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McKinsey & Company I am joining the McKinsey & Company Boston office in late July and searching for housing in the meantime. If I could get some insight on the ratio of days in the office vs work from home that would be super helpful!
If I need to come into the office regularly I will try to find a place close by.
What do you all think about the new vaccine?
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Sorry all. Meant to say LIVE negotiations not love negotiations!
Mentor
I suggest being honest with your partner. Set clear boundaries early on in the relationship. Agree on safety words. No b***stuff, at least not too often.
Mentor
I'm actually asking (not trying to be a jerk), but what are love negotiations? I think I probably know, but I've never heard that term before...
Yikes that meant to say live* negotiations lol
Coach
Do you mean live like actually in person or live like on Zoom or Teams etc?
Coach
Here are my thoughts on that: I’ve been practicing for over 20 years and I LOATHE Zoom/Teams.
There’s something so unnatural about it and it’s completely distracting that you can see your own face and anyone else on the call’s faces at the same time. Personally, I don’t process information as well and I have no poker face, so having to think about mitigating those things while engaged in heavy negotiation is ridiculous to me. I spent 15 years successfully negotiating over the phone and I’m not going to stop now. Most of my clients don’t want to be on camera anyway and often my camera is mysteriously malfunctioning.
However, negotiating via email is inefficient and clumsy. Too much can be misinterpreted in text, complicated topics can often be explained or discussed much more easily verbally, and you often need to hear tone. Give me old school telephone negotiations any day.
Conference calls were also the best way to learn, imo. When the associates would gather in the partner’s/senior’s office and could really just listen to the discussions and see their body language and the partner/senior could hit mute and explain things from time to time there was soooo much organic learning happening.
Side note: my colleagues and I had a running joke re the amount of money that could be extorted if there were fake mute buttons bc of how much real talk happened while on mute!
Wrt your specific concerns, I think the trick is to be dispassionate. Separate yourself from the topic/issues and think of it as a professional/academic exercise. There’s nothing personal about it.
Coach
Oh, that’s easy. Don’t be your authentic self. You’re a hired gun playing a role for a paying client. You can pretend to be someone else if the situation calls for it in your judgment.