A few years ago I was at the Cannes Advertising Festival. I had the opportunity to hear Susan Lyne speak. Susan has a new company called BBG, Built By Girls. They start up fund tech companies that have at least one female founder. Before she started BBG Susan was, for years, the CEO of Martha Stewart Inc. One of the guests in the, mostly female, audience asked her to comment on the male/female pay gap.
She told a few anecdotes. The first was that nearly all of the men that she’d hired, before the end of their first year, would usually come to her asking for a raise. Even if the project they were working on was still in progress, the men were all sure that they had, already, overdelivered. Conversely, she also noted that women, many of whom had not only reached their goals but surpassed them, almost never asked for anything. When they did receive raises, regardless of how small, they were grateful. She concluded that the single greatest obstacle to women getting paid more was super simple:
You can’t get what you want if you don’t ask.
As CEO she underlined that it is the company’s job to keep costs as low as possible. No company in their right mind would counter a potential employee’s offer with a higher offer. That goes against the basic principles of business: maximize profit margins by keeping costs low and pricing as high as reasonably possible.
We could debate the ethics of this until the proverbial cows come home, but for the moment let’s think about this in abstract terms. Imagine going to the supermarket and finding your favorite product on sale. Would you go to the cashier and insist on paying the original price for it? Or even offer more? No. Likely you’d stock up on that product while you could. If you can get something great for a lower price – wouldn’t you?
What it ultimately comes down to is that if we’re not the first people to be very clear, on what we’re worth, we can’t expect the other person to raise our own bar. And not just in business, in every aspect of our life. This means that if we’re waiting for our partner, our company, our life, our God to bring us what we want without us asking, we could potentially be waiting for a lifetime.
Where does the fear of asking for what we want come from? Many of us consider ourselves to be people who don’t make excuses. We go after what we want very easily. Yet, when it comes to asking for something, or worse, having to put a value on ourselves, we often run into difficulty. Is it just simply a lack of practice? Are we afraid the other person will say no? Are we afraid they’ll say yes? Do we think we’ll look weak? Or do we think we don’t deserve it and asking will make this blatantly apparent?
Let’s also consider this option: are we waiting for someone to recognize what we want, or what we’re worth, and instinctively bring it to us? Have we been trained in the art of passive aggression? Not specifically asking for what we want keeps us in the role of victim. We abdicate the ownership – and failure – of our desires This is the theoretical difference between childhood & adulthood. Children wait to be fed, adults feed themselves. Do we, as women, just need to grow up?
Let’s take a look at our relationship to asking for what we want. How many times have we wanted to ask and stopped ourselves? The next time we’re in that situation, let’s ask ourselves why? Why are we afraid to ask? Where is the obstacle? What is the worst thing that could potentially happen?
A great exercise that I suggest is to repeat, out loud , what it is that we want in our life. The more comfortable we are with the sound of it, in the real world (and not just in our heads), the more we will our mind will believe that it’s true. The more it’s true, the less willing we’ll be to challenge the thought. The more comfortable we are with that truth, the greater the chance we’ll follow through to make it happen.
Of course, this isn’t a guarantee that things are always going to work out the way we expect them to. While we may not get the yes we’re looking for, if we don’t ask the answer is already a no.
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