I wrote on this website about bosses, good and bad, left and right, and gave you more insights on this subject than any other single resource on the planet.
Monday June 15th, The WSJ had an article “Negotiating that Raise or Promotion” (Tessa West) I will comment on today.
Unless you are self-employed, most of us today aren’t negotiating for raises, we’re “negotiating” for holding on to our jobs and not being axed in a crashing economy. Forget the raise -nobody is giving any raises, folks. I’m thinking 30% of investment bankers are going to lose their jobs in the next year or so – and they don’t even know it. Who goes out the door first ? Juniors, of course.
I said negotiating with your BB as in Big Brother. See, I call your boss the Big Brother. (of course I know the biggest brother we often use the word for is the government, but what are you going to call your boss, Little Brother ?)
The only way you’ll still have a job in the next few months is if you’re hooking up yours to your boss’s.
We’re not living in a normal economy. We’re living in an economy suffocated by incompetence and artificial status hierarchies.
Back to the article
Tessa West says you need to ascertain your boss social hierarchy status: “hierarchies constantly shift”. Of course they do.
“What does your request ‘cost’ your boss in social capital ?”
Tessa West
“What problems does your request solve for your boss ?”
TW, The Wall Street Journal
Oh ya, like you thought bosses are those little angels here to help people in need. You can read the rest of the WSJ article at your leisure.
Know this: the boss, BB (nice sounding name by the way, bee-bee), whatever, only cares about his/hers social (organizational) status. You either understand this or you don’t.
What have you done for me lately ? is the name of an old song by Janet Jackson, but it is also your boss’s OS.
There you go, Adam Galinsky, “getting inside your boss’s head”.
Here comes my 20+ years of experience dealing with bosses: a very confident boss is just as bad, or worse, than an insecure boss. Bingo ! (Please don’t make this quote into another meme, I’ve had enough of those already).
You need to bring your boss up the ladder of confidence or he’ll lose you faster than a speeding bullet.
With a very confident boss, and we’re talking C-level here, you need to get him out of the stratosphere and back to breathing though the face masks we’re going to be using around one another for at least some time. Unless you’ve discovered a Covid-19 vaccine, he doesn’t care about you.
Talking about Covid-19, remember: there’s no such thing as an “invisible enemy” (I know you’ve heard that term a lot lately.) Your boss is vulnerable no matter what industry you work in or how high up in the hierarchy he’s in.
Let him know the higher up they are, the harder they fall.
I wrote this Book, The Book of the Underdog for people like you, who’ve had enough of being pushed aside and away. After dealing with the wild card bosses are for a very long time, I gave you straight up the truth about bosses, careers, negotiations and lifestyle improvements. Written in 2018, BOU is still the Manual for handling your bosses.