How to ask for more money

Contents

• 00:00 — What happens in the room after you leave it
• 07:20 — Why the number has to come from you
• 16:40 — The three sentences
• 26:55 — What your manager can and cannot decide
• 36:10 — Timing is a budget calendar, not a mood
• 46:35 — When the answer is no
• 54:20 — What to do this week

Transcript

Yara Mensah: You spent a long time on the other side of this conversation. What actually happens after somebody asks you for more money?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Almost nothing, immediately. That is the first thing people get wrong. They picture a decision being made in the room. What actually happens is that I say something non-committal, the meeting ends, and then I go and have a much more awkward conversation with somebody in finance.

Yara Mensah: So the person you're asking usually can't say yes.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Very rarely can they say yes. They can say no on their own — that they can always do. Yes needs a second person, sometimes a third, and it needs a form filled in. Which means the only useful question is: what do I need to give this person so they can go and win that argument for me?

Yara Mensah: That reframes the whole thing.

Tomasz Wieczorek: It reframes it completely. You are not persuading your manager. You are writing your manager's script. Everything you say in that meeting should be designed to be repeated by somebody else, in a different room, to a person who has never met you.

Yara Mensah: Which leads to the bit everyone wants, which is: what do I actually say?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Three sentences. And I mean three — written down before the meeting exists.

One: what you do now that you did not do a year ago. Specific, and preferably something that would have to be replaced if you left. Two: what that is worth to the business, in whatever the business measures — money if you can, time if you cannot, risk if it is that kind of role. Three: what you are asking for. A number.

Yara Mensah: Stop there, because this is the piece I get asked about most. Everyone says never name a number first.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Everyone is thinking about a different situation. That advice comes from job offers, from recruitment, where the other side has a range and you can lose money by naming under it. Internally you are not in a negotiation, you are in a budget request. Somebody has to write a figure on a form.

Yara Mensah: And if it isn't you?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Then it is somebody who is trying to be reasonable and safe, and reasonable and safe is always lower than what you would have said. I have watched that happen more times than I can count. A person asks for "a review," the review comes back at three percent, and they are disappointed by a number they left somebody else to invent.

Yara Mensah: What if the number is too high?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Then you get told it is too high, which is information, and the conversation continues. Nobody has ever been fired for asking. What actually happens with a high number is that it moves the range of the conversation, and even the no comes back closer to what you wanted.

Yara Mensah: Let's slow down on the first of the three sentences, because I think it is the one people cannot write. What you do now that you did not do a year ago.

Tomasz Wieczorek: It is the hardest one and it is hard for an interesting reason. People describe their job, and their job has not changed. What has changed is the load — they are doing the same role for more people, or with less support, or they have quietly absorbed something a leaver used to do.

Yara Mensah: Which nobody wrote down.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Which nobody wrote down, because absorbing it was the helpful thing to do and helpful things are invisible. So the sentence is usually not "I have a new responsibility". It is "I have been covering X since March." That is a very strong sentence, and the person saying it usually thinks it is a weak one, because it does not sound like an achievement. It sounds like a fact.

Yara Mensah: Facts are better?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Facts are much better. An achievement invites a judgement about how impressive it was. A fact invites a decision about what to do. You want the second conversation.

Yara Mensah: What about the second sentence — what it is worth. Most people cannot put a number on their own work.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Most people cannot, and they should not strain to invent one. If your role has a revenue number attached, use it. If it does not, use time: this takes me six hours a week, and before, it took somebody else eight. If it is not time either, use risk: if I stopped doing this, here is what would go wrong and roughly when.

Yara Mensah: Risk feels like a threat.

Tomasz Wieczorek: It does if you say it as a threat. It is not one — you are describing the shape of the job, not what you will do if you are annoyed. And I would say the risk framing is the one most likely to be repeated accurately upstairs, because it is the one the person above your manager already thinks in.

Yara Mensah: Say more about that — you keep coming back to the room your manager walks into afterwards.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Because it is where the decision happens and almost nobody prepares for it. Your manager is not going to reproduce your feelings. They are going to reproduce, at best, three lines from memory, a day later, to somebody who is holding a budget and a list of other requests. If your case survives that compression, you get the money. If it does not, you get a polite no and a vague reference to timing.

Yara Mensah: So the real audience is somebody you never meet.

Tomasz Wieczorek: The real audience is somebody you never meet, and the person in front of you is the messenger. Write for the messenger. Give them something short enough to carry.

Yara Mensah: Let me ask about timing, because that's the other thing.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Timing is unromantic. People wait for a good moment — after a success, after a good quarter, when the boss seems cheerful. That is the wrong calendar. The right calendar is the budget one. There is a period, usually a few weeks long, when next year's numbers are being put together, and after that period the money is allocated and a yes is administratively difficult regardless of how much anyone wants to give it to you.

Yara Mensah: How do you find out when that is?

Tomasz Wieczorek: You ask. Not as a negotiation — just, when does planning happen here? Most people will tell you plainly because it is not a secret, it is just not advertised. Then you have your meeting six weeks before it.

Yara Mensah: And when the answer is no?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Then you ask the only question that matters, which is: what would have to be true for this to be a yes, and when do we look at it again? Get both. A no without a date is not a no, it is a way of ending the meeting, and if you accept it you will be having exactly this conversation again in a year with the same three sentences.

Yara Mensah: What about the people who will never do this? Because a lot of listeners are hearing all of it and thinking: not me.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Then I would ask them to do the smallest version. Not the meeting. Just the first sentence, written down, kept somewhere. What I do now that I did not do a year ago.

Yara Mensah: Why does that help if they never ask?

Tomasz Wieczorek: Because the reason most people do not ask is not fear of the conversation. It is that they cannot summon the evidence, so the whole thing feels like a claim about their worth rather than a description of their job — and nobody wants to make a claim about their own worth to somebody who might disagree.

Yara Mensah: With the sentence written down it is not a claim.

Tomasz Wieczorek: It is a fact you are reading out. That is a completely different act, and people who could not face the first one can generally face the second.

Yara Mensah: Does any of this change if you are underpaid rather than due a rise? Those feel different.

Tomasz Wieczorek: They feel different and they run on the same rails, with one addition: if you believe you are below the rate for the role, that is a market fact and it belongs in the second sentence rather than the first. It is also the case that this is the situation where the honest answer is sometimes that the employer cannot fix it and you should look elsewhere. I would rather say that than pretend every conversation ends well.

Yara Mensah: So this week — write the three sentences.

Tomasz Wieczorek: Write the three sentences. Before you have a meeting, before you know if you are going to do it at all. Most people find that the first sentence is harder than they expected, and finding that out is worth doing whether or not you ever ask.