Shaunti Feldhahn · Career Coaching & Development Expert

In graduate school, one of my favorite classes was Harvard Law School’s renowned Negotiations course. The professors – the co-authors of Getting to Yes – demonstrated that THE key to negotiation is to thoroughly understand the other party and theirs interests. Know your audience, get inside their head, understand both their interest and their perceptions – including of you – and you’ll be able to sell yourself and your ideas in a way that the other person wants to agree to them. That is the case whether the negotiation is an across-the-table merger, or a subtle maneuvering for influence …

Did you ever have to enter an unknown culture for your work? Did it make you uneasy? Did you prepare? Did you read up on the geography, language, rituals, and nuances so that you would be successful?

What does this have to do with opposite genders working together? As I noted in my new book, “The Male Factor: The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace,” working with men is very similar to entering a foreign culture. In my years of working as a financial analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, my primary responsibility was investigating a…