How to Get Paid More And Not Have To Sell Your Soul

I was running a career workshop for a client the other day, actually, a charity workshop and one of the people in the room put their hand up and said, “So, what’s your philosophy of money? I just want to get paid more, how will I do that?“

Here’s how I answered the question in the workshop. I said to them, “Alright, so the traditional we get paid more, is to move up“

And as we move up in the organisation, and even in a small organisation, you’re taking on more responsibility, you control more budget, you’ve got a bigger scope in your role and you’ve got a larger team. The traditional way is to take on more.

I don’t know about you, but that sort of stinks of hard work, right?

So, what many people do, is they go,

“You know what, because that’s such hard work and I probably can get the dollars that way, I’m not gonna do that, I’m actually going to take a sideways move, ’cause I know if I go to another job, I might be able to get 20% more money for doing the same thing.”

But what that does, is because there’s a new context in place … I talk about two things.

• What’s the context of your job?
• What’s the content?

What often happens is that people say,

“You know what? I’m getting paid more, but I like the people I work with” or “I like my old boss” or you know what “There were some aspects of my old job that I liked, and now I don’t do them anymore“.

So we can get more by taking on more, and we can get more by going sideways, but both of them creates problems.

Taking on more creates the problem of taking all your available time and going sideways creates the problem of missing out on things that you liked.

So there is another way, and it’s the path of value, and interesting, organisations are thinking differently in this diagonal path, of saying

“you know what there is actually a role for you if you don’t even want to manage people as an individual contributor, or there is a role for you as a specialist where you’ve got a particular deliverable, and you’re really good at that and you can just keep doing it. And even if you don’t want to be an individual contributor, and you want to manage people, think of the path of value.”

And the path of value says, whatever organisation I work in, my job is to deliver outcomes, and the outcomes I deliver will be commensurate with the money that they’re willing to give you.

Now I know, that in some places it’s hard to negotiate and you don’t get recognised and all these things, but I think the only way that you can earn opportunity is to create value.

If you’re creating value in any role you’re in, it doesn’t mean that you have to do more, have a bigger team, and it doesn’t mean that you have to always move to create that value for the audience you care about.

If you’re creating value for other people, you’ll give yourself the best opportunity to get paid more without having to sell your soul.

I hope this has been really useful for you.

Talk to you next time on The Reason & The Road.