Erica Keswin

How to Bring Yourself to Everything you do with Author Expert Mori Taheripour

What’s important to you? What are your non-negotiables? What are your goals? When it comes to negotiating what’s best for each person in the hybrid workplace, answering those questions is a great place to start, says Mori Taheripour, this week’s guest on Left to Our Own Devices. Mori is a globally recognized negotiation and DEI expert, executive, Wharton professor, and author of Bring Yourself: How to Harness the Power of Connections to Negotiate Fearlessly. Erica and Mori discuss why it’s important to be straight forward about our needs at work, how companies will have to look at the future of work on a more individual, holistic level, and why it’s key to set boundaries with our values in mind and learn to communicate effectively and with curiosity. Listen in for a thoughtful conversation around bringing our best selves to work and life in an authentic way, and stick around to the end for some sage advice Mori gives to Erica as the parent of two college-bound kids.

Quotes

6:46 – “Companies are going to have to look at this very differently as well. and you can’t just force feed people into what this used to be. A lot has changed, and so I think they’ll have to have individual conversations, because one size does not fit all. And I think that part of those conversations, obviously there has to be some amount of compromise, because it could be that they want a lot of people back just to create that sense of camaraderie and connection, even a greater sense of maybe innovation and bringing people together—that energy that is hard to replace even at your finest moments virtually, right? So I think those conversations have to be tailored to people.”

8:44 – on being straightforward about your needs: “I’m hoping that the HR folks, your boss, your manager, or whatever it is, will be able to have those conversations so it’s more like collaborative problem solving as opposed to ‘this is the way it’s going to be, and this is what you have to do,’ because I don’t think workforces will fare that well if that’s how they approach it.”

11:33 – “Everybody doesn’t deserve every part of you and all the information you have at the beginning. You give a little, you take a little, you give a little. And then, as you become more comfortable, even in that first negotiation, that first conversation, you can see that natural progression, because the connection is made, the empathy is created, the rapport is built.”

12:28 – “It’s also the values piece of it, right? Being very true to who you are from a values perspective. So that’s less about, not necessarily behavior, so much as it is knowing your boundaries and the things that are important to you.”

17:25 – on the conversations around the future of work: “Too much has changed to unsee what has happened. And so I think a lot of those conversations are going to change, pick up, be a little more malleable, pliable, and really individualized.”

23:42 – “When I first started teaching negotiations, it took me a little while, but the essence of it is communicating effectively and being heard, and being curious and going into conversations not with your mind made up but being open to ideas and somebody else’s ways of communicating with you and perspective—hearing things from a different perspectives before you actually draw your own, and maybe what you end up with is far better than you ever thought was possible because it was innovative and you were open and curious.”