The Career Consigliere

Episode 38: Asking for a Raise (Part 1)

• America's White Collar Wise Guy • Episode 38

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It's one of the most highly confrontational, uncomfortable, and feared conversations we'll ever have:  Asking for a raise.  And the outcome you get has just as much to do with how you approach the subject, as it does with your performance on the job itself.

This will be the first of a three-part series on asking for a raise, and today's episode will focus on the background information you'll need to set yourself up for success in this situation.  The information covered today will give you the foundation you'll need to have this crucial conversation and will help you put together a strategic plan for bringing up this topic with your manager.

Enjoy!

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Whaddaya hear, whaddya say?  Welcome to episode 38 of the Career Consigliere podcast: your no frills, no BS forum for navigating the corporate job scene.  We’re back with you once again for what we hope to be a highly informative and engaging half an hour, or so!  Today, we’re going to begin focusing on something that consistently ranks amongst the most horrifying, anxiety provoking, and dreaded things in the corporate world:  asking for a raise.  And if you approach it the way that most people do, that’s exactly what it will be.  But there is definitely a better way of doing it, and today we’re going to lay out some strategies that can boost your chances of getting the outcome you want from this highly confrontational and uncomfortable conversation.  This will be the first episode in a three-part series that covers asking for a raise from soup to nuts.  So podcast land:  let’s do it!  

The market determines your worth

Before we get into any specific strategies or things to say during “the talk”, let’s establish something right out of the gate.  You can have a number in your head of what you’d like to be making:  in fact, most people do.  There’s a lot of that sentiment out there:  “Oh, if I only made $100K, or $200K”, whatever that number happens to be in your case, most of us have an ideal figure that we think would make put us on top financially, or give us bragging rights in our social circle, or satisfy our OCD because we like nice round numbers.  Whatever your ideal number means for you, stop right there and realize something:  this is an IDEAL number.  By definition, “Ideal”, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “existing only in the imagination: desirable or perfect, but not likely to become a reality”.  

Realize this before we go any further:  your skills and experience have a market value that organizations are willing to pay.  Just like houses, cars, and lobster tails all have a market value?  The same holds true for your resume.  You might work exceptionally hard, or might have a unique thing that you’re known for or contribute, or maybe you’re just a really nice person.  But even the nicest Honda on the lot isn’t selling for $100K anytime soon:  it’s just not what that kind of car costs.  Keep this principle in the back of your mind throughout the rest of the episode, because we’re going to come back to it later.  But if you’re at a point where you really think you deserve a raise, and you’re ready to approach it the right way, keep listening.

Have a proven track record of performance 

To get taken seriously when asking for a raise, the first thing you’ll need is a solid, proven track record of good performance.  So right off the bat, this is going to take some time.  If you’re a rookie on the job, you’re probably not going to get taken seriously if you start asking for a raise right away, and to be completely honest, doing so is going to make you look like a fool.  You want to get some credibility under your belt, preferably in a way that you can demonstrate on paper. 

Assuming you’ve been around a while, keep track of all your performance reviews.  Any well-managed corporation will have a structured performance management process in place, and all this information should be available to you, usually on-demand.  Your boss is busy:  I can promise you, even if you and them are tight, they’re NOT going to remember all your contributions.  They’re going to forget the last-minute favors they asked you for, the time you stayed late to make sure the order shipped on time, or when you drove up to Boston to meet the client YOURSELF, when the assigned salesperson had to call out.  I’m sure you’re a talented employee, and you’ve probably done lots of great things.  So if that’s the case, document them!  

Definitely include them in your performance review materials, but don’t limit yourself to just that.  Keep some kind of a journal, spreadsheet, email to yourself, whatever you want to use to document whenever you do something that’s “above and beyond” the normal call of duty, or whenever you get personally complimented on something.  Log the date, as well as a detailed description of what took place.  And if the praise comes via email, even better:  set up a folder in your email system to keep a record of all the accolades.  When it comes time to have “the talk” with your manager, you’ll have a whole arsenal of high praise ready to use as evidence that you’re a total stud!

Have a good reputation

Next, you’ll want to make sure that you’re reputation in the organization is up to snuff.  If you’re known for being lazy, unresponsive, disorganized, or otherwise unreliable, do you really think the company is going to voluntarily invest more money into you simply because you asked?  You get the point.  You need to have people on your side that can vouge for having positive experiences working with you. 

Obviously, the conversation about a raise starts between you and your manager.  But even if your immediate manager supports you, odds are they’re going to have to go way up the chain to get this approved. These conversations are going to involve their manager, possibly even THEIR manager, people from the HR and payroll teams, possibly some executives, and potentially even other parties depending on how the organization is set up.  What started as a conversation with one person could easily become a plea to a committee of 20.  And if somebody with some influence doesn’t have the greatest things to say about you, don’t count on a favorable outcome.  

