers and chapter have been reproduced in a number of publications. (We consider moves and turns in chapter 6 in this book.) However, in my experiences, especially in Africa and Asia but also Europe, I came to see the limits of some of the turns one might recommend. I remember vividly being called out by a dean at a university in East Africa who said to me, “I could never use that turn.” So in this book, we are both more detailed in describing moves and turns and more circumspect in what we recommend.

Negotiating at Work is informed in another way from my teaching with executives. Over the past decade, and even before that, I've been involved in two different types of projects that touch on gender and change. The first was a series of research and intervention projects that focused on understanding the ways in which an organization's policies and practices that appeared gender neutral could have unintended but differential impacts on different groups of men and women. We later came to call these types of policies and practices second-generation gender bias. With funding from the Ford Foundation and under the banner of the Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College School of Management, I worked with a group of colleagues, including Lotte Bailyn, Robin Ely, Joyce Fletcher, Deborah Merrill-Sands, Debra Meyerson, and Rhona Rapoport, to uncover these types of practices within organizations. Then in collaboration with organizations, among them the Body Shop, and several international nongovernmental organizations, we tried to identify some small wins. We thought of these as experiments, pilot projects: many of them had to do with expectations about time at work, as well as how unexamined role requirements contributed to gender inequities in these organizations.

The second project is tied more directly to my teaching. I have incorporated this perspective—identifying workplace policies and practices that may have unintended consequences for women leaders—into many of the WLPs that I lead. We call the session strategizing leadership dilemmas. In it, cohorts from the same organization, a company or a division, spend a session identifying these second-generation biases, develop some practical ideas about potential small wins, and then craft strategies to make the small wins a reality. In truth, some succeed more than others. But what I have found in hearing the stories is that when cohorts have been successful in getting small wins started, many started with an individual negotiating some change in her own working conditions or status. These negotiation experiences led her to take more leadership in spreading the word about her situation or directly initiating other changes. We report some of these small wins throughout the book and suggest in chapter 8 ways that they may have broader impact.

Negotiating at Work has been a few years in the writing but many more years in the evolution of its ideas. Some I have already mentioned, such as my colleagues on the Ford Foundation–funded research projects where together we learned about ways to think and talk about gender in organizational contexts. Kathleen McGinn and I brought that perspective to negotiations first at a conference at the Kennedy School of Government in 2008 and then in a paper in 2009. When I turned to writing chapter 6 in this book, I was happy to rediscover that Kathleen and I had developed a coding sheet for moves and turns that proved very helpful to the writing. But it was really in the context of the WLPs that the ideas for this book came together.

Cheryl Francis, Sheila Penrose, and Diane Sakach of the Corporate Leadership Center in Chicago run an amazing program for women leaders, Leading Women Executives, that I have been associated with since 2009. Collaborating with them has given me an incomparable platform to develop the ideas set out in this book. Their commitment to advancing women leaders sets a culture for learning and experimentation that one finds only rarely in a leadership program. It was Debra Meyerson, my good colleague, who initially brought me into that program, and I am always grateful to her for what we've learned together over the years. I've been able to involve great colleagues in this program as well—Debra Noumair, Robin Ely, Stacy Blake-Beard, Sue Ashford, and Melissa Thomas-Hunt—and together we've learned about creating WLPs that make a difference in women's lives and especially in the organizations in which they work.

When the leaders at Leading Women Executives wanted to increase their leverage with organizations, their first step was to survey the literature on gender and leadership and turn this study into a usable model for organizations. That is when Jessica Porter joined the project. She had already been working with us on other WLPs, but now she would become our team's expert on gender and leadership. It became clear to me that her knowledge and expertise would enhance this book considerably. We agreed that as junior author, she would take responsibility for bringing her knowledge about gender and negotiation (and later more generally negotiation) into creating extensive notes that would make the book a valued resource to people who want to use the book in classrooms and for research. I have also worked with Herminia Ibarra, Carole Levy, Amy Anuk, Vera Vitels, and Kristin Normandin in other WLPs, and each has contributed to the ways I teach and do this work. Debra Noumair at Columbia Teachers College has been my partner in crime in developing our version of WLPs. She also brought me into her Executive Masters Program in Change Leadership, where I've tested these ideas with both men and women. Lotte Bailyn has been my mentor for more years than I choose to remember, and it is at our breakfasts that I get feedback on my ideas. So too in my regular meals with Jean Bartunek, Robin Ely, Joyce Fletcher, Kathy Kram, Hannah Bowles, Kathleen McGinn, and Karen Golden-Biddle. I leave each of these sessions nourished and ready to go back to work with a way out of the puzzles I present to them. Linda Putnam has been a wonderful partner and coauthor in developing many of the ideas about interdependence that now figure so prominently in this book. It was Carol Frohlinger in our teaching collaboration who came up with the idea of n-negotiation as differentiated from formal deal making, which is the way we describe negotiating at work. Mike Wheeler, Larry Susskind, Robert Mnookin, Jim Sebenius, and Bill Ury of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School have always cheered my work, even though it is quite different from theirs.

Kathe Sweeney, formerly of Jossey-Bass, has been an editor and friend over the course of three books. For this one, she had to endure my continual excuses for missed deadlines. Rob Brandt then stepped aboard and has kept a steady hand on the helm, even when the seas sometimes get a bit rough. Christine Moore amazed us with her insightful editing of the book.

How can I express enough gratitude to Tim Murphy, our stalwart editor of this book? First, he had to figure out how to work with a person, me, who was clearly not writing the book, and then had to ramp up when things speeded up. His way with words—well, you can see.

I look to my children, Sam and Elizabeth, and their spouses, Karin and Greg, to learn how the younger generation deals with workplace negotiations. They should not be surprised to recognize some of their stories, well disguised, in this book. Their children, Jacob, Alexandra, Isaac, and Eli, are my diversions. My husband, Jonathan, is the patient listener and sounding board. Our dinner conversations are peppered with negotiation stories, where we continually find connections between my stories and what he hears in his work, a broader reality test for the ideas. He has been as always a great support even though nonfiction is not his favorite genre.

Finally, two notes about pronouns in the text. Because this is a book about—among other things—hidden gender bias, we've struggled with that famous flaw in the English language: what to do with the generic third-person singular. For obvious reasons, we can't simply accept the masculine “he” or “him.” To use “they” or “their” as a singular justifiably erodes credibility with some readers. Such tricks as “he/she” or “s/he” come off as cheap gimmicks, and repetition of “he or she” and “him and her” is plain clunky. So our solution is to keep the singular pronoun and alternate between the genders—and may no man or woman feel excluded in the bargain. In sections about teaching or seminars, you'll sometimes see the first-person singular. That's me, Deborah Kolb. Plural first-person pronouns refer to me and Jessica Porter, and sometimes my other teaching colleagues.

A number of people influenced and supported me while writing this book. I thank all of the women I've met at Women's Leadership Development Programs who have shared their stories and experiences, as well as the friends and acquaintances who discussed their own negotiations with me. I'm grateful to Debra Noumair, Kathleen McGinn, and of course Deborah Kolb for helping me push my thinking and expand my areas of expertise. My friend Bob tirelessly brainstormed book title ideas, as did my patient spouse and true partner, Matthew. My teenage children, Emma and Jackson, have provided me with the ongoing opportunity to practice negotiating with worthy counterparts. My parents, Tom and Judy, raised me in a dual-career family where work was a common topic of conversation. It was a great foundation for understanding the importance of negotiating for oneself at work, particularly for women.