6 Smart Career Moves Guaranteed To Get You A Raise
Eric Siu breaks down six ways to earn a raise: go above and beyond with standout work like an 8,000-word blog post, think strategically not just tactically, solve problems instead of just naming them, keep your promises, stay consistent, and build a reputation. The core idea is showing your manager you understand their goals and deliver value that matters to the business.
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Today we're gonna talk about 6 smart moves you need to make to get a raise. All right, so 6 smart career moves you need to make to get a raise. So let's talk about this because oftentimes I think people, when they— when people come up to me, they're looking for a raise, they're looking for some type of bonus or whatever, they usually approach it the wrong way. So they might say, oh, I think I deserve to be paid more. So I actually heard this from other managers. I think I deserve to be paid more. And then the manager will ask, well, why do you deserve to be paid more? I just think I deserve to. And that's not a good enough reason. You have You have to have— you have to think from the other person's side. Think about what the other person's incentive is to give you a raise or a bonus if you're just asking for it. Or if you come off, you started a job and pretty early into it, you're asking for a raise already. And when usually what happens is the other— the boss is the person that comes to you or the manager, assuming they're a good manager, they understand that you've gone above and beyond. So in some cases, I'll give you another counterpoint to this is When people are doing really well in the past, I'll give a discretionary raise and it'll come out of nowhere. It'll just come out of nowhere and it won't be like it was a planned thing or we're gonna wait for this discussion. And so, usually the way it works is you provide so much value where it doesn't make sense to not give you some type of raise or some type of bump. You— like the book that I recommend reading is Seth Godin's, it is called Lynchpin. And I remember reading that book when I was about 22, 23 years old, so I just entered the workforce and that book totally reframed how I think about things because I have to think about what is my boss trying to accomplish? What is the company trying to accomplish and how can I get them— how can I do that for them? How can I take things off their plate? And so, I think the first thing I would say is the first step, the first smart career move here is going above and beyond. If you know your boss, get to know your boss, build good rapport but also look at how they're behaving on LinkedIn, look at how they're behaving on Twitter, look at how they're behaving on Instagram. What actually interests them? It could be on the personal or the business side. Probably you want to lean more towards the business side because that leads to business results and that maybe if you help someone on the personal side, I think that's great, it shows you have a heart You have— you're a person of integrity, but go above and beyond. So for example, for me, I tweet a lot. I've been tweeting a lot about different things. Maybe I'm looking for someone— I might just tweet something, say, hey, who do you know that's a really good SEO? And if you come and say, hey, I actually have someone for you, boom, and then we actually end up hiring that person, that is helping me. That's taking things off my plate. That's making things a lot easier for me. Now on the other side, let's say I say, hey guys, do you know any good spots for when I'm traveling somewhere? And you come in and you give me some ideas, you are— it shows that you're going above and beyond. Now I'll give you an example of someone looking for a job. Raghav, who used to work for— he used to work for me, he now works for Team GaryVee. He— I keep referring to this time and time again. He wrote an 8,000-word blog post to get the job and that to me is going above and beyond because it's really in-depth and saying, hey, here are the things I want to do and do you want me to just do it for you? And I think that stands out and when you go above and beyond, you're not just seen as just a team member or just an employee, you are seen as someone that deserves to be rewarded and someone that deserves to be seen as a leader. Whether it's a manager, whether it's an individual contributor, it doesn't matter, you can still be a leader. Number 2 is to be strategic. So a lot of people, for me especially, in my early career, I was always focused on tactics. I was always learning new tactics. I was like, I'm gonna try this new tactic, this new tactic. But what I learned to be more valuable is to be more strategic. So being more strategic, strategy is, it's the guidepost, it's the map to getting to where you want to go to. And it has tactics that are nested within it. But you have to have a strategy to get there because if you just start executing a bunch of random tactics, that's not gonna work out that well. A person that has a more strategic mind is more valuable than someone that is tactical, that needs to be told what to do all the time. And that kind of leads me to the third point. You want to be a problem solver. You want to not just be the person that's— okay, you know, I've talked about in the past, like, you can just sit there and wait to be told what to do. Okay, what's bad is not doing anything. Pretty bad is being wait to be told— being waiting to be told what to do. Okay. And then the third thing is you're just pointing There's a problem here, but you're not solving anything. Okay, so you're still pretty like sure you're pointing out problems. You're not doing anything. You're causing more headache for people. Okay, but what would be better is if you point at things and then you come up with a strategy, strategic, and then you go out there and you solve the problem. Okay, and when you do that, you become a lot more valuable. Problem solvers are the ones that get paid the big bucks. That's how you get the raises. Okay, it's not just saying, oh, campaigning for yourself and being political saying I deserve a raise because I did this. If your boss doesn't see it that way, if your boss— if you've promised your boss to do things, if you promise your boss To hit deadlines, you promised to follow the core values and you're not following the core values and you say you deserve to get reward on these other things, how do you think that's gonna go over with your boss? It's not gonna go over well and you're gonna create resentment, you're gonna create all this unnecessary tension that doesn't need to be there. Well, unnecessary, obviously it doesn't need to be there. So, you know, the other thing is I just talked about earlier, like these 2 things are important. If you say you're gonna do something and you don't do it and you're not accountable, accountability is one of our core values, then how is someone supposed to give you a raise? It's such a simple question. How am I supposed to give you a raise if— You're not accountable and you're also not hitting deadlines. It's really simple to just say, hey, doesn't make any sense because you're not even accountable to your boss. Like, the phrase I keep thinking about all the time is how you do anything is how you do everything. And if you can't get those little things, all these little ticks, they end up adding up into big things because your habits, your little habits, they add up into big things. You might think they're small but no, how you do anything is how you do everything. Mm-hmm. All right, and then the final thing I want to say is you want to be reliable, okay? So you can't just have a spurt of good work and then you're off for 2 months and then you're on again, you're off, right? That's— you got to be reliable. You got to be consistent across the board. You got to be— if you're looking for raises, if you're looking to get paid the big bucks and transition into a leadership role on the individual contributor or the manager side, you got to prove that you are day in, day out, you are reliable. You look at some of the best basketball players in the world or some of the best football players in the world, they're consistent. Their work ethic is consistent. You look at Tom Brady, right? Or if you look at Messi on the international football stage, you look at LeBron James, he's been consistent throughout his career, work ethic, he shows up on time, does what he needs to do, and he is consistent. So you got to prove as a performer because you are on the high performance sports team that you are consistent, because we've brought on people that have had a really good track record in their career and then they join us and then boom, they they fall flat. For whatever reason, they fall flat and they just cannot recapture the same magic that they had. And unfortunately, that doesn't work out. These are just a couple things you need to do, a couple smart career moves to make if you want to be able to get a raise. And we also have something, by the way, if you check out the comment, it's a pinned comment, but it is, it is, if you are actually looking for a raise, we actually have a program. It's called Six Figure Academy. All right. So check out the link and we will see you inside. So it's in the description or it's the pin, the first pinned comment if you're coming in from YouTube. And yeah, that's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.
