Sally Soprano

After I read the roleplay, I felt like this time was going to be an easy negotiation for me because I thought I would have more bargaining power to choose which company I wanted to go. However, it was not easy as I thought at all, which I will mention all the difficulties that I met during the negotiation later in this journal.

During the preparation stage, I found out that both Altitude and Boniface had the same reputations, benefits, and backgrounds. Therefore, this narrowed down my interests to two points. First, the enough salary to live in California with my family and able to raise two kids in a pleasant environment. Second, the amount of workload and working hours, which had to less than 2,200 hours per year. I set my reservation numbers at $126,000 by calculating from the child care expenses for two kids and the living expenses in California. From what I searched on the Google, it showed that the average of the child care expense for a kid was $12,000 per year and the living expenses was approximate $75,000 per year. Typically, people would spend around 79% of their salary for the costs. Therefore, $126,000 is the minimum salary (including benefits and bonus) that I should get to be able to survive in California. My target would be $150,000 by calculating from what I would earn this year from the firm ($180k+$45k=$225k) and cut off only 30%. My first number was $170,000 by using all the expenses that I would be needed in California. Also, I thought this time I could say out the first number a little bit high to create the value for myself, as an employee. Personally, I felt that if the employee requested the salary cheaper than the average, it would degrade your value.

In this negotiation, Al emailed me first on Thursday. I was impressed by her fast action to contact me. However, she asked me to confirm whether I would be interested in the position in her first email, even before I knew any detail and condition of the job! So, I thought that’s a bit too rush and made me feel that she must desperately need me for this job. That’s why she wanted me to confirm for this position, so, I couldn’t change my mind later. I replied her and mainly asked her about the salary, benefits and other information about the job. Next email, she was very considerate about my kids. However, she didn’t answer about my pay. So, it seemed to me that she tried to avoid answering this question. On the next email, I had to list out all of my questions, from number 1 to 5, so she would have to answer them. Then, she gave me the base salary at $85,000, which was surprisingly low. I didn’t really know how could she came up with that number, so I made a counteroffer at $170,000 with the explanation on how I calculated it.

On the other hand, I had to be the one who emailed Bo first because I didn’t think that I could hold Al any longer. That’s a horrible impression for me. However, what I liked about Bo, which was significant enough to change my attitude toward Bo. She was very considerate about my babies. The way she answered her email was well structured. I could get more information than what I asked, and I thought that it’s very efficient. In her second email, I already knew all of the benefits, the base salary and the shares that I would get, while it would take Al on her third email to say the base salary (not even include all of the benefits and shares). At that time, I had a little negative impression with Al of her slowly offer; I thought that might have to deal with the effect of email negotiation that can lead to misunderstanding between parties (see Rapport in legal negotiation Pg. 228-229). I already 80% sure that I would accept Bo’s offer, but it just the matter of how much that I would get. However, I still have a hope on the 20%, so I used principled negotiation with my negotiation (see Getting to Yes Pg. 11) to separate the negative feeling on Al and the problems that we were negotiating.