Knowing Your Value (19 page)

Carol Smith was the first female ad salesperson for the
Wall Street Journal
at a time when women weren’t doing that job. She says she must have some male gene in her makeup because she’s “always been a very strong negotiator when it comes to salaries.” But she knows plenty of brilliant women who have a hard time being paid their value and who have an equally tough time with rejection.

Smith knows that emotions can handicap women at any age, and at any point in their career. She shares a story of a friend of hers who had recently taken on a great deal of additional work: “She had been doing basically three jobs in the last six months and had asked to be compensated. I knew what that job was worth because I’d had that job. So she was out to lunch with her boss and asked for the raise, and he said
no. And she burst into tears.” Smith points out that her friend wasn’t a young woman, but an experienced executive. “I have known her for twenty years. She is brilliant, a hugely successful woman.

“She felt embarrassed and beaten down by this ... she was going to walk away in tears, you know, and never go back.” Smith told her friend that her boss’s ‘no’ didn’t have to be the end. Smith encouraged her to go back and work out a solution that both she and her employer could accept.

Smith tells me, “It helped me that I came out of sales. When you’re in sales you have to learn to get rejected and constantly go back. When most of my non-sales female colleagues hear ‘no,’ they take it personally, and they think, ‘Oh, I must not deserve this.’ . . . When you’re in sales, you’ve got to ask for that order over and over and over again, and you have to figure out a way to go ask for it a different way and say the same thing with a different ending.”

Sometimes when the answer is no, you realize you’re not going to get what you want now or possibly ever. That’s when you realize it’s time to get out. Tina Brown remembers the moment she realized it was time to leave Condé Nast. “I was editor at
The New Yorker,
my contract was coming up, and I wanted to play more of a role in the strategy of the magazine instead of just the editing. And the president of the company, Steve Florio, took me to lunch. I started to talk about how this was an issue in my contract. And he said to
me, ‘Where are you going to go? No one’s going to give you a dress allowance like we do.’ ” Those words had her packing her bags.

Carol Bartz suggests that when push comes to shove, you better have your bags packed: “Now, what I will say to you is, you have to be ready to walk . . . I mean, when you are in a situation and you take a stand, you’ve got to be ready for the consequences. You know, when they look you in the eye and realize, ‘This crazy bitch is going to leave.’ ”

And then there are times when the worst-case scenario becomes a reality, whether you like it or not. You ask, the answer is no, and you get fired! Real estate mogul Donald Trump says you can pester your boss to the point of no return. “I’ve had some very smart aggressive women working for me, and they are not shy about asking for things. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to get them, and in some instances they’re so over the top in what they ask for that I fire them. Do you understand? I fire them. I say, ‘Listen, I don’t want to deal with this, you’re fired . . . You work for a salary, you get a lot of money, and you’re expected to make good deals.’ . . . I have guys who make deals all day long, and if they came to me every time they made a deal, I’d go crazy.”

If you deserve a raise, simply say it. But be prepared to leave and work somewhere else if management doesn’t agree.

Former GE CEO Jack Welch says that successful salary negotiations depend on your level of confidence; if you know your skills are valuable, you know you’ll find another, better job. “If you think it’s easy for a guy to go in there and ask for money, I’m not sure it is. . . . I always felt if I didn’t
get what I liked, I was packing it in,” he says. “I was ready to leave the day before I became chairman. I was always ready to pack it in, because I thought I could do well elsewhere.”

Writer Nora Ephron suggests that quitting can be the best thing for your career: “You have to look at what men do. They quit, and they go somewhere else.” That’s how they improve their salaries quickly. But unless you like being unemployed, you need to be talking to other companies all the time and have an idea of where you’re headed next. “The way to do it is you say, ‘I need more money, I’m not being paid as much as so and so,’ and you have to be prepared to leave. But you have to go sneak around and find somewhere to go. That’s a very important thing, having somewhere to go when you quit,” she says.

Comedian and talk show host Joy Behar will always have somewhere to go when she quits. She maintains her independence by keeping her comedy skills sharp. “One of the things that I’ve done in my career over the years is to have many irons in the fire,” Behar tells me. “When I took
The View
, I did a lot of stand-up because nobody in television was going to control me. I could always make a living on the road.” Now she has both
The View
and her own show, but she still does stand-up just to keep her options open.

Suze Orman points out that you can take the strongest negotiating stance of all when you have your financial safety net in place. “A woman can only be powerful when she doesn’t need the money, otherwise she can’t be powerful. You can’t push somebody and say, ‘This is what I want.’ If
you really need it and they let you go, what are you going to do?”

But Suze, how many women who ask for raises don’t actually need the money? Orman responds, “What I’m saying is, the time to go in and ask for a raise with confidence is not when you have credit card debt, it’s when you have an eight-month emergency fund. You also have to have a plan. Know your alternatives and come from a powerful place, not an insecure place. What gives you power? The answer is usually ‘having money to fall back on.’ You don’t have to have a lot, just enough for you to know you’ll be okay no matter what.”

