“What’s in it for me?” is unidirectional. It exclusively spotlights your wants and needs without considering what drives the people and organizations you work with. It implies that only your incentives are relevant — though this is seldom true.
“What’s in it for us?” is multidirectional. It spotlights everyone’s wants and needs and makes it possible to look for mutual incentives. It acknowledges that everyone’s incentives must be acknowledged in order for there to be a good partnership.
Misaligned incentives is a major risk in any operation. If you want to be able to manage them, you first need to ask: “what’s in it for us?”
The more overlap you can point to, the more fruitful the partnership will be.
Either we try to blindly please the other person without acknowledging how it's affecting us -- sometimes negatively.
Or we narcissistically obsess over what gain we might yield out of the other.
This way of framing "what's in it for us" is a great frame.
As a people-pleaser myself this is something that I struggle with.
This was definitely an important thing to write about -- I took a handful of business classes during college and they all indoctrinated me into the what's-in-it-for-me (WIIFM) mindset.