You’re out on a limb when you ask for a raise. It’s kind of like being a teenager again, and asking someone out on a date for the first time. The stakes are high – if you’re successful, you’ll feel good, and look like a hero to your peers. If you’re not successful, you’ll look and feel like an idiot.
The reactions to success and rejection are similar too. If you get the raise (or the date), you become the cock of the walk. If you get rejected, you try to keep it quiet, or if asked, you say you really didn’t want it anyway.
The outcome of a raise request is highly personal – people equate it with their personal value. It’s a bad idea to attach your perception of personal value to someone else’s assessment of you. It is a good idea, however to attach your professional value to the goals of the organization.
Several years ago I did quite a bit of work with a company that conducted employee satisfaction surveys. In addition to many questions about their leadership and work environment, we asked employees about compensation. We discovered that there is almost no way that compensation can be a driver of employee satisfaction.
People are either neutral or dissatisfied with their compensation level. No one is ever actually satisfied with the money they make, presumably because more is always better.
People become dissatisfied with their compensation for a variety of reasons, but one of the most prevalent is because they find out someone else is making more than them. This judgmental itch often extends beyond our immediate peers, causing anger because of how much the CEO makes, or others far removed from our own circle.
There seems to be a disproportionate amount of anger addressed at CEOs and politicians; while we have a collective blind spot for sports and movie stars. The CEOs have successfully equated their action and leadership with value for the organization (or they bribed the Board of Directors), and politicians, for the most part are underpaid.
If we should be angry at anything, it should probably be at overpaid movie stars who have done little else than won the genetic lottery for meeting our narrowly defined societal version of what is good looking. However, many movie stars have a good argument that if a movie is going to make $300 million dollars, then $20 million for a pretty face has certainly contributed to its success.
And that’s the lesson for the rest of us. We should spent no time being angry or bitter about what other people are getting paid, and channeling our energy into clearly demonstrating the value that we add to our organizations.
Either that, or ask the boss’s daughter out on a date.