I was offered a promotion to manager but with no raise

A reader writes:

I’ve been working at a university for eight years in the donor relations department. This past year has been really tough for the university budget-wise, for various political funding reasons. There was a round of layoffs in late April, where 10 out of the 60 people let go were in our unit (which has about 200 people).

Another layer to consider is that our fundraising unit has gone through a massive reorg with a lot of roles being compressed with bigger portfolios. We used to have stewardship person in each faculty, now we have stewardship officers responsible for 3+ faculties.

Our team is really flat, with the associate director having seven direct reports. I’ve been approached to take on a role where I would oversee four of those people as a manager. This is a first time manager role for me but I have already demonstrated a lot of leadership and mentorship.

I was quite disappointed to hear that this new role would not come with a salary or job grade change. It was presented as a learning opportunity, but I sort of feel taken advantage of. I think I deserve a salary increase and if I don’t get one now, I won’t have as much leverage to negotiate if I wait to ask six months into the new role.

Yes, they’re taking advantage of you. Managing four people is a significant increase in responsibility and you should be paid accordingly for it.

I’m curious to know whether they’d be hiring for this position and advertising it to external candidates if you didn’t accept it. If they would be, they should absolutely pay you accordingly. But if they otherwise wouldn’t hire for it for budget reasons, it could become slightly less unreasonable; in that case, they might be seeing it as mutually beneficial. The idea would be that you get a management role that you might not be as competitive for if more experienced candidates were in the mix, and you can then parlay that into advancement and more money down the road (even if it not with them) … and in exchange, they get someone in that role. It’s still not fair — you deserve to be paid for a significant increase in work and responsibility — but I’d be slightly less irked by it, particularly given the context about the budget issues and layoffs.

Ultimately it comes down to how much you want to get management experience. If it’s not something you really care about, that’s a lot of work to take on for no raise just because they offered it. If you do want management experience, which can be frustratingly hard to get for people who want to move in that direction, it might be worth it to you to do.

If you do want to do the job, it’s reasonable to point out that it’s a significant increase in work and responsibility and ask to be paid fairly for that increase. They might not give you as much as they’d give a more experienced candidate, but you should get more than you’re getting now. If they really won’t budge, though, see if you can negotiate for a salary review (or outright raise) in six months. That’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

The post I was offered a promotion to manager but with no raise appeared first on Ask a Manager.