The key to negotiating anything...

Here's the thing nobody tells you about negotiation: by the time you're in the room, most of the outcome has already been decided.

Not by them. By you.

For fifteen years, I ran an executive search firm, which means I spent fifteen years sitting squarely in the middle of other people's negotiations. Watching candidates decide what they'd accept. Watching clients decide what they'd offer. Watching both sides talk past each other about money when money was almost never the actual issue.

I got very good at reading the tells. Early on, I used a scorecard of the eight motivating factors that I'd been taught measured the value of a job:

Mission.
Leadership.
Challenge.
Scope of impact.
Acquisition of new skills.
Prestige.
Personal needs.
Money.

If a candidate lit up on one or two of those, I knew there'd be a second conversation. Three or four, and I knew the bait was on the hook. More than five nibbles and that candidate was practically in the boat.

Except, I couldn't have been more wrong..

My candidate pools kept falling apart. A search takes three, four months, and over those months a rich, deep pool of extraordinary people would quietly disintegrate. One by one, they'd drop out.

I'd checked all their boxes.
And they still ghosted me.

It took me embarrassingly long to figure out why: those eight factors were floating in space. Untethered to anything.

I was measuring the job.
I was never measuring the person.

Because here's what I learned was true during a two decade long career in executive search: we all rank what matters to us in completely different ways, and that ranking moves depending on where we are in our lives.

Someone on the upswing of a career might weigh prestige and new skills and scope of impact far above mission or money. Someone balancing aging parents and small kids might put personal needs and flexibility at the very top and mean it. Both are right. There is no wrong answer. There's only your answer.

And, by the way, money? What I know from a seven-year research project, with nearly 10,000 responses from 113 different countries, from every possible demographic and every possible industry tells us that only 36% of people tell us that money is the most important factor determining their happiness at work. (Want to know what does actually determine happiness at work? Read the research here.)

But, here's the thing: most people walk into a negotiation having never once sat down and figured out what matters to them, so they negotiate hard and they negotiate well... and they win something they didn't actually want.

Want to learn to negotiate better?

Let me introduce you to my friend Alex Carter.

Alex is a Columbia Law professor, director of the school's Mediation Clinic, and the author of Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything — the first negotiation book solo-authored by a woman to hit the Wall Street Journal business bestseller list. She's trained diplomats at the UN and executives across the Fortune 500. She is, without exaggeration, one of the best in the world at this.

And her whole method starts exactly where I'd want it to start: with questions, not tactics. Not how to out-argue the person across the table. How to understand what you're actually there for.

She just launched a MasterClass, and I'm going to give it to everyone I know. Not only that, I'm planning on giving it to myself, too.