Fired? Not so fast: How to negotiate your job back

"You asked me to tell you personally," began the chair of the litigation department. "We're laying you off."

I tried to stop the tears. I'd trained myself for 12 lawyerly years not to show that damning female emotion - sadness. I was a no-cry ninja.

It was 1993 and we were in a recession. Not one nearly as bad as today's, but when you're being laid off you don't much care whether you're one in a million or one of 8 million. Your own little economic empire is collapsing.

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I might have been the 'Queen of Conflict Escalation' and tough as nails, but now I was hard crying and the last thing on my mind was negotiation strategy and tactics.

But that was then and this is now. Today, with unemployment at 9.5%, it's time we learned how to negotiate our jobs back.

"People simply don't negotiate when they're being laid off," says Los Angeles commercial and employment mediator Eleanor Barr. Barr, a member of the ADR Services, Inc., dispute resolution panel, has been helping attorneys resolve wrongful employment termination lawsuits for more than a decade. In all that time she's never heard a single story in which an employee attempted to negotiate his or her job back.

"People cry, shout or freeze," explains Barr. "No one thinks clearly when they're being fired."

Well, almost no one.

One young public relations maven in Los Angeles responded to her termination conversation by refusing to be fired.

"I'd never lost a job before," says Lindsey Carnett, now CEO of Marketing Maven Public Relations in Los Angeles. But there she was, sitting in the CEO's office being told that her services were no longer needed. And yes, she was crying. But she was doing something in addition to that. She was negotiating her job back.

"[As] I was wiping tears from my face, I was thinking, 'This is crazy, I'm making major money for this firm. This CEO must not be in the loop. You don't fire someone who's making lots more money for the firm than she's being paid.'"

Our propensity to tear up hasn't changed but our ability to negotiate through those tears has.

"The CEO was about to tell me to pack up my desk and turn in my key-card when I put the brakes on the conversation," says Carnett.

"You can't be firing me," she told her employer.

"'Take a few days off,'" the CEO finally said, "Then let's finish this conversation."

Carnett didn't do what many of us might have done - consumed an entire sheet cake for instance - instead, she became her own PR agent.

"I searched my e-mail for client testimonials. I gathered the best work I'd done - Power Point presentations that landed new clients or PR event flyers that retained old ones. I calculated just how much money I'd made for the company and put together the records that proved it."

In fact, Carnett was doing what all good negotiators do. She was gathering evidence of her market value. When she returned to work after a long weekend, Carnett was not only ready to negotiate her job back, she'd convinced herself that she was being seriously under-compensated.

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