How's your Silent Bargaining Power?
A few tips on getting the pay rise you deserve from Hilton Catt and Pat Scudamore
So how do you rate your chances of getting a bumper rise this year? Are you confident all the effort you've put in over the last twelve months will be justly rewarded? Or are you less sure? Could it be your firm will need a bit of a nudge to get them to do the right thing?
A difficulty many of us face is that the contribution we make is largely taken for granted. We do a good job but, because we get on with it and don't complain, no-one seems to take too much notice of us. This can be especially true when salary review time comes round. We get the usual token rations if we’re lucky along with a pat on the back and then it seems that's that as far as the recognition of all our hard work is concerned.
Going in, banging your fist on the desk and demanding more money may not be your style but in any case confrontation over pay usually achieves little except putting people's backs up. So what do you do when you feel your employer isn't paying enough attention to your salary? The answer is this is where you may need to get your silent bargaining power working for you.
Think of it this way. Any joy you are going to have with negotiating a better rise will be determined not by who can shout the loudest and longest but by two factors and two factors alone:
- your employer's ability to pay you the rise
- whether you're worth it or not
With the first of these factors you're going to know from past performance whether the people you work for are inclined towards stinginess but also take into account the state of the order book and anything else that could have a bearing on the cash available to fund rises.
As for you and your worth, this may not be quite so easy to gauge. A useful test to apply is to ask yourself how much damage you would inflict on your employer if you decided to up and leave. Would your talents be sorely missed and hard to replace? Or would your bosses be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of being rid of you? Providing you're honest with the answers this test of damage will tell you how much bargaining power you've got and bargaining power is what you need to be focussing your mind on if you want to make progress with your ambition to be better paid.
Not that we're suggesting you use the threat of leaving every time you want a decent rise. Far from it to do this would put massive dents in your credibility. No, bargaining power and the leverage that goes with it are subtle forces where the threats are implied rather than put into words and hence the term silent bargaining power.
How does it work? First get the timing right. Speak to your boss well in advance of the salary review so you don't fall into the trap of making your pitch too late and after the decisions on rises have all been made. The gist of what you'll be saying is 'I enjoy my job, I like working here… and I see my future with the firm…' all good positive stuff before moving on to name what it's going to take in terms of money to keep you happy.
How your boss reacts to this information is probably less important than the impact of the message. Your salary ambitions will be crystal clear, perhaps for the first time ever, and already your silent bargaining power will be working for you. You've sent out a coded message that you're not going to put up with being treated like part of the furniture any more and, without you having to spell it out, your boss will be quick to appreciate the risk of not engaging with you. You could go off and work for someone else, a competitor perhaps, and your boss could be left with the unwelcome and distracting task of having to find someone to fill your shoes. The compulsion is now there to come to some kind of accommodation with you: the rise you're after or to explore other ways of keeping you on board.
Silent bargaining power won't always work of course. It could be, for example, you're asking for an increase that your firm is genuinely going to have difficulty in paying. It could put you above other more senior people or they may simply not have the funds. Whatever the reason, you may, at this point, have to take stock of your situation and decide how much longer you can go on investing your talents in this particular employer.
What you may also have to consider is that you don't have enough in the way of silent bargaining power to make the leverage work. You're not worth the figure you're asking for and your boss will have no compunction in saying no because the prospect of you leaving poses little or no threat. Here the challenge is see what steps you can take to boost your silent bargaining power. How? By seeing what you can do to add value to yourself. For example to see if you can add to your range of skills or learn new techniques or do more to enhance your reputation as a key team player. The message here is silent bargaining power is acquirable and, the more of it you have, the more you can extend your capacity to realise salary and other career ambitions.
A few tips on getting the pay rise you deserve from Hilton Catt and Pat Scudamore
So how do you rate your chances of getting a bumper rise this year? Are you confident all the effort you've put in over the last twelve months will be justly rewarded? Or are you less sure? Could it be your firm will need a bit of a nudge to get them to do the right thing?
A difficulty many of us face is that the contribution we make is largely taken for granted. We do a good job but, because we get on with it and don't complain, no-one seems to take too much notice of us. This can be especially true when salary review time comes round. We get the usual token rations if we’re lucky along with a pat on the back and then it seems that's that as far as the recognition of all our hard work is concerned.
Going in, banging your fist on the desk and demanding more money may not be your style but in any case confrontation over pay usually achieves little except putting people's backs up. So what do you do when you feel your employer isn't paying enough attention to your salary? The answer is this is where you may need to get your silent bargaining power working for you.
Think of it this way. Any joy you are going to have with negotiating a better rise will be determined not by who can shout the loudest and longest but by two factors and two factors alone:
- your employer's ability to pay you the rise
- whether you're worth it or not
With the first of these factors you're going to know from past performance whether the people you work for are inclined towards stinginess but also take into account the state of the order book and anything else that could have a bearing on the cash available to fund rises.
As for you and your worth, this may not be quite so easy to gauge. A useful test to apply is to ask yourself how much damage you would inflict on your employer if you decided to up and leave. Would your talents be sorely missed and hard to replace? Or would your bosses be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of being rid of you? Providing you're honest with the answers this test of damage will tell you how much bargaining power you've got and bargaining power is what you need to be focussing your mind on if you want to make progress with your ambition to be better paid.
Not that we're suggesting you use the threat of leaving every time you want a decent rise. Far from it to do this would put massive dents in your credibility. No, bargaining power and the leverage that goes with it are subtle forces where the threats are implied rather than put into words and hence the term silent bargaining power.
How does it work? First get the timing right. Speak to your boss well in advance of the salary review so you don't fall into the trap of making your pitch too late and after the decisions on rises have all been made. The gist of what you'll be saying is 'I enjoy my job, I like working here… and I see my future with the firm…' all good positive stuff before moving on to name what it's going to take in terms of money to keep you happy.
How your boss reacts to this information is probably less important than the impact of the message. Your salary ambitions will be crystal clear, perhaps for the first time ever, and already your silent bargaining power will be working for you. You've sent out a coded message that you're not going to put up with being treated like part of the furniture any more and, without you having to spell it out, your boss will be quick to appreciate the risk of not engaging with you. You could go off and work for someone else, a competitor perhaps, and your boss could be left with the unwelcome and distracting task of having to find someone to fill your shoes. The compulsion is now there to come to some kind of accommodation with you: the rise you're after or to explore other ways of keeping you on board.
Silent bargaining power won't always work of course. It could be, for example, you're asking for an increase that your firm is genuinely going to have difficulty in paying. It could put you above other more senior people or they may simply not have the funds. Whatever the reason, you may, at this point, have to take stock of your situation and decide how much longer you can go on investing your talents in this particular employer.
What you may also have to consider is that you don't have enough in the way of silent bargaining power to make the leverage work. You're not worth the figure you're asking for and your boss will have no compunction in saying no because the prospect of you leaving poses little or no threat. Here the challenge is see what steps you can take to boost your silent bargaining power. How? By seeing what you can do to add value to yourself. For example to see if you can add to your range of skills or learn new techniques or do more to enhance your reputation as a key team player. The message here is silent bargaining power is acquirable and, the more of it you have, the more you can extend your capacity to realise salary and other career ambitions.