If you want to earn more money, you’ll need to get a promotion.
This is a 10-part series of “Nuggets” to help lay out a path to a better, higher-paid, job that is better fitted to your competencies. But you’ll notice, you’ll have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
MASTER THE ART OF NEGOTIATING
It is not up to other people to like and facilitate your ideas. It is up to you to convince them to climb aboard.
On this point, model yourself after your executives. Not one of them is incompetent at the art of selling their ideas. To get to where they did, they had to provide a flow of valuable ideas, certainly, but more importantly, they had to convince their fellow executives to relinquish funds and other resources to accommodate their ideas.
Money and resources in a company is all part of a zero-sum package. If you come along with a “great idea”, and “innovation”, and need financing and resources, it has to come from another player’s budgets. You will have to convince others, especially your boss or higher ups like the executives, that your idea is more important and valuable than someone else’s. This will test your skills of selling and especially negotiations.
I have heard many people say they do not want to learn to sell or negotiate, as if it was some ugly disease. If you are one of them, then you have dead-ended your career. To climb the ranks, to make more money, you really do have to learn the art of selling and negotiating. For clarify an important point about these arts, this is not the same as manipulating people. Like you, I despise manipulators.
This is the art of creating win-win scenarios. It’s up to you to do your homework to ensure you are picking the very best ideas that make the very best contribution to your company and then to convince others that you do have the best idea, or an idea among the best, and that it deserves to be financed and championed for implementation.
