IS your boss being a dick about giving you a payrise while moving you to a three-day week? Get around their spurious objections:
Make it seem like their idea
Say ‘We need to get ahead of challenges in retention right now, given the cost-of-living crisis’ and they’ll decide your 10 per cent pay rise is the proactive, strategic thing to do. Unless they veer off into insanity like ‘Good thinking. We’ll have a fun team quiz every Friday at 6pm.’
Put it in Powerpoint
A line chart is way more credible than basic beginner stuff like words, especially because your boss never learned how to read graphs properly, has been bluffing since 2008 and will agree to anything to make it go away.
Give them three choices and make it the middle one
Bosses are busy. They like easy solutions. Giving them three options remind their childlike management brains of fairy stories, and they will immediately latch on to the middle option because it’s the most reasonable. It is also the least like making an actual decision, which is the greatest fear of all managers in case it comes back to bite them.
Run it past their boss first
Your boss is essentially a useless, overpaid link in a chain. Short circuit the whole process by presenting it, very briefly, to their superior. He won’t make a decision but you can now go to your boss and act like your company BMW is a fait accompli. Will you be resented? Absolutely. Is cutting them out the most efficient way? Absolutely.
Multiply by an insane factor
After a 10k pay rise? Ask confidently for 100k. Act as though anything less is an insult and absolutely beneath you. Put on a show of being cajoled into accepting their logic and persuaded by their flawless reasoning as they give you a tenth of what you want. Wear a pained, beaten-down expression while they fall for your psychological trick.
