Q & A Table of Contents
Name Your Price
From: Tanya, New Zealand
Question: Recently I was given a pay increase. My employer wanted me to name
a salary I felt was fair. Of course I wanted as much as I could get. However
I knew if I said something too large my request would not be taken
seriously. I wanted my boss to first tell me how much he was thinking of
giving me. Unfortunately I could not get him to name a figure. I ended up
naming an amount that in hindsight was too little. My boss happily gave me
the pay increase I had asked for.
How could I have approached my boss to elicit from him the pay increase that
he considered reasonable before I told him how much I wanted?
Response: Sounds like you lost this round of a game of 'Chicken'. There's
an old saying that when it comes to naming a price, the first person who
mentions a number loses. Initially that may sound true, given your
experience. But I suspect that unless you leave your job, there will come
another time when you approach your boss for a raise and he won't be able to
play the same trick twice.
In your question, you ask how to get your boss to be the first one to be the
'Chicken', to reveal how much he was willing to pay. You don't need to play
that game to arrive at a mutually-agreeable result.
When someone says "Name your price," there's nothing wrong with asking for
what you really want. Remember that they expect to negotiate down from your
proposal. If you negotiate with yourself, thinking that if you state too
high a figure you'll get a bad reaction, then you're devaluing yourself and
giving things away before you've been asked for them.
In the alternative, when someone maneuvers the situation into where you have
to be the first to name a financial figure, you can always say, "I was
thinking of something in the range of . . ." For example if you say the
"high twenties", you can be talking of something between twenty-five and
thirty thousand. When you set the range you should be comfortable with the
lower end of the range -- that way when the boss says "OK, how about
twenty-five" you've achieved an acceptable minimum and the boss feels like
he's just saved as much as five thousand. That way you both walk away
feeling comfortable with the process and the results.
I would suggest that your next move in the current situation should be to
ask for a salary review sooner than usual, for example in six months rather
than a year. Even if that cannot happen, at least you've put your boss on
notice that the game he played isn't the whole story.
Good luck with the next rounds.
Steve
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