Submitted by galway on
in
Forums
[b]My director is vountarily approaching the exectuive to ask that my salary be increased. He's asked that I "give him as much ammunition as possible". What do you recommend I do?[/b]
I am a department manager and have held my current role for approximately four months. Coming from a role that had a defined pay scale, and being young and inexperienced, I signed a contract without any negotiation that pays a relatively small amount.
According to my director, there is concern that I will move on to bigger and better things shortly if they don't increase my pay. The truth is that I'm still finishing my undergraduate degree and have no intention of going anywhere until it's complete. With my degree in hand, however, I will be re-evaluating my opportunities (about a year from now).
What do you recommend I include in my proposal? Specifically:
I have 3/4ths of a BBA with a 3.9GPA, how can I include that?
Results in my department are extremely hard to measure. As a result, I'm in the midst of developing a set of indicators, but numbers to date will be tough to come up with. I'm thinking of preparing a list of initiatives that I have introduced since my promotion, but without results do they carry any weight?
Would competitive numbers be recommended? Ie. salaries that would be available to me if I were to leave the company tomorrow?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
If you talk about competing numbers, it sounds too much like you just care about money. Your GPA is nice, but it does not really benefit into business results.
The only thing that matters is this:
[b]What value do you bring to the company?[/b]
which translates very starkly into
[b]"What will you do for the company that they should give you additional compensation for?"[/b]
You can focus all day on what you have done already, and most people won't care. Talk about what you will do and what value it will bring to the company. If you can, find out what the executive sees as priorities and talk about how you will help meet those priorities.
Be as specific as you can and don't exaggerate.
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
TomW provides excellent advice. Little to add - except to second him on his two points:
They don't care about your GPA once you're working for them.
A raise for previous work is a reward, whereas a raise for future work is an incentive. Companies would rather [i]incent [/i]than [i]reward[/i].
And look - if you don't plan to go anywhere until your studies are done, don't push it. It sounds like they're the ones who want to keep you. Challenge yourself to "keep a light hand on the wheel" this time...
-Hugh
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
Don't mention competitive salaries.
Specify accomplishments. You can build the case for business impact from that.
Have you listened to the performance review podcasts? David M put together a nifty list of them for your convenience:
http://www.manager-tools.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3801
John
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
This is great stuff. Thanks everyone.
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
Put together an MT annual report. WWW on one side. TALA on the other side. FUTURE on the bottom.
The the left side with accomplishments in various areas of business. Human resources, productivity, efficiency, total production, cost control, revenue generated, trainings completed, certifications attained, etc etc.
Your job is not difficult to measure. It is difficult to measure suddenly upon request when you have not the year before established goals and proxies for various activities that are difficult to directly measure. You measure all year long.
Any job can be measured. You do stuff all day long. You do X amount of it. It takes you time to do it. It costs money to pay you. Measure that stuff. Show improvement.
Preparing a Compensation Proposal
Thanks Rob, those are great suggestions for measurements.
The core of my dillemma is that I'me being asked to justify a raise, and I have had the job for less than 4 months. I haven't even cleared my probation period yet. As a result, I don't have a sample from which to judge improvements/gains.
My other challenge is that my department generates no revenue and has no consistent output. The value to the company is in risk management and therefore difficult to quantify.
I've done some work on the submission based in part on the posts above. As a new manager I've tried to limit the changes that I've made in the first three months, so most of the results that I'm reporting on are either very recent or ongoing. I describe value and potential value added.
That section is followed by a plan: things that I will be doing in the near future and how they will be adding value to the company.
On-track? Off-track? Suggestions?
Thanks again.