This pay raise, however big or small, is an additional investment the organization is making.  It wasn’t part of the original budget, and it’s probably coming out of left field, so think of all the people that have to spend time reviewing your request and having all those “behind closed doors” conversations to figure out whether this gets approved.  All this requires a lot of time and energy from people who, quite honestly, have better things to do.  So I promise you:  if your reputation is anything less than stellar, they’re going to have a big laugh at your expense, while they continue smiling to your face.  

Know your Market Value

I promised you earlier we’d come back to the financial stuff, so here’s where I make good on it.  This is probably the single most important aspect of asking for a raise:  making sure that your request is in line with what the market dictates for someone in your position, in your market, with your education, qualifications, and experience.  In short, you’ll need to do your homework here to make sure your request is based in reality.

My recommendation?  Start with a google search of “salary market analysis”.  No sooner than pressing enter, you’ll get a whole ton of results with links to different online tools that have all the information you need, and you probably won’t even need to scroll past the first page of hits.  I’m not going to recommend any one over another:  none of them are sponsoring this podcast, at least not yet, so we’re not going to give any free press.  But I’ve personally used some of these tools myself, and I can tell you that what’s out there is pretty accurate.

Tools like this will ask you a whole bunch of questions about yourself, your background, the job itself, where you live, a whole bunch of qualifying questions.  They’ll tabulate your results and create a personalized report with a whole bunch of market data on the job profile you selected.  I’d recommend running 2-3 of these reports from different sites.  When it comes to the salary ranges they provide, as long as the results are reasonably close, you can take the average of the all of them and use that as your benchmark.  Most of these sites will give you a few freebies before they eventually start charging you.  But honestly, don’t be a lowlife and go creating burner email accounts just so you can game the system.  Most of these services are pretty cost-effective, and it’s a very worthwhile investment to have information like this in your back pocket, not only for raises, but for any other situation where you might need to know the market value of a particular job.  

And this will be the moment of truth for you.  Assuming all your report parameters were correct, if what you’re currently making is substantially less than what you’re seeing from the market data, then you’re justified to ask for that raise.  But let’s turn this on its head:  what if you’re making MORE than the data indicates you should be?  In that case, you have no justifiable grounds on which to ask for a raise. Or what if you’re only making very slightly less than what the data says?  Could you technically still ask at that point?  Sure.  But would it be worth it?  Having that really uncomfortable conversation for another $2-$3K a year?  Might sound like a lot, but when you do the math, after tax and all that, you’re probably looking at another $150 a month in your take-home pay.  You want my opinion?  If $150 a month is  really that big a deal to you, you might need to reassess how you manage money.  Asking for a raise is like vacuuming the carpet.  It’s going to make lots of hidden, dormant things come up:   it’s really going to expose every aspect of your performance in that role and with that company.  If there’s a problem brewing somewhere, even if nobody’s talking about it, asking for a raise is going to bring it front-and-center.   Still want to put yourself through that?  That’s your call, but I’d really make sure you stand to gain more than a few measly bucks before you roll the dice. 

Read the writing on the wall

Before you actually sit down with your boss and have this showdown, there’s one more thing you’ll want to do.  And you shouldn’t wait to do this until right before D-day either:  you’ll want to read the writing on the wall and make sure that your overall timing is right and appropriate relative to all the circumstances surrounding this situation.  Is the company having a good year?  If the belt is tight and budgets are getting slashed, a pay raise probably isn’t happening right then.  Are you on good terms with your manager?  If things have been tense lately for whatever reason, you’re probably not very high on their list and they’re not going to go out of their way to help you.  

More importantly:  is this a place you want to stay with?  Do you see things working out with this organization long-term?  If the company is going to up their investment in you, there’s going to be, at the very least, an unspoken understanding that you plan on sticking around for a while.  In summary, make sure that asking for this raise, and all the fallout it could potentially cause, is worth it to you.  If you’re going to make this request, this organization has to be the place where you really want to be, and the company needs to see that before they’re going to throw you a bone.

Set up the meeting

And here we are!  If you’ve done all the things we just mentioned, now it’s finally time to have the conversation.  But you’ll want to be very strategic about how you do it.  For one, I DO NOT recommend waiting until performance review time for this.  For one, your performance review conversation is meant to be an objective evaluation of your performance, and that’s it.  Adding a raise request into that mix muddies the waters and really shows a lack of tact on your part.

