Sun Tzu or Shih Tzu?

A lot is written about the topic of negotiating pay rises, and with good reason. This one negotiation has the potential to impact not just your financial status but your psychological well-being and sense of worth. For most of the week you probably spend at least half of your waking hours at work. If you spend all that time feeling that you’re undervalued and underappreciated, perhaps confronted with the reality that other people doing the same job are earning more than you, the well of discontent and resentment that builds up will inevitably affect you not just in the workplace but at home too. Rightly or wrongly we define ourselves to a great extent by the work we do, and if we feel exploited in the workplace it can be extremely demoralising.

So the stakes of the salary negotiation are very high, but the quality of what is written is extremely one dimensional. Most of what it is very generic and offers nothing that you couldn’t find for yourself in any negotiation good negotiation book. An example list of tips from a recent article on Linked in could be condensed to;

• Be prepared (be clear on your business case)
• Be assertive and direct (communicate clearly and unambiguously)
• Be ambitious (don’t talk yourself out of going for a high number which gives you room to move)
• Look for areas to create alternative sources of value (for you and the boss)

These are perfectly good tips, but they are all tactical. There’s no strategic thinking behind them. What the writers of these articles are suggesting is that when salary negotiation time comes around, if you follow those steps above, you’ll get a better outcome that you otherwise would. What they don’t address is how come other people get far better outcomes, sometimes without employing any of the tips above.

I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen people who seem to progress through the use of some kind of Jedi mind trickery. They don’t even work as hard as you do, they never seem to be as stressed at pay review time and you just know that they’re earning more than you. How are they doing that? By demonstrating an innate understanding of the importance of strategy in negotiation.

Position yourself for success.

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”

Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

As a rule, I try not to quote Sun-Tzu at people. But there’s no avoiding the old General’s wisdom in this case. To paraphrase the lesson of this quote for this context (21st century salary negotiation);

“You can do all the tactical preparation you like for the day of your salary negotiation, but if the boss experiences you as a pushover on the other 364 days of the year they will not take you seriously on the day you decide to put your “assertive hat” on...” 

If you only assert yourself on that one day; you’re going to be the “defeated warrior”. The “victorious warrior” gets better outcomes from the salary negotiation by establishing over the course of the year that they are not pushovers. The most effective way to achieve this is to take every opportunity to negotiate with the boss through the year.

This may seem counter-intuitive. It’s tempting to think that by taking on every assignment the boss throws your way and showing that you can be their go-to guy (or gal), you’re establishing yourself as a valuable asset in their minds. Sadly, that all too often not the case. When we think that way, we ignore the negative consequences of being the go-to person. People stretch too far. Something has to give. Up to a point, it may be your personal life and physical well-being that you're trading but eventually the work will suffer too. You may kid yourself that if the other things on our plates slip because we’ve taken on extra work the boss will understand but the truth is they won’t. You may reason that if you just suck it up and make things happen (at the cost of your private life) the boss will notice all the extra hours you’re putting in and remember it at the end of the year. That won’t happen either.

Both of these misconceptions betray an unfortunate naiveté. The more likely outcomes are that the boss notices that you’re delivering work late or making errors and thinks less of you. Or they note that you’re always in the office and start questioning your productivity or capacity to manage your workload. I’m not saying this is fair, but we’ve all seen it happen. If you try to argue that you took on extra work, the argument gets turned back on you (“You should communicate better” or “You lack assertiveness”). Worst of all, if you take on extra work and manage to deliver it all to a good standard (even if it costs you all your evenings for six months), in your boss’ eyes that level of performance will become the new normal. You took it all in stride, you nailed it, why shouldn’t you repeat that next year?

So what alternative am I proposing? I’ll start with what I’m not advocating. I’m not advocating that you say “No” to everything. You risk creating a different impression in the mind of your boss if you just refuse, which is that you’re lazy, difficult or obstructive. This isn’t going to serve you particularly well at salary negotiation time either. Paradoxically (given what I’ve written above), when they ask you to do extra work they may think they’re giving you a wondrous opportunity to demonstrate your value to them so you don’t want to be seen to snub this "wondrous gift of opportunity".

I’m advocating you take every opportunity to negotiate with your boss throughout the year. There is no better opportunity than when you’re asked to take on extra work. At the very least this is the time to set expectations regarding the impact of this extra work on your main workload. When asked to take on a project Y, instead just swallowing hard and saying “Yes boss” and thinking you’ll figure out later how to do it, try saying something like;

“I’ve done the set up on project X, but I’m supposed to be delivering it too. If you can provide me with some delivery support on project X (or accept that delivery will take 25% longer), then I can take on the planning phase of this new project Y”

The obvious benefit of this approach is that you’re protecting your time and capacity to do high quality work, by making clear to your boss that if they want everything done they are going to have to find some extra resource to help you (not your evenings!). Additionally you’re showing that you’re sufficiently in control of your workload to understand and have plans to mitigate for the impact of being given extra work. You’re still offering your boss a solution, and positioning it as a less risky one. Yes, they have to find the extra resource, but better to do that pro-actively than have to fight the fires when you burn yourself out. Best of all, you’ve increased your perceived value. You’re no longer the pushover who takes on everything and does an ok job most of the time but sometimes drops the ball; now you’re the pro-active manager of expectations, who is realistic about what they can achieve, is comfortable with delegating work effectively and helps find solutions to problems.

The working year is full of negotiations with your boss. Some, like the scenario outlined above, are obvious and impactful. Nevertheless I see people mismanage them time and time again. Others are smaller and more innocuous like making changes to holiday plans, or staying late, or not expensing a cab home after a late night because “…it was only a few pounds”.

The difficulty is that when you let things go, you condition your boss to see you as a person who is easily satisfied and unlikely to challenge. As salary review time approaches, and they start thinking about how they’re going to manage their budget, they may put you in the “easily pleased” bucket. Your behaviour in the year has given the impression that you’ll be easily pleased so they needn’t earmark much budget for keeping you happy. By contrast, the colleague who has pushed back a little over the course of the year, perhaps extracting some trade-offs for the concessions they’ve made (e.g. “Hey boss I have to join a conference call with the US at ten o’clock tonight, so I’m going to be in at ten tomorrow”) might be in the “knows their worth” bucket, and the boss will prepare for their negotiation expecting to have to make bigger concessions to that person.

If you’re in the “easily pleased” bucket the boss may come to the table hoping to give you a raise of 0%, but prepared to go to x%. Deploying the tactical tips and tricks you may read about in LinkedIn posts or Listicles might at best get you closer to x%. Far better to position yourself through the course of the year to be in the “knows their worth” bucket. The boss comes to those negotiations with no hope of closing them at 0% and willingness to go to x+y%.

The “victorious warrior…wins first” by taking every opportunity negotiate in the year, so the boss is thinking about their raise long before the negotiation is even in the diaries.