How do you get people to do what you want?

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You can be completely right and still lose the room — when you're right about something that matters to you instead of something that matters to them.

We're taught to make our best case: believe in it, lead with conviction, line up all the reasons it's true. But the person across the table rarely acts on your reasons. They act on their own. The most persuasive thing you can do is stop selling what convinced you and start naming what already matters to them.

There's a scene that shows this cleanly in Careless People, the memoir by Sarah Wynn Williams — a former New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into Facebook around 2011, rose to run its global public policy, and later became the most senior whistleblower the company has ever produced. Early in the book, before any of that, she's just trying to get hired. She lands a meeting with Marnie Levine, the executive who ran public policy at Facebook and would become her boss.

Marnie interrogates her. Sarah opens with four words — "Facebook needs a diplomat" — and Marnie takes them apart before she can go further: What do you mean by diplomat? Why would Facebook need one? How would you rank that against everything else Facebook needs right now? Sarah writes that within minutes she was terrified. They hadn't made it past her opening line.

So Sarah pitches the thing she actually believes. Facebook is a global political force that's going to change the world, a tool that gives ordinary people a voice, and governments are about to start writing the rules for data and speech — Facebook needs a hand in writing them. It's a genuinely big idea. And Marnie keeps cutting it down with a single word. Why? And then: Matter to who?

Then Sarah says it a different way. Those rules, she points out, will be written by the people who could decide to stop Facebook from growing. And that's the sentence that changes everything. As she tells it, she can feel it land: "I realize it's the sweet spot. I'm focused on Facebook, the global political force. She's focused on Facebook, the global business force." Same company. Two completely different reasons to care. Sarah had been selling the mission she believed in. Marnie only leaned in when that mission got connected to the one thing Marnie actually cared about — whether governments would help Facebook prosper or try to stop it.

She didn't get hired that day. But months later she was offered the exact job she'd pitched. The door opened the moment she started speaking to the other person's interest instead of her own.

Here's what's easy to miss: Sarah never changed her idea. The pitch was the same pitch. What changed was whose reasons she led with.

People don't act on your reasons. They act on their own.

Your job in a negotiation isn't to make the other side care about what you care about. It's to find the thing they care about and connect your ask to it.

You do this more often than you think, and usually backwards. You walk into the budget meeting with every reason the project matters to you and your team. You ask for the raise by explaining how hard you've worked. You pitch the client on the features you're proud of. All true. But all beside the point. The question that actually moves people is the one Sarah stumbled into: what does the person across the table already want, and how does saying yes to me get them closer to it?

Before your next hard conversation, try this. Write down your best argument. Then ask who it's really for — you, or them. If it's for you, you haven't found the sweet spot yet.

Remember: negotiation is life.

– Gene

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