Orman recommends taking into account your entire financial picture before you start talking to your boss about money: “Not just what you’re earning, but where is your money invested? How is it invested? Do you have all your wills and trusts? Do you have your insurance in place? Is everything together that creates a powerful woman? Because if it’s not, you’re walking into a negotiation powerless, and you will never be able to get the amount of money that you deserve because you’re coming from a powerless place. It really is as simple as that.”

She’s right: the fact that I was in the red at the end of every month probably gave me an air of desperation. What I needed was an air of confidence.

When I tell Donny Deutsch that I had been an idiot about negotiating, he responds, “Well, then next time you’re ready to do it, you talk to me first.” The idea that Deutsch
might be a more effective advocate for me than I am for myself speaks volumes about how powerless I was to get the money I deserved. And I think if most women really would look in the mirror, they’d see they aren’t nearly as powerful as they should be either.

MY STORY, WITH SHEILA BAIR, HANNAH RILEY BOWLES, MARIE C. WILSON, SUSIE ESSMAN, TINA BROWN, ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, AND BROOKSLEY BORN

W
hen I got back to New York after the 2008 presidential primary season, I was demoralized and exhausted. After some soul-searching, I realized I could not go on being undervalued. I could not allow any managers, male or female, to exploit my insecurities. I could not back down any more. After years of letting myself be pushed around in an unforgiving profession, I was finally mature enough to know that when it came to being rewarded for my value, I was my own worst enemy.

Now was the time to make it right.

That is what brought me to the meeting with Joe at the
Rock Center Café. I felt Joe deserved an explanation. He had, after all, believed in me when no one else did. He had revitalized my career, and now I had to walk away.

I was transparent with Joe about the mistakes I had made. I also made it clear that whatever my own failings in getting my worth, the current pay structure between us was wrong. I had allowed it to persist for too long. I felt nauseated when I told him I would be leaving this job and a show that we both fought so hard to create.

“I’ve been working on something,” he said. “Please wait another week. I have an idea. I see this as my business, and I see you as important to the success of that business. I need a chance to find a way to make you stay and feel whole. I won’t ask for too much time. Just a few days.”

A week later I went online to my checking account thinking I had run through my funds. I was expecting once again to be overdrawn and at least $2,000 in the red. Instead, I was shocked to find that I had more money in my bank account than I ever had had in my life.

I had not received the raise that I was looking for and was still not being paid what I deserved, but NBC had direct deposited a large amount of money into my account. Questions started racing through my mind.

Where did this money come from? (Had I won the lottery?) Would NBC give me a huge bonus without telling me first? (Not on your life.) Did the crack GE accountants accidentally add a few extra zeros to my paycheck? (A remote possibility.)

I soon learned, to my horror, that Joe had demanded that
MSNBC transfer his ratings bonuses to my account. These were payments Joe had negotiated in his contract. They were bonuses he received if
Morning Joe
ratings topped that of the Imus show, which we had replaced. While management never expected we could do that so quickly, Joe had banked on our success and soon tripled his salary.

So the money NBC had added to my account was actually subtracted from Joe’s compensation.

I was furious. Raging. Humiliated. How could I accept this money? How weak and dependent would this make me look? How could NBC allow this?

Joe and I had ridiculous, loud arguments over whether I could accept his bonus pay. Although his public persona is quite different, when it comes to negotiations, Joe is introspective and calculating. Sensing that he was about to lose the cohost who would help him earn even more money down the line, Joe had sat down with his wife, Susan, to talk through their options for keeping me on
Morning Joe
. Soon they realized there was only one course of action. Joe would sign over parts of his ratings bonuses or lose me forever.

To Joe’s agent and NBC, it seemed like a supremely generous gift to a cohost. To the Scarboroughs, it had less to do with charity than it did with the bottom line: I was a good investment.

While I understood their argument intellectually, I was still not emotionally prepared to accept a handout from a professional partner whom I considered to be my equal. So I did what I often do when confronted with a professional or personal crisis: I called my dad.

After I spent way too long explaining the situation, my father was ready to render a speedy verdict.

“Mika, it sounds like a shrewd business strategy on Joe’s part. He is worth much more with you as his partner on the show than he is by himself. CEOs reward top performers with bonuses all the time. What makes this any different?”

That was a good question, and I had no good answer. My father was right. I would take the bonuses, not because I needed them but because I deserved them.

Joe’s move had been generous, but as both my father and Joe pointed out, it was also a shrewd business move. We had a show that was on the upswing, whether MSNBC management could see it or not. He didn’t want me to leave, he knew I was important to the show, and he knew that what was happening within the walls of 30 Rock was not right. He actually said that to the management: “You can be part of a
New York Times
article about our salary discrepancy, but I’m not.” As is his habit, Joe Scarborough once again took matters into his own hands.