All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

You aren’t paid what you’re worth. You’re paid what you can negotiate.

Or so said the in-flight-magazine ad for a negotiation class I read a couple of decades ago.

It’s a bit o’ wisdom that’s correct, but while it might be a useful insight for your average job candidate trying to maximize their salary, it provides little help for a payroll analyst assigned to draft the company’s compensation framework.

Last week’s missive provided just such a framework. Within it, the annual raise … and by extension, salaries or hourly pay rates … are determined by the labor marketplace. The law of supply and demand for a given job category dictates its median pay.

This way of looking at compensation is useful in large part because of its objectivity. It delivers an outcome where an employee has no financial incentive to leave for greener pastures, while their employer has no financial incentive to replace them with a more economical supplier of effort.

It is, if I say so myself, both complete and pragmatic, which, if you have to create a corporate compensation framework, are major advantages.

They aren’t, however, satisfying if you’re an employee and think you’re underpaid. Quite the opposite – if you’re an employee and think you’re underpaid it’s probably because you look at the value you create by doing your job well, and figure you deserve to see more of that value reflected in your paycheck.

Which leads to Compensation Rule #1: If you want to be paid for the value you deliver, you need a way to objectively demonstrate the value you deliver. If you’re in Sales you can do this. Interestingly enough, if you’re in Sales you probably are paid for the value you deliver. Likewise Product Development. If those aren’t you you’ll have to use your ingenuity.

If there’s a Compensation Rule #1 there must be …

Compensation Rule #2: You aren’t paid what you’re worth. You’re paid the lifestyle company management thinks is appropriate for the work you do. In the heads of company management there’s a rough-and-ready translation of job titles to lifestyles.

So if you’re, say, a Senior Developer you can be sure the CFO (for example) has a mental image of what size home you should be living in, in what location, what model and age car you should be in a position to drive, and so on.

It’s a nicer home and in a better neighborhood than an Administrative Assistant but not so nice, nor in as nice a neighborhood, as your manager.

Good things come in threes, and so there is, inevitably …

Compensation Rule #3: In addition to your lifestyle, and parallel to the official org chart, your place of employment has a pecking order based on the jobs and titles of its employees. From this perspective you’re paid based on the social stratum company management thinks a person with your job belongs to.

As a general rule, managers figure they’re the social superiors of the employees who report to them, just as their managers are their social superiors. And so on. Especially in management, an employee’s perceived social stratum frames the compensation the company’s executives figure they’re worth.

Bob’s last word: Disappointed? Think compensation should be more of a science?

Be happy. In the best companies, it might not be a science, but it just might make it to art.

Which just might give you more wiggle room to negotiate than you’d have if it was a science.

Bob’s sales pitch: As we enter KJR’s home stretch you’re running out of chances to add your ManagementSpeak to the repository. So now’s the time to stop procrastinating and send in your favorite “What managers say and what they really mean.”

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The ‘IT Business Office’: Doing IT’s admin work right.”

What it’s about is establishing an organizational home for all of IT’s administrivia. It’s about the difference between running IT like a business (bad idea) and running it in a businesslike way (a necessity).

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Hidden in an article about a recent mass shooting was the following datum, which has more relevance to your responsibilities as a business leader than you might think:

“Far-right radicalism is the nation’s top domestic threat, according to the FBI, particularly in the category known as RMVE, racially motivated violent extremism, the agency’s catchall term for white supremacist and neo-Nazi militants.” (“3 shot dead in hate crime in Florida,” John Raoux, Terry Spencer, and Trisha Ahmed, 8/27/2023, Associated Press.)

The relevance?

I’m certainly not challenging the FBI’s tabulations on this front. The FBI has both more data and more expertise on the subject than I do.

But I think a deeper root cause analysis might be in order, because tossing aside a few more shovels full of dirt would, I think, reveal that far-right radicalism is the consequence of an even more pernicious neurological ailment – one we’re all vulnerable to if we aren’t wary, namely, the deep-seated need to despise and feel superior to some identifiable group of people.

And it isn’t just some identifiable group of people either. It’s always the same identifiable group: “Them.” As I’ve pointed out before, “we” are the source of all that’s good and right with the world: We’re smart, we’re strong, we’re virtuous. We demonstrate excellent personal hygiene, and we’re snappy dressers, too. That’s in contrast to “them.” They’re ignorant, stupid, and too ignorant to know the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Their morals are unsavory, they smell bad, and their mothers dress them funny.

I’ve made this point before, but perhaps not often enough.

The connection to your leadership?

Once upon a time I presented the five primary motivators – useful to marketers, just as useful to business leaders with some minor tweaks: (1) need for approval; (2) fear; (3) exclusivity; (4) greed; and (5) guilt.

Focus your attention on exclusivity (“A dangerous way to motivate,” 10/27/1997). It caters to the desire most people have to be unique and to matter. Remember the recruiting ad the Marines used to excellent effect? It was “The few, the proud, the Marines!”

Join the Marines and you became part of a rarified, special, exclusive group. This was highly motivating to your average Marine (yes, I know, there’s no such thing as an “average” Marine), but won no friends among the Army’s troops.

It’s a dangerous way to motivate business employees because it’s divisive, encouraging employees to treat rival organizational silos with disdain and without cooperation or collaboration.

Which takes us back to our national culture and your role as a business leader in helping to shape it: Whenever a business leader encourages employees to divide the organization into rival silos, that leader encourages employees to divide other aspects of their world into “us” and “them” too.

Bob’s last word: Faced with news of yet another mass shooting it’s easy to feel powerless.

But as a business leader there is something you can do: Whenever you hear an employee grousing about “them” and how awful “they” are, challenge them. It doesn’t matter whether “they” are HR bureaucrats, Accounting’s bean counters, IT’s propeller-heads, or management’s empty suits.

If you can help those you lead jettison the us vs them mental habit you’ll have helped.

Because while I ain’t no expert, I’m pretty sure mass shooters are less likely to aim at those they think of as “us” than they are to fire at “them.”

Bob’s sales pitch: You might have noticed the links to past KJRs. In round numbers the KJR archives contain about 1,400 entries, which means if you’re looking for a commentary on a subject that interests you, there’s a pretty good chance I’ve written about it at least once.

I’d be delighted if you were to take advantage.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “6 ways CIOs sabotage their IT consultant’s success.” The point? It’s up to IT’s leaders to make it possible for the consultants they engage to succeed. If they weren’t serious about the project, why did they sign the contract?

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