The Power Playbook’s Rose Herceg reports from whichever city she finds herself in about the stories she sees and hears in boardrooms, business lunches and dinners across Australia (and sometimes the world).
Time: 4pm
Place: Via email…
Players: Female seeking pay-rise. The male boss to whom she is pitching…
The scene: Female emails her sell for a pay-rise to the boss. She spends over an hour crafting her message with carefully selected facts to support her case. She over-explains, over-writes and over-defends the reasons why she should be given more money.
Power play do-over? (If this woman could turn back the clock and have that moment again)
First, if you can’t ask for time with the boss to have the conservation in person, then you’re not worthy of a pay-rise.
Second, the conversation should go something like this:
“I love my job and I love working here. My feedback and evaluations from you have been consistently very good and it may perhaps be time to talk about my salary. It’s been over three years since we’ve last visited the issue and I’d welcome your view on this”
There are some conversations that must be had in person. This is one of them. No one who ever got anywhere with a pay-rise did it over email…
It’s the only way to fly.
Next week we sit in on meeting between biz partners…