Asking for a Raise

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development   Communications Management  

Even with intensive preparation, there’s no telling how a raise conversation will go, says TonyLee, publisher of Carlsbad, CA-based career website CareerCast.com. Before launching the site, Lee was publisher of several Dow Jones publications (including The National Business Employment Weekly, CareerJournal.com and CollegeJournal.com).

The dumbest thing you can do is to wing it. Even though your boss seems like an open-minded person, there’s no predicting how the conversation will go. It’s reason enough to plan for all eventualities. Lee stresses the importance of justifying your raise with strong, irrefutable reasons. Many hardworking professionals walk into their boss’s office assuming he or she has knowledge of their work performance.

That’s a bad assumption. Even if your boss thinks he has his or her fingers in every pot and knows what staffers are contributing, it’s only in big-picture terms. The boss may now about different departments’ overall contributions, but it’s doubtful he or she doesn’t know who the major contributors are (and the details of their accomplishments). When everything is going well, they’re delighted that projects are completed on schedule, within budged or, better still, under budget and his superiors are quiet (that means all is quiet).

It’s another story when problems …

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