The Secret Sauce for Everything (Starting with Polling and Policy)

A recent article in The Washington Post by Anna Greenberg and Jeremy Rosner discussed three ways people are misusing and abusing polls. While polling is not a particular interest of mine, I read the piece because it was on the way to some other article that had caught my eye. I’m glad I did because it had more relevance to my work than I would have guessed.

To read their entire argument you will have to click through, but their third point read:

“Good polling, requires good listening…The best polling has always been accompanied by directly listening to people, face to face, in their own words.”

It occurred to me this simple phrase applies to many other situations. You could substitute as follows and it would be same:

• Being a “good parent requires good listening.”
• Being a “good student requires good listening.”
• Being a “good friend requires good listening.”
• Being a “good manager requires good listening.”
• Being a “good citizen requires good listening.”

You get the idea.

But it also struck me immediately how the phrase pertains to my work. What do I do for a living? I try to change people’s minds. Sometimes I am working with clients to try to change a policy. Sometimes I am helping a client sell a new service. Sometimes my job is to convince a payer to increase a client’s reimbursement for delivered services.

All of these efforts start not with gathering the evidence, or trying to prove a point, but instead with good listening.

Before I can help a client in any of these circumstances, I have to understand how the other side would benefit. And I have found the best way to do this “has always been accompanied by directly listening to people, face to face, in their own words.”

Changing people’s minds, which could also be called negotiation, is a skill that seems to be of high interest. Type “how do I negotiate…” into Google and more than 100 million results appear. In Essentials of Negotiation, a book I have been using for years, the authors advise:

“In structuring the message, you as the negotiator should emphasize the advantage the other party gains from accepting your proposal. Although this may seem obvious, it is surprising how many negotiators spend more time explaining what aspects of their offer are attractive to themselves than on identifying what aspects are likely to be attractive to the other party.”

It also seems obvious to listen, preferably face to face to people in their own words. But I guess it’s not.

Thank you, Anna Greenberg and Jeremy Rosner, for reminding us all of something so fundamentally important. Perhaps your advice will be used by more of us to negotiate for ourselves and others, and to think about how to change people’s minds.

First, listen! It works for me and my clients. It seems to work for polling. Maybe it will work for you too.