Instead, in a perfect world, I say the best time to have this raise conversation is actually a few weeks AFTER your performance review.  If the review was bad, then return to start:  no raise coming your way, don’t even ask.  But assuming your review went well, this gives you time to reflect on all the things that you and your manager talked about, and it also gives you material to reference and pull from to further justify why you’re worth the extra investment.  Your manager just told you a whole bunch of good things a few weeks ago, so strike while all that is still fresh in their head.

As for how to go about it?  Schedule a meeting with them, but be semi-discreet about the true purpose of the meeting.  If you send them a meeting invite titled “Pay Raise Request”, that just doesn’t show a lot of professional tact on your end.  Instead, wait until you’re talking with them one day about something else, and then mention that you have another topic that’ll likely take some time that you’d like to follow up on, and ask if you can set up a meeting.  This should pique their interest, so they’ll most likely agree.  If they press for more right there on the spot, just say that you had some ideas for a project (something to that effect), and you’d like to dedicate 30 minutes to it.  If they have any respect and professional regard for you, their answer should be “sure, go ahead and set something up.”  Call the meeting “Project ideas”, or something similar, and send away!

Maybe they’re a good detective and will know what you’re up to, or maybe not, but the whole key here is to be discreet.  If they know for sure what’s coming, they have a lot of time to prepare and get their defenses up, and they can throw whatever excuse and story at you.  When you do eventually meet with them, you want their visceral, raw reaction to your request, because the nonverbal cues are arguably even MORE important than the words they say.  You want to ask someone out?  Ask them in person, because you’ll know in the first 3/10 of a second by the micro expression on their face if they’re into it or not. 

We’re not asking anyone on dates here, but the same principle applies:  asking for a raise is a sensitive topic, and you’re REALLY putting yourself out there by doing it, so you want as much information available to you so you can read the tealeaves and manage your expectations accordingly. And even if you can’t do it physically in person, they’re located remotely or whatever the case, at the very least do it over a video call.  Still not quite the same, but it’s as good as it’s going to get.  Make sure you schedule this on a day that doesn’t look too busy, at a reasonable time, and follow the best possible meeting etiquette as you would with any other:  we’ve talked about that in previous episodes.

Curtain Call

Anything beyond this point involves having the actual conversation with your manager, which we’ll save for part 2 of this series.  But today we covered a lot of theory and background that should set you up pretty well for when the showdown happens, so let’s sum it all up with today’s…….Consigliere curtain call.

Remember, when it comes to what you earn in any job, whether you’re the janitor or the CEO, the value is set by the market.  There are established guidelines in place for what a certain type of role pays, and it’s all relative to your experience, tenure, education, geography, and a bunch of other factors that are all factored into the equation.  Keep your expectations in line with this, and do your homework before you ever sit down with your boss to have this kind of conversation.

Also, make sure you have a proven track record that you can demonstrate on paper.  This will add a lot of validity and strength to your raise request, and you’ll have a lot of material you can reference back to if anything is ever called into question.  You’ll also want to make sure that you have a good reputation amongst anyone that could potentially be involved in the decision to grant you the increase.  It’s not just your boss:  think about THEIR boss, HR, payroll, anyone else these people might know or confide in.  The simple answer here is to do be respectful, maintain integrity, and have a reputation as being someone that people like having around.  Pay raise or not, this will go a LONG way in determining your career success, because at the end of the day, nobody likes an a-hole.  

Next, read the writing on the wall.  Make sure that your request is appropriate given the current state of things, and is made at the best possible time.  It should be clear to everyone involved that you like working for this organization, and that you have plans of sticking around.  And finally, set up the meeting.  The best time is 2-3 weeks after your performance review, if at all possible.  And don’t give yourself away – make it clear that you have something important to talk about, but being tactful here is CRUCIAL in determining the outcome that you get.  The conversation needs to be had, but this will only work to your favor if it’s done just right.  And what happens once all this is done and it’s time for the big show?  Stay tuned, because that’s coming up in episode 39.

Sadly folks, that’s all the time we have for today.  But have no fears, and shed no tears, because I’ll be back with a new episode very soon.  As they say in the industry:  no listeners, no show, so do me a favor, and stay loyal!  If you find value in my content, please leave me a nice review, tell all your friends, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts.   Beyond the confines of your headphones, speakers, TV screen, or any other crazy contraption with the ability to stream audio, I also provide one-on-one career assistance, so visit my website at career-consigliere.net to learn more about me, book me for a private consult, join my email list, or explore some of the other career services I offer.  And to all of you out there in podcast land, remember this:  Who’s the boss in your career?  You, nobody else.