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Day Four: Take a deep breath and ask

Today is the day.  You’re prepared.  You’ve justified.  You’ve scheduled the meeting with your boss, and given him the heads up on what it’s about.  Now it’s time to pull the trigger and ask the tough question.

Ask you boss (or your bosses boss, whomever it is you have the meeting with) what he or she can do to help you get the raise you want.  Be ready for some push back, but don’t expect it.  The fact is, everyone you work for has asked their boss for a raise at some point, and if they’ve been working for a while they probably have helped other employees get the raise they wanted as well.  The trick here is to make the conversation a collaboration, rather than an adversarial situation.  The other thing you need to do is get your boss invested in your success.

This is actually easier than it sounds – it’s all about the phrasing.  Remember that your boss is not the person paying you (unless he’s also the owner), so you aren’t actually taking money out of his pocket.  I’ve found that the usual progression of this stuff goes like this:

Keith: Hey John, how’s it going?

John (boss, not his real name): Pretty good Keith – you said you wanted to chat about your salary?

Keith: Yeah, I was hoping you’d be willing to help me get a raise.  How do you feel about that?

John: Well you know that I value the work you do for us, so I’ll see what I can do.  How much were you thinking?

Keith:  I’ve done some research and gotten an idea of what the going rate is for my position, but I thought I’d ask you what you thought would be reasonable and go from there since I know those numbers aren’t always accurate.  What do you think is reasonable?

John:  Well, I think I can get my boss to sign off on a $3500 raise, how does that sound?

(If whatever they offer you puts you in line with what you would ask for, thank your boss and get the heck out of there.  If it’s off by quite a bit, continue on)

Keith: It sounds good, but I was hoping for a number closer to $8000, based on my years of experience and the quality of my work. What do I need to do so you can get me that $8000 raise?

(That last question is key, because it shows you are willing to put forth some additional effort)

John: If I talk really fast, I might be able to convince my boss to move the raise up to $5000, but I doubt he’d be willing to go much further than that.  Let me see if he’d be agreeable to another salary review in about 6 months, but to get anything out of that he’ll probably insist on some help with one of his special projects.  Would you be willing to do that?

Keith: Absolutely!

Okay, so maybe you didn’t get the whole raise that you wanted, but you did get some of it, and a chance at more in relatively short order.  Then what?  Well, you have to close the deal – but more on that tomorrow.  Do you have any other tactics you’ve used to pull in a raise?

July 20, 2009 | Filed Under Career

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