The Right Way to Ask for More Money
One thing I’ve never been terribly good at is asking for a raise. I know, even though I’m full of tips on how you can get more money, and how to campaign for a salary increase when you need one, I’m not terribly good at it myself. Historically, when I’ve needed more money or wanted to make more money, I just look for a new job where I’ll earn more. It works pretty well when you’re not particularly attached to the job or company you work for, I have to say.
Hi, I’m Alan Henry, and I’ll be your guide today. I know where I’m going, promise. Just hang on and try to enjoy the ride, okay? And speaking of work and making the money you deserve, I wrote a book about that! It’s called Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, and I’m giving away 10 copies if you’re interested! Just sign up right here. I’ll draw the winners in the next newsletter (so that’ll be two weeks!)
So let’s talk about how to get more money for the work that you do.
One thing I’m going to do at this stage is assume that you understand a few things that I’m not going to spend time re-litigating: the pay gap is real, marginalized groups are, overall, paid and promoted less than their privileged counterparts, and that marginalization extends to race, gender, disability, ethnicity, and other factors. The data is clear, I’m not going to go back over it, if you need to see it buy the book.
Now let’s move on. My friend Emma Carew Grovum told me when I interviewed her for my book probably the simplest maxim to remember when you want a raise: “Data is power and power is money.” So when it comes time to ask for more money, you need to come armed with your accomplishments, your wins, and how they line up with your responsibilities and the work that you’ve been hired to do. You especially want to highlight how you’ve gone beyond your regular responsibilities, especially if you’re asking for a raise in a situation where you normally wouldn’t get one, like in between performance reviews.
And I know I’ve mentioned this before, the best way to do this is to keep a work diary. We’ve discussed how to make one before, but the short version is that you should have some space, whether it’s a paper notebook, a personal Google Doc or Word Doc, or some other place that’s for your eyes only where you can write down the challenges you’re running into at work, the people you enjoy working with, the people you’d prefer not to work with, and your wins and achievements at work, small, large, and all of them in between. This is pretty powerful for a number of reasons, but when it comes to asking for more money, it’s powerful because you have a paper trail of the things you’ve done well, your achievements, and even your challenges and how you overcame them.
So when you do sit down in a performance review, or when you ask your manager for more money, you can give them a solid case of all of the things you’ve done to deserve it. It’s important to hand that to them as well, so you don’t have to rely on them remembering, or coming up with that case on their own. Take it from someone who has both been a manager and been managed, it’s very helpful when someone says “here’s a list of the great stuff I’ve done,” and I can look and say “oh yeah, I forgot about that!” As a manager, it helps me remember the great work my team has done, and it adds even more to my case to my manager as to why my people deserve more money.
It’s also important to separate what you do on the day-to-day from the kind of work that will get you a raise or a promotion. Sure, the “glamour work,” as we’ve discussed before also, is definitely the kind of thing you want to hold up to your manager as evidence that you go above and beyond and deserve a raise. But “office housework,” or the necessary work to keep the team running that’s not the kind of work that you can hold up in lights (e.g., booking meetings, taking notes, and the day-to-day admin work that data shows generally falls to women and specifically women of color,) can be valuable as well if you do it all the time and tell your manager that the fact that you do it so often shows that you’re an essential part of the team that deserves to be rewarded for their essential, hard work.
Finally, make sure you do the research on your position, and what your position generally gets paid in your field or at other competing companies. This is one thing I see a lot of people forgetting to do, and it often ends up with them taking less than they deserve, even if they switch jobs. Sites like Salary.com and PayScale are very good for comparing your salary with the median in your industry, and Glassdoor is a good place to look over similar positions at other companies, not just so you can scope out the competition, but also so you can see what other companies are like, according to the people that work there. But just be mindful of crossing industries: the same job title in different fields can mean drastically different payscales. And depending on your field, it could even be drastic between individual companies and the type of work you do for them (see: journalism.)
At the same time, there are also a few things to specifically avoid, especially if you’re a member of a marginalized group. First, always come with information and data to support your request. Whether it’s your immediate accomplishments or salaries at similar organizations as well, come with the information that your manager will either use to sell your raise to someone else, or refer to when they make the decision. Believe me, the fact that your rent has gone up sucks, but especially for marginalized groups, trying to appeal to the empathy of a manager or chain of managers is a losing battle, and worse, runs the risk of alienating you from the people who would most champion your success.
Try not to rely on your manager’s empathy, whether you have it or not—even if you do, it’s unlikely your manager is the one who’ll make the final decision. So try to emphasize less how expensive groceries are (although we all know it) and emphasize more that new skill you had to learn so the last project was a success. As always, consider whether you have the psychological safety to make a personal appeal to your manager, but bringing data—including data on how you’ve gone beyond your regular responsibilities, or those responsibilities have become essential to your team’s success.
Also, don’t go in hot. Prepare for a no answer. Depending on where you work and what you do, things like raises and promotions may be so labyrinthine in process that what you’re asking for simply won’t happen. That doesn’t mean your case was bad. It means your manager’s manager’s manager said no, or something. Or it’s not the right time. Or something: there’s always something. But whatever the reason is, be ready to hear it’s not going to happen. Then decide when to bring it up again; maybe in a quarter, or at your next performance review or assessment. In the interim, it’s time to start looking for other opportunities.
Even if you don’t take something new, you put yourself out on the market and prove to yourself that your skills are useful and valuable to other companies. Even if you don’t get an offer, you practice making the case for your skills and abilities, sharpening your resume, and perfecting your interviewing skills. This practice helps you with the other part of getting paid what you’re worth: learning how to be your own best advocate based on tangible evidence and real skills and achievements, not desires and feelings. Save those for when you decide that this job isn’t worth fighting for a raise over, and that you can find something better that’ll pay you more.
If you have more tips, just hit reply to this email! I'd love to hear what's worked for you in the past, and I may round up more tips for a future newsletter!
[ Worth Reading ]
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them, by Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller and David Armstrong: Not that anyone reading this probably needed any more information on exactly how horrible the health care system in the United States truly is, and how many people suffer and die as a result of it, but here’s more fuel to add to the fire. The article outlines exactly how Cigna—and likely other major insurers—operate exactly how we always fear they do: they reject by default and then force you, the patient, or your doctor, to go through the hoops of advocating against them for your care, because they know that more people would rather just pay out of pocket for treatment or go without it entirely than stand up to fight their bureaucracy. It’s how they make money.
5 Black Environmental Groups You Should Know, by Maya Richard-Craven: Climate justice and climate solutions should always be focused on the people on the ground who have to live with the effects of climate change and are working to fight climate change, at least when it’s not directly focused on the major corporations and policy failures that perpetuate the damage that climate change has done, continues to do, and will do in the future. So these groups are worth your attention, at least to understand that there are people on the ground doing their part and doing their best. So when people crow about how fighting climate change is a job for everyone, you can proudly say that “we’re all doing our part, so what’s Exxon and Chevron doing?”
Big Tech's big downgrade, by Ed Zitron: It helps that Ed’s gone from “funny PR friend” when I was at Lifehacker to “one of the sharpest media commentators of our time” today, but this piece in Insider is a brilliant dressdown of how big tech companies have lost the desire to solve real problems and innovate on issues that matter to real people. Instead, major tech companies are focused squarely on one-upping each other in speculative raids for mind share and investor interest, gobbling up smaller companies focused on problem-solving just to own their IP. As a result, the tools we use every day, and in fact, the tools that brought us the internet the way we understand and use it today, are getting slower, less useful, and overall worse. Honestly, have you looked at Google Search these days?
[ See You, Space Cowboy ]
While I’m writing this, The Texas Observer is shutting down, to the protests of its staff, writers, and editors. It’s a shame, one that I think is well captured in this Daily Beast piece on what’s happening over there, and even better in this Twitter thread from Megan Kimble. But I think it’s also worth mentioning that the staff have set up a GoFundMe here to support them and potentially save the magazine.
The reason I want to highlight this is because I talked about this issue in the last newsletter: this is how large publications shut out new, diverse voices. The Observer wasa in a place where they wanted, very clearly, to serve the communities they were meant to serve: the Texans who were concerned about corruption in their government and expected their journalism to speak truth to power and inform the public. In order to serve that audience, increasingly younger readers, more diverse readers, and readers who valued that mission, they sought to bring in the voices that reflected their communities.
But what happened instead was that the board of directors for the publication, mired in nostalgia for the good old days (read: the long-gone white columnists and the praise of the board’s white, older peers,) decided instead to just shut it all down. If their journalism couldn’t be what it was in the old days, when they were the only voices in the room and the only people who had to be heard, they’d rather take their ball and go home. And as a result, a swath of people in Texas lose an intensely valuable news source, and for many of them, their only trustworthy local news source.
This is how journalism self-destructs. When it’s so focused on something that was never truly good, something that was never truthful or fair, but may have been fiery—that it simply fails to evolve and make itself relevant for now, or for the future. So instead, it would rather die than get better.
And it’ll take the opportunities that the organization offers along with it. It’s a shame, and worth keeping an eye on as you see other publications, like The New York Times or The Washington Post all the way to newcomers with the same playbooks and deeply-pocketed sponsors like Axios and Semafor all do the same things, reuse the same voices, parrot the same talking points, and fail to do the journalism that we desperately need for the future.
For as many journalism startups I’ve seen make waves in the past several years, I truly haven’t seen any of them doing anything actually different or exciting, and it’s painful to watch.
I’ll see you back here in two.